In addition to addressing the premonitory electricity of death, the title of Don DeLillo's White Noise alludes to another, more subtle sort of white noise, silent death of suburban white identity. College-on-the-Hill is not only an elite academic cape, but also a bastion of white flight where Jack Gladney's family took refuge. Instead of John Winthrop's clear City-on-a-Hill morality, DeLillo presents us with JAK Gladney's confusing postmodern legacy of JFK's civil rights legacy. Racial identity no longer demarcates a simple binary between whites and Native Americans, but complicates a nation in which all races claim American nativity. Jack's inability to classify the Other in obvious racial terms has repercussions on his identity crisis; incapable of evaluating what is not, he remains without the necessary tools to understand what is. This anxiety of faulty racial organization leaves Jack with America's chief domestic product, consumerism, as a cultural machete to cut swaths of identity. But consumerism, exemplified by the position of the supermarket as the novel's site of social reflection, is too fragmented and massive a philosophy to provide Jack with an orderly understanding of race. Furthermore, any insight that consumerism might provide is negated by its production of a confusing strain of commercial colonialism. The most feasible “solution,” though the novel's persistent chaos denies any clear answer, is for Jack to accept racial hybridity and view the world not as white noise and black clouds, but as shades of gray. This diminishes his anxiety about the need to identify others and, by extension, himself, across race, flattening the three-dimensional globe to a two-dimensional model for the sake of understanding, but allowing the confusing idea of ​​heterogeneity to exist elsewhere in his mind. Paradoxically, Jack can only gain this knowledge by embracing his ignorance, a fitting complement to his obsession with death, the great unknown for which science, intellectualism, and religion all admit defeat in explaining or conquering. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The most obvious form of racial classification in the novel emerges as Jack faces the visual jumble of a new multinational corporation: What kind of name is Orestes? I studied its characteristics. He may have been Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Central Asian, a dark-skinned Eastern European, a light-skinned Black. Did he have an accent? I wasn't sure. Was he a Samoan, a Native North American, a Sephardic Jew? It was becoming difficult to know what you couldn't tell people. (208) For Jack, the immediate importance lies in the cross-referencing of race, the permutational mixing and matching that Jack performs on color and nationality that furthers his conversational anxiety. Many other keys to this anxiety are found in the name of Orest Mercator. Orest may take its name from Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who avenged his father's death by killing his mother and her lover. The classical allusion repositions Orest as a mythological origin that blends both Greek myth and biblical allusions (returning to Eden and facing the serpent) with his indeterminate lineage. The binary extends to the near-palindromic nature of its name, which begins and ends with "o." This is different from a forced "option" system; instead, Orest's two "o's" imply an incessant search for an answer. The fact that Orestes avenged his father's death reminds us that Orestes' father is an unknown progenitor,coming from seemingly every continent. Confronted with a "slimy" (267), slippery, serpentine death, Orest seeks to kill his indeterminacy, an equation DeLillo writes in White Noise. Whereas "Orest" could allude to both the French "L'ouest" for West, and an English-French blend of "Or-Est" (Or-East, which denies the Manifest Destiny movement in the West, in other words, describing the flow of immigration and not of colonialism), then the language remains the only definitive father of Orest and at the same time hides the exact etymology behind it. layers of allusions and variables. In fact, the language barrier and the breaking down of every language barrier and the involuntary creation of a fluid and fluent Esperanto is what arouses in Jack the need for maternal protection at the supermarket checkout or, more directly, his urgency to protect the womb white with heterogeneous insemination: not everyone spoke English at the checkout terminals, or near the fruit and frozen food baskets, or among the cars in the parking lot. More and more often I heard languages ​​I couldn't identify, much less understand, even though the tall guys were of American descent and the women at the register too? Did I try to stick my hands up Babette's skirt, over her belly? (40)As if the incomprehensibility of other