White Noise

[Brittany Wilson]

Post 2

I would like to focus on White Noise for the first part of this response. The scene opens while Heinrich and his father are driving to school. Heinrich informs his father that the radio said it would rain. His father tells him that the rain has already started and they do not need to relay on the radio but their own senses. Growing up I feel that I believe mostly everything I was told without experiencing it myself.  My grandmother always said that her knees hurt when it was going to rain. I feel that scientifically our body is able to recognize changes before we are. Another example is when we walk into a house and we smell food. We instantly know that our mother is cooking dinner. We basically use our senses and realize truth before we even know what the truth is.

Also within this piece Jack makes the claim that media creates a fake impression of reality. I do agree with this claim. I feel that media’s job is to make sure the viewer is satisfied. Media follows the events that are happening around us. However, we only know the details and accounts that they feel is important. We are not given the whole story to create our own impressions. For example, during presidential elections certain television stations are biased toward certain candidates. They focus more stories around that one person and broadcast commercials supporting that candidate. As humans we are naturally lazy and do not do our own research. We see something on television or on the radio and ultimately believe it. All in all I believe that the truth is found within our senses and experience because each person has the ability to recognize what they believe is true and what is not. This realization comes with age. 

[damian hunt]

Post 3

This chapter, called White Noise, is very curious.  It reminds me a lot of me and my father on the way too school.  My father always told me to question everything, to take things in stride and not believe everything you hear.  I think this dialogue is one of the most dynamic I’ve read recently.  It reads like a Socratic piece almost, a modern take on the Socratic Method where the older man is using questions for the boy to find answers.  It gets a little ridiculous though, the extent of the questions that is, I mean is it really that hard to see the rain?  I guess a true philosophical level we must question things like that.  It really does prove that we don’t know an absolute truth, which brings me back to something similar I wrote in my previous post.  Is there absolute truth? Is the absolute truth that there is no absolute truth’s? It is very tricky and I think the best way to go about answering questions like this is not through essays of non-fiction but through literature.  Literature gives the author the ability to show examples of this paradox through re-created or imagined real-life scenarios.  By the end of the dialogue the reader is ideally just as shocked or persuaded as the character that is being attempted to be persuaded.  That is the magic of Literature and why it is so important.  Complex concepts like absolute truth and philosophical debate can be easily attributed to a father and his son on the way to school and executed in a manner that is easily understood by anyone who reads it.  I think Don DeLillo is a very intelligent man for coming up with this and I very much want to read some more of his work.

Wc: 300

[Marlee Brannock]

Post #3

This chapter is very interesting.  It opens up with a scene of a father driving his fourteen year old son to school, where they begin to have a debate about whether it is raining or not.  The father says it is raining while the fourteen year old, Heinrich, is very defiant and stubborn, going on and on about all these factors that could mean it was not raining.  While Heinrich's thought process is admirable in a sense, it made me just as frustrated as his father seemed to be.  I also assumed though that his behavior was the product of his fathers parenting.   When Heinrich leaves the car his father feels love towards his son.  "At such moments I find I love him with such an animal desperation, a need to take him under my coat and crush him to my chest, keep him there, protect him." (Delillo 25) Then we find out that the father is a professor of a Nazism. When I read this I automatically thought how German "Heinrich" sounds. There is a prominent dark undertone in the passage and multiple mentions of death/danger.  Heinrich is already a moody teenager, and during the rain debate his father asks "What if someone held a gun to your head?" (Delillo 23)  This, on top of the fact that he teaches such a violent subject, and then the ominous ending where he tells his students: "We edge nearer death every time we plot.  It's like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot." (26)  This ending is intriguing and could possibly be a foreshadowing of an event that could come, possibly having to do with Heinrich.  I would guess that maybe Heinrich could get into some kind of trouble where his father would have to protect him, but I also would not doubt that Heinrich could do something dangerous to someone else.  

