Character Study

In Don Delillo’s White Noise, there are several main characters introduced throughout the novel. The main character and narrator of the story is named Jack Gladney. He has a strong fear of dying and spends much of his time worrying about this. He constantly wonders about him and his wife’s death and asks “who will die first?” (30). He is the chairman of “Hitler Studies” at the College-on-the-Hill. Murray Siskind, a professor at the College-on-the-Hill, obsesses over his desire to teach an “Elvis studies” program, similar to Jack’s Hitler’s studies. He always tries to impress others with his highly academic dialect, even for the simplest conversations. For example, when at the supermarket, he overanalyzed the simple art of packaging into a way more complex thing “flavorless packaging…I feel I’m not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus” (18). He’s a satire of the modern college professor. Babette is Jack’s husband; she teaches a posture class and raises the children, but her main occupation involves comforting Jack “whatever she is doing, makes me feel sweetly rewarded, bound up with a full-souled woman”(5). That is until she is caught for having an affair with Willy Mink, “an unsupervised well-built human” (300), or “Mr. Gray” who trades the experimental drug “Dylar” for sex. He’s very mysterious and really isn’t mentioned much until the end of the novel. Jack and Babette have many children, some from previous marriages. The more significant children to the book are Heinrich, Steffie, Denise, and Wilder. Denise is the bossy eleven-year-old daughter who criticizes Babette for several things such as her health. For example, when Denise saw Babette chewing gum, she said “that stuff causes cancer…in case you didn’t know” (41). Steffie is the innocent and sensitive seven-year-old daughter who has difficulty witnessing people on television get hurt, physically and emotionally such as when she was “brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife” (64). Heinrich, the fourteen-year-old son, is often characterized as awkward, the oddball in the family. He’s dubious and constantly disagreeing with Jack. Jack believes “I have a sense that his ready yielding to our wishes and demands is a private weapon of reproach” (22). Wilder is the slowly-developing son who never talks in the novel but cries a ton but still seems to comfort his parents the most out of all the children “there was something permanent and soul-struck in this crying” (77).  Although some of these characters have larger roles than others, each brings an important significance to the plot of the novel.