Don Delillo's White Noise is a novel set in twentieth-century America, in a small town in the Mid-West. The story follows the life of Jack Gladney, a teacher of Hitler studies at university, and his family , (his fourth wife, Babette, and their four children from previous marriages) through their lives invaded by white noise, the constant murmur of American consumerism. The narrative follows these characters as they struggle to live distracting themselves from their sense of reality. White Noise explores the characters’ deep underlying fears and uncertainties that keep them from discovering and revealing their true identities.
In its first half called "Waves and Radiation", White Noise is a chronicle of absurd family life combined with satire. In the second half, a chemical spill from a railcar releases a "Toxic Event" over Jack's home region, causing an evacuation. After the evacuation, the Gladneys return home and their ordinary life resumes. Men in protective suits and German shepherd dogs patrol the town. Sunsets last for hours; silent crowds watch the spectacular colours from overpasses. Gladney secretly visits a think tank diagnostic centre that confirms the presence of the toxin in his blood. Frightened by his exposure to the toxin, Gladney is forced to confront his mortality and his obsessive fear of dying. It seems a play in the Theatre of the Absurd, because nothing really changes. He is still afraid, as he already was, he will still die, as he was going to anyway. There is no catharsis, no restoration of the sense of reality, just a thickening of the absurd. Soon the novel becomes a meditation on modern society's fear of death and its obsession with chemical cures as Gladney seeks to obtain a black market drug called Dylar, which is said to reduce the fear of death. Babette admits to taking Dylar, moved by her constant anxieties to answering a tabloid ad looking for volunteers for secret research. When the firm doing research in psychobiology decides not to use human subjects, Babette is desperate and makes a private arrangement with the project manager, a shadowy figure she will reveal to Gladney only as ''Mr. Gray.'' For several months, she has met him in a motel room, offering herself in exchange for drugs. Gladney wants to kill Mr Gray but his attempted murder has a farcical disastrous ending. He is wounded and taken to hospital. The novel ends with a significant scene at a supermarket, the symbol of modern consumerist culture.