WC:323

[Lindsay Miller]

Post 4 - Lindsay Miller

 

"White Noise" is such an interesting story, or I guess it is actually a chapter out of a novel, but I agree with a lot of the points you have brought up here. Our senses can definitely lead us to an understanding of the truth. I think sometimes that idea can also become blurred with elements of belief. For example, I remember being a kid and believing in Santa Claus with all my heart. Then, when I was about 12, I found a receipt on my parent's dresser that listed all of the items that I had supposedly gotten from "Santa Claus." I was SO crushed, especially since I had placed milk and cookies by the fire place the night before and there was an empty glass and bite marks on what was left of one of the cookies. I had never experienced actually seeing Santa Claus do those things, but I had believed it anyway, until I found that receipt that is. I think this also ties into the media, as you have discussed above. Most of the time, I want to believe that what I am hearing on the radio, television, etc., is at least partially true. It seems to make us feel good when someone else relays information to us, as a way of filling us in on the details we would never know otherwise. But, there is definitely a problem with the swaying media and all of their biased tendencies. I totally agree with your point about politics. I cannot remember a single election where more than one channel seemed to agree on the same candidate, or even what that candidate was trying to convey when speaking. It is so frustrating, but ultimately, I believe that you are right. As we grow older, we all learn from experience and are better able to distinguish between the truth and fictionalized drama that was only intended to sell magazines.

[Amanda Dunn]

Post 4

After reading “White Noise”, I could not help but feel a sense of puzzlement in several ways. Surely, reading the entire book that this chapter is taken from would help with many of these things but one of the most puzzling things for me was the age of Heinrich in comparison with the argument that he is making. I just found it very interesting that someone at the age of fourteen could possess such insight about the definition of reality, or the lack thereof. I think that it depends a lot on your perspective of how reality is conjured, if it exists and we simply function within it or if it is a slew of images that our minds fabricate to surround us. Personally, I am a proponent of the first option. I believe that our minds are basically sponges made to absorb all that is around us and that is what defines our own personal “truths”. It is also true that there are many other aspects that play a role in what is true or untrue to us, like how we were raised, genetic dispositions, and personal experiences. I guess in a way, this can fall into the idea of our minds are projecting a reality for us as individuals; everyone sees different parts of the same passage of time, we all have our own developed personal screens, so in a way that’s how our realities are constructed uniquely. In a way, this idea is also reflected in Tompkins’ piece in a way. I think that when she discusses the idea that pieces of literature become relevant within a network of meaning, she is talking about the alignment of realities. If someone holds a certain set of beliefs about the world and then discovers that a piece of literature has content within it that elucidates those beliefs, it becomes relevant. I think that a lot of times, people share certain important aspects of reality with other people and this is what creates trends, and thus the popularity of pieces of literature. It is just a matter of how society grows both on an individual basis and as a collective. 

[Matthew Seif]

Post 4

Reading this chapter of "White Noise" definitely triggered my memory back to when I was young and I had my grandfather tell me that things would happen like how Heinrich was told by his father, Jack that it is raining. The media’s role in this piece is to be a channel to please people in order to achieve their positive ratings stood out to me the most. DeLillo painted the picture of Jack arguing with his son Heinrich but in reality, Jack is trying to tell Heinrich that the media is a very dangerous tool as it tells people what to think rather than people thinking for themselves. Since Jack is a professor of Hitler Studies, he analyzes the tactics that Hitler utilized in his plans to manipulate the people to come to agreement with his beliefs. Jack would like to believe that we control our reality through our senses but acknowledges the fact that we our actually controlled by the media. It is very clear that Heinrich does not have the same mentality as Jack, since everything he sees or thinks is not compared to a Hitler-Nazi mentality. Usually when a parental figure attempts to tell their son or daughter how to feel about something, it drives them the opposite way. This is because of the simple fact that people do not like to be told how to think or feel about certain things. Even though it didn’t seem like there was much happening physically, there was definitely more of a mental obstacle occurring. Also, Jack came to a realization after being asked a question about Hitler’s death. He figures out that death is inevitable in any plot and this sparked more questions in Jack’s head about himself and, more than likely the meaning of most things in general. 

