Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum By Mar ...

Chapter 1

Shopping for Its Own Sake:
Don DeLillo's
System of Objects

In White Noise, DeLillo presents the first-person narrative of Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies whose fear of death is exacerbated when a cloud of toxic chemicals appears over his town. Brooding over the cloud and other phenomena that signal the imminence of death, Jack discovers that his wife, Babette, has been experimenting with Dylar, a drug that allegedly “speeds relief” to the “fear of death part of the brain” (200). When Dylar eventually proves ineffective, however, Jack and Babette retreat to the aisles of their local grocery store where the checkout line provides an opportunity to rehearse life's slow-moving march toward death. Thus, as the novel draws to a conclusion, the relationship between death and shopping (the two major themes of White Noise) comes clearly into focus: shopping is what we do to keep ourselves busy until we die or, to borrow an apt colloquialism, “check out.” From this perspective, the novel as