Murray's White Noise

Superior Essays
The supermarket is something they can count on – they can count on the “forty-five yards” of fruit bins, “six kinds of apples” and “exotic melons in several pastels” (36). The supermarket is featured in White Noise so much that it becomes a main setting of the novel. Jack and his family take several shopping trips, and each time they are in awe with the variety and sheer quantity of products to buy. It is a place Jack doesn’t have to feel so vulnerable. One day Jack sees a colleague at a shopping center that barely recognized him without his dark glasses and long cloak. Without his academic persona, he is reduced to “a big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy” and a “different person entirely” (82-83). Suddenly Jack is vulnerable again …show more content…
There is a sense that consumption and products are not enough; consumption wards off death in the mean time, but they need something more real. In this sort of environment – one of unlimited information, yet still no certainty; people need something larger than life to give them the reassurance they desperately need. Once everyone is quarantined to avoid exposure, people are desperate for something to grasp onto. Coping with the uncertainty takes the form of several different approaches that Murray later elaborates on. Some put faith in technology – that there were microorganisms designed to “consume” (160) the cloud and thus save them from further exposure. Some put faith in the spiritual, distracting themselves with headlines such as “Life After Death Guaranteed with Bonus Coupons,” featuring testimony by someone who claims to have been “the secret KGB assassin responsible for the unsolved murders of famed personalities Howard Hughes, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley” (143). Still yet, some others flock to Heinrich, who appeared to have some authority on what’s going on. At the same time, no matter what crowd or coping mechanism each group grasped onto – all served the same function. What they were trying to get away from wasn’t the “black billowing cloud,” (113) or even the exposure. Each crowd’s purpose was the same: to evade death. By relinquishing their individuality for the sake of …show more content…
Murray draws the example of funerals and tributes. Similarly, In The Spectacle of the Scaffold, Michel Foucault discusses another way crowds “assemble in the name of death” (73): public executions. For Foucault, the purpose of public executions was two fold: to set an example to the commonwealth in order to deter anyone else from committing a crime, but more importantly, as a display of power. Holding a public execution puts the power differential between the commonwealth and the sovereign on display: it “reactivates” (49) his power over his subjects in a way a less public punishment wouldn’t. At the same time, the whole ritual depended on crowds showing

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