[Dillon Freeman]

Post 4

When you are growing up, it feels like you should always believe what your parents have to say.  You learn that they are always doing things in your favor so it doesn’t make sense for them to do anything to confuse you.  Because of this, it seems funny to see Heinrich questioning his father on the topic of perception and senses.  I, personally, have never really questioned my senses like the son does in the story.  I would have just answered the father immediately saying that it was raining.   After reading the story, however, I might have to think twice before I automatically jump to conclusions.  I thought that it was very clever when the son responded to his father’s comment that rain makes you wet by proving that he wasn’t.  Only being a reader of the story, I enjoy seeing the ways that some people think outside the box like Heinrich does.  On the other hand, I think that I would get very annoyed if anyone were to ever do this to me in real life.  Trying to think of other ways that your senses can deceive your mind, I came up with candles.  Some candles have scents like cookies, laundry, and pine trees.  If the story had been changed where the father was trying to get his son to say that someone was baking cookies in a house because he smelled them, the son could easily show his father that he is being deceived.  I do not, however, understand the remaining of the chapter once the son leaves the car.  I can’t understand what the father was trying to show when he thought to himself “Is this true? Why did I say it? What does this mean?”  I’m sure that since this is only a chapter out of a story, it goes on to explain it later.  

[Sarah Shellabarger]

Post 4: 

Dillon, I also agree with what you're saying, about being young and feeling as if you should always trust in what your parents tell you. At least that's how I grew up. Not in the sense that they were brainwashing me, or indoctrinating me in any way, but I just felt that they were my elders and that I owed them a certain sense of respect. There's also a certain sense of trust, and the fact that you assume that they have your best interest in mind in relation to what information you're exposed / they expose you to. That's why I was a little thrown off by this chapter, because Heinrich just doesn't come across as your average fourteen year old boy. Not that it's entirely unbelievable, he just seems very wise beyond his years, as he tries to argue with his dad about whether or not it's truly raining. I know if my dad said, "hey look it's raining", I'd probably look out the window and say, "hey yeah, you're right." Maybe that's my personality, where I wouldn't even think to argue it, or maybe it's the fact that I don't think I could even comprehend or think up what Heinrich is debating. I would also agree with what was previously mentioned about there being a dark undertone in this chapter, which probably carries over in the book(?), as it's mentioned that Heinrich "has a sense of danger to him" or something along those lines, I think it even mentions his communicating or playing chess with some convict, which again, is odd for a boy of only fourteen. It's probably important to mention that Jack teaches a class about nazis, who were obviously very brainwashed, so it's good that his son, although he may have a dark personality, is questioning things and not just believing what he's told. 

[christina behan]

White noise focuses on a few themes one of which seems to be the feeling of lonelness and disconnect. I read this book in its entirety during the summer for American multiethnic literature. Each chapter is immersed in a sad tone which becomes more prominent as the book continues. The conversation in the car with Jack and Henrich show the disconnect that the book displays. The son cant help but argue everything anyone says and the dad just wants to have a friendly conversation with his son. It makes him sad after and furthers his disconnect with others. The tone of sadness is also shown in Jacks lession about nazieism. He answers a students question about the plot to kill hitler by saing "all plots tend to lead towards death". Death is a theme that this novel carries and Jack thinks about it often which i infer is because of his relationships wit the people in his life. His wife cheats on him which makes him feel worthless and his son refuses to entertain a friendly conversation with him about something so simple as the weather. The people in his life is the reason Jack hold his attitude and thinks about death as much as he does. The comment to the student did surprise him and made him question if that is really what he thinks of life because is answer was automatic. His subconscious reveals that death is the end plot which is a strange thing to think. Rather than say the plot is life then death he skips life and focuses on death. I attribute this to his mundane life and the unloving people in it. He feels bad about his sons attitude because its the same attitude he himself caries about life. The attitude of others influence the attitude of those around them. The entire family has social awkwardness due to their disconnect in their home. 

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