languages ​​wasn't bad enough, Jack also finds difficulty in learning the Germanic language, supposedly his area of ​​expertise, and eradicates contradictions and conflicts in his native English. Before reaching the checkout line, Jack mutters "'Dirty blond'" (40), a reference to his earlier statement that Babette's hair is "a particularly tawny shade that used to be called dirty blond" (5). It doesn't explain why this is no longer an acceptable term, but the fact that the adjective "blonde" generally denotes hair color while "blond" is a noun loaded with gender implications may have something to do with its censorship. Textually "dirty blonde" is appropriate, but orally it can be confused with the misogynistic "dirty blonde". As the founder of Hitler studies, Jack would be well aware of the additional controversy this poses to Hitler's vision of a perfect, superior race; for Hitler, there is no such thing as a dirty blonde person, while for Jack it is a signifier of the ways in which the changing world can alter language's relationship to visual identity. Exercising restraint, Jack is careful to qualify his observation that his The German preceptor's complexion "was of a tone which I would call flesh-colored" (32). Jack's sentence has a tone that I want to define as politically correct, even if this is not the real reason for its delicacy. Rather, he recognizes the havoc the new world has wreaked on the phrase “flesh-colored,” rendering it obsolete not through newfound sensitivity but through gross inaccuracy. When Bee, Jack's daughter, is also portrayed as a racial mix of a "little smooth, white face in a mop of frizzy hair" (92), DeLillo reminds us that even for those whose racial identity is clearly known, the visual aspect remains blurred. This is why the most sacred of suburban rituals is put to the test in White Noise. After Jack tries to play the pompous role of an accommodating husband, Babette corrects his clinical use of the word "partner": "'I'm your partner when we play tennis, which we should start doing again, anyway. Otherwise, I'm your wife'" (28). Her recommendation that they take up tennis again, the clichéd institution of suburban sport, the married couple playing in their club whites, highlights their sterile sex life in lieu of intercourse, their focus on old albums of family, a return to a pastwhich temporarily averts the approach of death. Jack's castration through suburban ritual advances when he comes home one day in the transition between the traditional climax of one paternal routine (working as the family's breadwinner) and the beginning of another (the normal Rockwell dad comes home with the evening paper, the slippers and the martini): "When I got home, Bob Pardee was in the kitchen practicing his golf swing. Bob is Denise's father. He said he was driving across town on his way to Glassboro for give a presentation and thought he'd take us all to dinner" (56). Bob has usurped all of Jack's patriarchal duties to which his secret government job is paying to give the family a night out in one fell swoop with his suburban golf swing. Jack no longer has these typical suburban traits to complete his identity, and with their erasure comes the novel's treatment of the dissolution of suburbia. DeLillo, foreshadowing his ideas in Underworld, refines his interpretation of the crowd as a case of safety in numbers: «To become a crowd is to keep death out. To break away from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face death alone” (73). This is a reasonable explanation of white flight from the city to the suburbs, the revulsion towards heterogeneity, and the attraction towards a homogenized subculture. However, the new heterogeneous composition of the city compromises this security; the town's name, Blacksmith, implies both a utilitarian point of white rural life and an anonymous black man, a black Mr. Smith. In the nearby countryside, a pastoral paradise of "white fences" and "side fields" (12) welcomes tourists to the most photographed barn in America: this is the logical next step for the threatened suburbanites, a merely dirty sub-suburbia with the reassuring invisible hand of capitalism and not by the visible mix of integration. This integration is most visible in the black cloud of Nyodene D which, if we read it as a visual metaphor of minority immigration stimulating a mass exodus of whites, finds its personification in the black family of Jehovah's Witnesses. Their family unit is a cohesive propaganda unit: “Father and son distributed leaflets to those nearby and seemed to have no difficulty finding willing recipients and listeners” (132). This, therefore, is the new face of the suburbs; not a white father and son playing ball in the backyard, but their black counterparts doling out philosophy to the white masses. It makes sense that whites are “willing” in the midst of death, recognizing the death of the old suburbs and the need to belong to yet another group. Murray links the deadly urban anonymity and palliative identity of suburban death with consumerism: "In a city there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice death better. The dead have faces, cars. If you don't know a name, you can know the name of a street, the name of a dog. 