Topic > White Noise - 1310

In Don DeLillo's eighth novel: White Noise, warmly received by critics, the author exposes that money has acquired a colossal significance during our times, collapsing other values ​​such as the freedom of customer choice and respect for buyers. In his work of fiction he illustrates how the current world of commerce affects our minds by manipulating our decisions, and further indicates that human nature demonstrates immense vulnerability to such attacks. Furthermore, omnipresent advertising leads us to want things we have never tried before, to see things that are not worth seeing, to buy things we don't really need. The novelist tries to open our eyes to identify and understand how this destructive commercial mechanism works. There are many marketing techniques that lead customers to make a certain selection to convince them to purchase a product. Sometimes these techniques are so powerful that they can radically change our opinion. One of the very first scenes shows us a photo of the family having lunch. DeLillo focuses our attention on how food is packaged on the table: “open cartons, crumpled tinfoil, shiny bags of chips, bowls of pureed substances covered in cling film, flip-top rings, and drawstrings” (7). There are many things, but I would say: lack of food. From Babette, Jack's now-wife, who prepared the meal, we learn that she actually wanted them to eat something completely different. She is also criticized by her teenage daughters: Denise and Steffie for her bad taste: “Keep buying that [food]. But he never eats it” (7). How is it that Babette, who collects food, makes such horrible purchases? She is the brightest example of someone who stopped to think independently and was drawn to shiny packages... in the middle of paper... with an infinite number of products for us to choose from. There must be a place where we can get the goods, it's great that we can also relax, listen to music, meet a friend and have fun there. However, we clients must be aware of the fact that those places are gigantic, war arenas where our minds are under siege, where our brain can be attacked by unconscious contents, that those buildings are truly full of hidden traps of suggestion. This is the complete package. Don DeLillo states in his novel that we easily become victims of an enormous number of commercials and salespeople, whose job is to guide us “towards infinite well-being” (83). From the well-trained specialist we hear: what we want to wear, eat, listen, read, and this is the moment we really die. We die as a separate, unique and precious unit, to become subscribers to the “noises of the levels” (84).