Simulacra in Don DeLillo's White Noise

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s White Noise is a novel laden with meaning being explored since the end of the 19 the century. InWhite Noise, DeLillo challenges the ideas of reality by replacing the reality with the use of various images and signs. For this, he has used his protagonist Jack Gladney who confronts a new order in which life is increasingly lived in a world of simulacra, where images and electronic representation replace the reality. DeLillo takes a postmodern idea, that simulacra have replaced reality, and applies it throughout White Noise. For DeLillo’s characters, contemporary American ‘reality’ has become completely mediated and artificial; there is a culture of comprehensive and seemingly total representation. We do not merely disdainfully live in a world offalse things; we embrace the simulacra and thrive on them. In White Noise, simulation is not just a fact of contemporary existence, it is a comfort. In a world where images, signs and codes engulf objective reality,signs become more real than reality and stand in for the world they erase. The simulacra, the television images, the radio reports, the medical imaging devices: are considered more real than the immediate personal perception of the characters. Therefore, the novel provides the new concept of reality, which is more real than the real, hyperreal.