Overcoming the fear of death?

The thing that stood out to me more than anything else in “White Noise” would definitely have to be the subject of death. I think that there are a lot of reasons for this, but it fascinates me how Delillo started out with the mentions of death being much more subtle and spread out, and ended with it all coming in to be such a central part of the entire storyline. Perhaps it interests me even more because I took a class on death and dying on a whim whenever I was a sophomore, but I find it funny that Jack seems to embody the “normal” person whenever it comes to his fear of death.

The fear of death is something that all of us have. It is innate, because there is something in our brain that does not allow us as human beings to fully comprehend the knowledge of our own deaths. Of course it is more prevalent in some than others, as is obviously the case with Jack. As he gets older, it seems that his fear of dying seems to be getting worse and worse, perhaps because he knows that it is drawing closer. As a result of this fear, he attempts to construct something to make him feel “better” about it, to distract him from the thoughts and convince himself that he is not going to die. This is his J.A.K. persona, one that he models after Hitler and that he feels more comfortable under, especially in situations where he feels that he is confronting death more closely than usual.

Throughout the novel, I don’t think that Jack ever gained an acceptance of death or overcame his fear. This seems obvious to me in the fact that he couldn’t go through with the murder that he planned to commit, unable to cause someone else to die and face it so directly. In the end, ironically, Jack simply has to come up with a way to accept that he will never be able to accept or overcome this fear of death.