DeLillo's White Noise and Mao II Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

DeLillos White Noise and Mao II - Essay ExampleDeLillo has proved himself as an boom analyzer of crowd situations. Jack Gladney, an off-beat professor in the studies of Hitler at the College-on-the-Hill, is the main character of White Noise. As much as he is grim and off-keyed, his wife and children are equally the odd combination of bizarre and blas. His wife, Babette, beset with a forgetful mind nurses an ever present premonition of death. Babettes addiction to a medicate called Dylar finds her in dalliance with a certain shady Dr. Gray compromising with him her body for drugs, a situation which almost ends in murder.The sons, Heinrich, 14, glum and prone to doom anxieties, is a chip of the old block, while 3 years old Wilder is rather assuring and conspicuous by his presence. The daughters, Denise, 11, is a brat and go forth brook no nonsense from her parents, calling spade a spade, and Steffie, the younger sibling, is a sensitive child who cannot bear to see anyone suffer. I t is a classical pillow slip of a family living inside a capsule inexorably hurtling towards sure doomsday.The family itself is a telling commentary of the society we live in today. The glum environment may well be the product of a blended marriage with the children having to bear the brunt of a forced step-relationship over which they substantiate no control.The novel highlights the usance of children in the scheme of things in the present world. They are more sober, more sensitive, and the target consumers for marauding marketers, reflectively symbolic of the novels mock surprise towards anything natural and design towards more sensitivity and sobriety found among kids rather than the grown ups. Nonetheless, they are warned of the isolation and discomfiture that are sure to follow them soon, by professors at the college. DeLillos novels have the uncanny effect of touching upon raw nerves. They delve into the not so distant past, hover over the present, and eerily strike at th e future have a go at it on target. Written in 1985 with an industrial disaster as background, the White Noise draws parallel with the Union Carbide tragedy in Bhopal in 1984, and attempts to rub or so sensitivity into a nation benumbed with excessive materialism and prosperity. The United States prominent world supremacy is akin to the arrogance of Hitler minus the despotic adventurism. Typically, responsibleness and control can go to the computer programs. In the quest for comfort and an easy lifestyle, the increasing tendency to fulfill every wish at the promote of a button is so pervasive that it is treated as an irritant if the situation turns out to be otherwise. With the Gladney family as the background, White Noise goes on to oscilloscope out and catch the big picture of the industrial accident and its consequent aftermath when the evacuation lasting nine days causes seemingly endless trade snarls and panicky inhabitants taking whatever route and protection available t o escape the doomed city. News of the impending disaster after the first tentative information about the leak instinctively thrust the population nonchalantly towards their favorite supermarkets. It is only after the death of a man during inspection, and a night of mobile toxic event that the magnitude of the disaster sinks in