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

privileges” within the context of the marketplace (23). Both as a unit and as individuals, Jack's family finds a sense of identity in the act of consumption.

Yet for all of Jack's magnanimity and the sense of family unity it appears to engender, the joy of shopping is markedly short-lived, and the members of Jack's family, as if to confirm Baudrillard's theory, gain no real satisfaction from their outing. Immediately after experiencing the “buzz” of their shopping trip, the Gladneys drive home in silence, then retreat to their respective rooms, “wishing to be alone” (White Noise 84). Not much later, Jack finds his daughter sitting in front of the television, moving her lips and “attempting to match the words as they [are] spoken” (84). This image is echoed throughout the novel whenever the children of Jack's marriage mutter the names of products and corporate slogans in their sleep, and confirms a theory Murray espouses early in the novel when he argues that children are the primary targets of “advertisers and mass-producers of culture” (50). Children, Murray says, understand something that adults seem to have forgotten—that the purpose of television is to indoctrinate them into society; in addition to offering “incredible amounts of psychic data,” television also, according to Murray, “welcomes us into the grid” by presenting us with “the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of the darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras” of consumer culture (51).

Unlike Baudrillard, Murray sees television's power to indoctrinate as a positive phenomenon insofar as it offers society a shared sense of history and purpose. From Jack's perspective, however, this shared sense of history and purpose is illusory as demonstrated by the isolation ultimately engendered by consumption and television. The ideology of consumption that the medium enforces strips Jack's family of what Baudrillard calls the “real” dimension of lived existence and replaces interpersonal relationships with relationships among individuals and the objects they possess. As Jack's family is loath to discover, the latter type of relationship cannot deliver the degree of fulfillment it promises. In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard