Throughout our discussion of White Noise, we spent a lot of time talking about Jack’s deep seeded desire to be the perfect representation of white normative masculinity. But we did not spend a lot of time talking about where that desire came from, and I think this could point to another meaning of the title of the novel: The media is constantly showing everyone what “normal” looks like. Every race and gender is represented on TV and in the movies in some generalized way or another, but white men have most typically been portrayed as normative. Their masculinity and their whiteness are depicted as the norm. This “white noise” is incessant and inescapable for Jack.
As a result, those are his expectations for himself. He expects himself to be strong, powerful, assertive, and the head of a perfect nuclear family. In actuality though, no matter how “masculine” he is, death is inevitable and other people’s actions are entirely out of his control. For example, he sees his marriage to Babette as the perfect relationship because of the way she makes him “feel sweetly rewarded” (5). When she has an affair, he realizes how far outside of his control she really is. This certain lack of agency is evident in nearly every aspect of his life, and seems to contribute to his fear of death – he can’t do anything to stop it.
This makes it easier for me to understand the motivations behind Jack’s “protective strategies”. His Hitler obsession especially makes sense: Hitler not only controlled the people around him, but he seemed to have complete control of his own life – and his death! By living his life in the footsteps of someone he sees as having complete agency, Jack believes he can bridge the gap between expectations in reality.
It seems to me that the disparity between expectations and reality is something that everyone can relate to. You have this idealized image in your head about the way something (your life) should go, and it becomes really hard to swallow when things do not turn out the way you imagined. Though DeLillo does not necessarily speak directly to this, the sentiment is certainly there. And it’s an emotion that everyone can understand on some level or another.
An interesting extension of our discussion of normative masculinity. It would be fascinating to track this in the novel - to see if you can pull out passages re: media/consumption and link them up to the representation of normative masculinity. I think you'd come up with some interesting evidence.
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