White_Noise

In his novel, White Noise, Don DeLillo stages many of his scenes within the local supermarket. Housing many material possessions and excessive advertisement, the supermarket provides a perfect backdrop for a commentary on the overwhelming amount of information in the world. DeLillo uses the scenes in the supermarket, and the character’s emotional reactions to the space and items for sale to suggest that finding the meaning of one’s existence is not only impossible, but that such a meaning does not actually exist. By placing Murray in nearly every supermarket scene, DeLillo exposes man’s obsession with finding the meaning of life by reading ever-present and encoded “signs”. During Murray’s rant to Babette about the Tibetan theory on death in the supermarket, Murray relays many points about decoding and deciphering secret messages hidden in the supermarket around them. Similarly, Murray explains to Jack that he is happy to be in the supermarket, and that this environment actually allows him to think and see new things with more clarity. Clearly, Murray believes himself to be an expert in the matter of decoding these secret messages available to him in the supermarket, and yet at the end of his rant he digresses and says that it is impossible for anyone to read through the “layers of unspeakability” (p.38). By coupling Murray’s inability to decode the ambient signs around him in the supermarket with his extremely frequent trips there, DeLillo shows that Murray is willing to devote a large part of his life to a task that he admits is impossible. Furthermore, DeLillo uses this obsession to parallel man’s obsession with finding the meaning of life, which he suggests is equally impossible. By linking the supermarket and its products to religious experiences, DeLillo illuminates the artificiality of religion as a whole. Throughout the supermarket scenes in his novel, DeLillo shows the characters receiving a feeling of spiritual healing or emotional satisfaction during and after their trips to the supermarket. By linking these strongly emotional responses which often are associated with religion to the supermarket, DeLillo suggests that religion in general is nothing more than a set of tangible items or ideals meant to bring people cheap satisfaction in the short run, and a method to escape the fear of death. Jack goes into detail describing the wholeness that the items he and Babette purchased at the supermarket “brought to some snug home in our souls” (p.20). His description of the wholeness seems very similar to a description of someone talking about being whole with God, or some higher authority or purpose. By having Jack describe his feelings in this way, DeLillo suggests that the comfort or power of some higher purpose, or religion in general, is the same comfort that one can receive from other material possessions. This equality between worldly possessions and religious ideals undermines the basis on which basically all religion is founded. DeLillo includes the final supermarket scene, where the shelves have been rearranged, to show that life is completely random and that there is no larger meaning or purpose to the existence of human beings. During the previous supermarket scenes in the novel, Jack and the other shoppers have become very comfortable with the layout of the store and have made the order of things in the store make sense in their minds. Some, like Murray, have been attempting to look deeper into the meaning of the layout of the store. However in the final scene, Jack comments that the shelves have been rearranged and “It happened one day, without warning” (p.309). DeLillo uses this image of a sudden rearrangement to show how a person’s life can be flipped upside down quickly and without any greater purpose or plan. In this final scene shoppers are looking frantic and worried trying to make sense of these new circumstances. They were described as “trying to figure out the pattern, the underlying logic” (p.309) of this new layout. However, as people frantically look for some reason why everything has changed, the labels, packages, and other signs the people are reading give them no answer to this question. As we see from this scene DeLillo is once again calling the reader’s attention to the need for human beings to find the larger purpose behind everything that happens. Finally, by not providing an answer for the shoppers as to why the shelves were changed, DeLillo shows that no such grand scheme or plan exists for people in life in general. By using the supermarket as a backdrop for many scenes dealing with spirituality and religion, Don DeLillo shows the lack of a greater purpose and the subsequent lack of a meaning of life.