Reality, Technology, and Simulations; Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism in Don DeLillo’s 'White Noise' Anonymous College

Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise is a text firmly situated in the modern world. Through the novel, part Postmodernist satire part Post-Structuralist understanding of the world, DeLillo presents an incredibly cynical view of the modern world through his narrator and protagonist Jack Gladney, the head of Hitler Studies at a Midwestern American university. The novel layers a narrative atop Gladney’s altogether unspectacular life that explores the role of technology, computing, and simulation in the postmodern world, presenting contemporary America as enveloped within a system of cyclical programs and paradoxes. The outcome is a novel that probes deeply into the contemporary meaning of reality, showing how in our postmodern world there is nothing concrete, nothing solid or dependable. White Noise presents a world where due to the intervention of technology reality is a fiction all of its own.

To have a good understanding of White Noise it is essential to understand the basics of Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism. Within both Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism there is an overarching nihilism, and though Postmodernism is a far broader field than Post-Structuralism there many other similarities between the two....