MORBID IMAGES IN DON DELILLO’S WHITE NOISE: A STUDY

J. Kastrokumar 1 and Dr. V. Gnanaprakasam 2 . 1. Ph.D. Research Scholar, Department of English, Annamalai University. 2. Assistant Professor,Department of English, Annamalai University. ...................................................................................................................... Manuscript Info Abstract ......................... ........................................................................ Manuscript History Received: 27 February 2019 Final Accepted: 29 March 2019 Published: April 2019

Don DeLillo"s well-kept secret mind of fiction White Noise highlights suspense and intelligence of his writing. Postmodernist elements of his fiction reveal, the superhero exist only as myths in the modern world; we are nature"s elements, a technologically oriented people on the other hand caught in the sieve of history. This study focuses on an industrial accident that occurs at a small Midwestern town in which the total town is evacuated. Jack"s family is also evacuated. The highlight of the history is Union Carbide disaster in India that killed over two thousand people and injured thousands more. Carbide is one of the most poisonous gases, which is injurious to health. It is made from rail car released as dark clouds of chemical spills in the science laboratory. Particularly, it seems timelier and frightening the environments, which is rendering American numbness. The toxic nature of Carbide results in man-made disasters, which threatens the society and the survival of nature. Here, DeLillo explores death as a result of chemical poisoning which forms the major theme of the novel, however death is inevitable and annihilation that seizes everyone"s consciousness.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….... Introduction:-
Don DeLillo is born on November 20, 1936 who is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist. White Noise is his eighth novel; Jack is the story of a college professor and his family who live in a small Midwestern town. The novel mainly covers the subjects of "Waves and Radiation", "The Airborne Toxic Event", and "Dylarama". He has described his fiction as being connects with "living in dangerous times". White Noise highlights several themes that emerged during the mid-to-late twentieth century: rampant consumerism, media saturation, the disintegration and reintegration of the family, man-made disasters, and the potentially regenerative nature of human violence. This novel is set at bucolic Midwestern College known only as The-College-on -the hill, White Noise follows a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a college professor who has made his name by pioneering in the field of Hitler studies. Babette is Jack"s wife. They have six children from previous marriages, and they are currently living with four of these children. Jack Gladney is the first person narrator of this novel. Babette is Jack"s current wife, the mother by her earlier marriages of Denise and Steffie. Willie Mink is a project manager for the company which manufactures the Dylar. He trades drug for sex with Babette. She has an affair with Willie Mink, also known as Mr. Gray, in order to attain Dylar. He is a shady character in this novel. Jack Gladney becomes obsessed with Willie Mink so he wants to revenge for the affair.

ISSN: 2320-5407
Int. J. Adv. Res. 7(4), 1640-1642 1641 She has very forgetful memory after taking the tabloids. The entire novel is a little sequence of important events than a series of conversation relating to various interests and obsessions. It depends on the natural language of the American culture. The impression is one of pervasive bitterness, suspicion and intrigue.
"A valid point. But it is not a question of greatness. It"s not a question of good and evil. I don"t know what it is. Look at it this way. Some people always wear a favourite colour. Some people carry a gun. Some people put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, and safer. It"s in this area that my obsessions dwell." (63) Don DeLillo"s White Noise is one of the tabloid thriller fictions in the postmodern American history. Jack Gladney is the protagonist of the novel who argues that he has come to understand that the medium is a primal force in the American homes. Television offers incredible amounts of human psychic data. It opens ancient memories of world birth; it welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern.
Television is the death throe of human consciousness and which is just another name for junk mail though a message was being transmitted from the weather satellite. Babette is tall and fairly ample who gathers and tends the children and she teaches a course in an adult education program, belonging to a group of volunteers who read to the blind. Once a week she reads to an elderly man named Treadwell who lives on the edge of the town. The old fellow demands his weekly dose of cult mysteries. Babette"s eleven year old son is Denise, a hardnosed kid. He led a more or less daily protest against those of her mother"s habits that struck her as wasteful or dangerous.
"Japan is pretty good for disaster footage," Alfonse said. "India remains largely untapped. They have tremendous potential with their famines, monsoons, religious strife, train wrecks, boat sinking, etc. But their disasters tend to go unrecorded. Three lines in the newspaper. No film footage, no satellite hooks up. This is why California is so important. We not only enjoy seeing them punished for their relaxed life-style and progressive social ideas but we know we"re not missing anything. The cameras are right there. They"re standing by. Nothing terrible escapes their scrutiny." (66) The finding of this novel is restoring the sublime to our thinking about recent American postmodern fiction. The "postmodern sublime" gives us back mystery and the sense of wonder. It resolves the stresses between postmodernist negativity and the rigidity of conspiracy theory.
The new sublime has different origins. One derives from Kant through Christopher Norris, whose account of Niels Bohr"s quantum physics invokes a world beyond classical logic and human reason, which is "virtually a definition of the postmodern sublime" (W N 77). Thomas Pynchon and DeLillo are sceptics whose writing reveal, satirizes, and undermines the terms taken by paranoid conspiracy theory according to Coale shows that himself to be transcendence derive from vigorously secular fictions. In difficult times, he often criticized the paranoid religious rights in America; such vigorous scepticism should not be resolved as "the postmodern sublime". Don DeLillo"s White Noise explores how he foregrounds the often unnoticed impact of narrative on identity formation emphasizing the crucial interconnections between form and idea. Although its first person narrator fails to successfully use narrative to meaningfully form a stable existence, the novel produces revised models for the reader"s own positioning as an agent of his or her own formation of identity. In other words, fiction presents a distinctively narrative uses of countering the loss of individual, meaningful experience therefore often connected with a historical, simulacra, and absurdly ironic nature of postmodernity.
White Noise presents the cultural consciousness and the subjectivity of social environments that are affected by man-made disasters. These substances rise from chemistry laboratories such as the nyodene acid and toxic cloud. The rail car wheel releases the contaminated poisonous gases. White Noise fills up all frequencies creating a background of the noise around the environments. Don DeLillo observes the small whisper of human mortality can be unused frequencies of an individual"s mental process. She defended Babette. Jack Gladney is an academic college professor on the Hill who does the research about the Hitler studies. There is no Hitler building as such, they are quarted in centenary hall, a dark brick structure they share with the popular culture department, officially known as American environments. Murray Siskind is the best companion of Jack Gladney, whose researches about Elvis theories are similar. However their findings are vague.