'He drove an orange Mazda'" (38). The equation of the face with the automobile is just one of DeLillo's many plays with American consumerism as a signifier of identity. The defenseless Treadwells are found "alive but shaken in an abandoned cookie shack at Mid-Village Mall" (59). The trip to the suburban mall is inverted in the tragedy reported by the newspapers; the biscuits go from luxury to sustenance, the shack becomes a real home. Jack redefines his personality in the same shopping mall, savoring its shiny veneer: "I filled up, I discovered new aspects of myself, I identified a person whose existence I had forgotten. The brightness established itself around me" ( 84). The blanket of blinding whiteness, the cloud of consumption, is at the same timecause and cure for Jack's forgotten self, just as the alliterative rhythmic play of objects starting with "b" and "s" in the opening catalog of station wagon clothing amplifies and stifles the importance of each individual component (3) . DeLillo takes this concept to parodic extremes when Jack on a mountaintop recites a list of chewing gum: "I watch the light climb the rounded tops of the high-altitude clouds. Clorets, Velamints, Freedent" (229). This form of consumerism, while harmless, hints at its inherent colonialism (here, a Wrigley lineup reconfigured as a Zen mantra). Expanding the reach of his empire is the white man's way of resisting integration into his own country (or city). Babette deflects a question about Dylar to a discussion about "the black girl who hangs with the Stovers" (80), which leads to a conversation about the "nation" Dakar, and then turns into a culturally ignorant discussion of Africa and Asia informed by Product Hollywood. The conversation raises an even more ignorant question: "If she's African," Steffie said, "I wonder if she's ever ridden a camel." "An Audi Turbo." "Try a Toyota Supra." (81) The gross stereotyping of the unknown leads to the very familiar territory of automobiles (themselves imported products) as distinct sections of the conversation: geography, a film, waves, a play, an animal, automobiles form a continuous bond only through comprehensive scope of cultural colonialism. Colonialism provides all the rewards of a country's product without the dirty work; Murray praises the eclectic tastes of the globe's supermarket: "'Exotic fruits, rare cheeses. Products from twenty countries. It's like being at a crossroads of the ancient world, a Persian bazaar or a booming city on the Tigris" (169). DeLillo deepens the novel's vision of colonialism beyond a simple critique of corrupt American values. Colonial history seeps into every crevice of the American life system, especially those based on survival and information, the foundations of American Protestant values, and the success of the blue chip computer age The evacuation of the city imitates the two-way sweep of empire: The voice to the radio said people on the west end of town should head to the abandoned Boy Scout camp, where Red Cross volunteers would hand out juice and coffee. People on the east end should take the scenic route to the fourth rest area , where they would continue to a restaurant called Kung Fu Palace, a multi-winged building with pagodas, lily ponds, and live deer (119) The Western advance into America and its cultural signifiers (boy scouts, Red Cross, refreshments) . opposes the exotic retreat to the restaurant and demonstrates the natural tendency of different peoples to separate by geography and, subsequently, by culture. This fractured quality of colonialism is at the heart of Jack's confusing relationship with the world: Our newspaper is delivered by a middle-aged Iranian driving a Nissan Sentra. Something about the car makes me uncomfortable: the car waits with its headlights on, at dawn, while the man places the newspaper on the front steps. I tell myself that I have reached an age, an age of unreliable threat. (184)The threat has something to do with electronic surveillance by the car's inanimate eyes, but it also has to do with the confusing delivery of the newspaper, delivered by an Iranian driving a Japanese car. The newspaper provides information on an increasing scale of local, national and international news, but the Iranian's presence reminds us that the local is already international and that borders are increasingly porous. The world without borders arouses Jack's central fear, suggested by Willie Mink" (184).