Title: The Narrative of Death and Critique of Television Culture in White Noise

Abstract: Don DeLillo’s White Noise is on the surface a representation of the everyday life of an ordinary American family in the 1980s, yet it actually refers to the death culture and symbolic politics of television. The novel not only examines how television intrudes on the everyday life of the Gladneys by shaping and intensifying children and adults’s consciousness of death, but also shows how the narrator Jack utilizes televised narratives to resist the fear of death and to retell the everyday life. However, this resistance does not restrain the televisual transfiguration of domesticity through virtualization, aestheticization and commercialization. Through his portrayal of the chaotic but warm domestic life of the Gladneys, DeLillo emphasizes the cultural power of everyday life and explores a path to redemption full of “radiance in dailiness.”

Keywords: Don DeLillo, White Noise, television, everyday life, death

Author: Lu Li, Ph.D. Candidate, Foreign Studies College, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, Hunan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.03.012