Narrative Technique in DeLillo’s White Noise Essay

Narrative Technique in DeLillo’s White Noise American literature has evolved extensively over the course of the history of the republic, from the Puritan sermons which emphasized the importance of a solid individual relationship between the individual self and the omnipotent God to the parody of relativism we find in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. One of the recurring concerns of American fiction, though by no means restricted to American writing, is the position of the self with regard to the other, whether manifest as God, nature, the community, or another individual. Since at least the Modernist period, writers have explored the definitions and relationships of the self formally as well as thematically and narratively. Don DeLillo’s†¦show more content†¦Frank Lentricchia has written in detail of the postmodern narrative technique of movement from a first-person subjectivity to a third-person objectivity as integral to the American experience. This distancing of the reader from the reality of the novel has s everal functions. By telling a story through the eyes of Gladney, we experience contemporary mass culture, DeLillo’s favorite theme, as Gladney does; we experience the same (or similar) disillusion and confusion that Gladney does and we share in Gladney’s distancing of himself from his experience. In this way, the narrator’s state of mind is a mimetic reproduction of anyone in the reader’s reality. The objectified subject technique that DeLillo employs also serves as the site of DeLillo’s further explorations of character, perception, and action. By treating a character who treats himself and his experience as an object, DeLillo can cast his characters into roles not mimetically coherent. The identity and characteristics of the narrator in the novel evoke a number of questions of critical importance to our understanding of the whole work and the interaction of its parts. Rarely has a work of fiction so utterly interweaved the relationship between narrator and story narrated so neatly and successfully. The choice of Jack Gladney as the novel’s narrator, called DeLillo’s most important formal decision (Lentricchia 93), literally casts the entire work in a new light, shiftingShow MoreRelated The Power of the Family in White Noise Essay examples1139 Words   |  5 PagesThe Power of the Family in White Noise    Don Dellilos protagonist in his novel White Noise, Jack Gladney, has a nuclear family that is, ostensibly, a prime example of the disjointed nature way of the family of the 80s and 90s -- what with Jacks multiple past marriages and the fact that his children arent all related. Its basically the antipodal image of the 1950s nuclear family. 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