The Analysis of Narrative Techniques in the Novel White Noise
Throughout White Noise, Jack’s, the protagonist, ability to buy highly advertised marketed images is directly related to his psychological need to belong. Such a marketing system is based upon the illusion that belonging to this cultural advertising scheme is a guaranteed method for staving off death. Murray reminds of this when he states that “here we don’t die, we shop”. Jack acts accordingly when he feels disconnected and alone as he confronts the cultural dumping ground known as the mall: I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it… I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgot existed. Brightness settled around me. We crossed from furniture to men’s wear, walking through cosmetics. Our images appeared on mirrored columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors is security rooms. I traded money for goods. I was bigger than these sums.
The final supermarket scene introduces two important existential metaphors as objective correlatives for this transcendence of death via commodification of selfhood. DeLillo invokes the powers of technology and the tabloids as the agency of Jack's rebirth. Technology restores the shoppers to their existential serenity: But in the end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age , our carts stocked with brightly colored goods.
Jack's acceptance of the divinity of technology in his world reflects yet another crucial change in his perception of himself and his reality. In the paragraph immediately preceding the supermarket episode in the final chapter Jack stops taking telephone calls from his doctor. He explains his decision to be resulting from his phobia of technology: 'He wants to insert me once in the imaging block, where charged particles collide, high winds blow. But I am afraid of the imaging block. Afraid of its magnetic fields, its computerized nuclear pulse. Afraid of what it knows about me. His fear comes from his status as an individual. But once he is a member of the community he yields to the divine powers of technology which can decode the binary secret of life itself. The critic Bradley Butterfield validates this conclusion in his article 'Baudrillard's Primitivism and White Noise'. Butterfield suggests that at the end of White Noise Jack seems to come to locate hope in technology:'
If Jack is the sum total of what he has bought and his life is measured by what is there in his existential cart in the supermarket, the tabloids provide him with the make-believe necessary to maintain his cultural rebirth as a consumer. Delillo himself makes clear the significance of the tabloids in White Noise: “Perhaps the supermarket tabloids are the richest material of all, closest to the spirit of the book [White Noise]. They ask profoundly important questions about death, the afterlife, God, worlds and space.' Indeed, the reference to the supermarket tabloids at the end of the novel brings Jack's pattern of existence and rebirth a full circle. They satisfy Jack's need for faith necessary for completing his cycle of existence for they provide anything we need other than 'food or love.' They are textual spaces where death is being negotiated and fashioned as the fantastic. The critic Mark Osteen speaks to this effect when he states that ' the postmodern prophecies repackage death and turn it into magic… for tabloids are the textual equivalent to such postmodern religions.'
The tabloids are the sacred texts of White Noise, the hopeful narratives that reverse or negate death. Babette narrates a tabloid story at the family’s Boy Scout refuge during the Airborne Toxic Event called “Life after Death Guaranteed with Bonus Coupons.” This is a tale of death defiance through reincarnation and coupon redemption. It acquires urgency at that moment and offers an unironic hope. Her tone, according to Jack, betrayed no sign of skepticism or condescension, and the audience that grows around her, of frightened evacuees in need of reassurance, listens with a deadly seriousness.
The scene of Wilder's tricycle adventure across the highway initiates this transcendence. The sunset watching scene brings the transcending subject into the rhetoric of communal selfhood. The supermarket scene affects the rebirth of Jack through the commodification of his newly fashioned communal self. Consumerism, however, is a twofold ritual. On the one hand, it is a ritual of initiation into the post-capitalist society. It is a cultural agency which fashions the individual into a consumer by surrendering his/her individual identity to embrace a collective communal identity, which the only signifying practices of subjectivity in the post-industrial society. Consumerism, on the other hand, is ritual of transcendence through which the individual go beyond the restrictions of his physical existence. Consuming experience is, in a sense, an illumination, or liberation from the bondage of physical world. Hence, the significance of Murray's remark to Babette in the supermarket: 'here we don't die, we shop.' Shopping, in other words, becomes a mystical experience whereby the individual transcends his existential fears and anxieties towards illumination.
Narrative closure, according to Noel Carroll, ' is identified as the phenomenological feeling of finality that is generated when all the questions saliently posed by the narrative are answered.' The notion of closure refers to the sense of finality with which a narrative concludes. It is the impression that exactly the point where the text does end is just the right point. 'Closure,' says Carroll, 'is a matter of concluding rather than merely stopping or ceasing or coming to a halt or crashing.' When a writer effects closure, then the reader/recipient feels that there is nothing remaining for his/her to do. There is nothing left to be done that hasn’t already been discharged. Closure yields a feeling of completeness. When the storyteller closes her/her book, there is nothing left to say, nor has anything that needed to be said been left unsaid. Or, at least, that is the intuition that takes hold of the reader.
Narratologically speaking, the closing sequence of Jack's transcendence does not affect a sense of closure on the structural level of plot development. Such an ending does not explain what happens to Jack after the failed murder plot, nor what happens to his family which has come to shrink to three members in the closing chapter of the novel. It, actually, leaves many unanswered questions and loose ends. Plot completion is unattainable with such a closing fragmented chapter. The novel might well do end with chapter thirty-nine which brings Jack to experience death first-hand and be illuminated with it. The last sentence in this chapter even provides strong sense of closure: “ There was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset, when the sky would ring like bronze.” Chapter forty seems even irrelevant to the rest of the novel in the light of this sentence. It never carries Jack narrative any further in terms of plot development and chronological extension.
The actual significance of chapter forty is only evident on the thematic level. It brings the three major thematic strands that run throughout the novel. These are death, sunset, and the supermarket. After all Jack is dying because of his exposure to the airborne toxic chemicals. It is this moment of peace that constitutes the real substance of the novel's narrative closure. It has to do with the reader than with the character of Jack or the novel's plot completion.
Overall, Jack's moment of peace, however temporary or short, is also a moment of catharsis for the reader. With this new dimension of Jack's experience at the end of White Noise, the novel's sense of narrative closure becomes inclusive of peace and the therapeutic effect. And these are, indeed, the two primal meanings of closure.
