Summary: Chapter 9
Denise and Steffie’s grade school is evacuated because
children and teachers are exhibiting mysterious symptoms like headaches,
eye irritations, and the taste of metal in their mouths. One teacher
starts rolling on the floor and speaking in foreign languages. The
school closes for a week while inspectors do a sweep of the building.
The inspectors’ suits are made of Mylex, a substance that confounds their
detection equipment, rendering the results ambiguous and inconclusive.
While the girls are home from school, Jack, Babette, Wilder,
and the girls take a trip to the supermarket. There, they run into
Murray once again, and Jack notes that he’s seen Murray in the supermarket as
many times as he’s seen him on campus. Jack listens to the din of the
supermarket and thinks he can detect a strain of noise coming from
within the human clamor: something dull and unlocatable, just beyond
his perception.
Jack and Steffie walk down the aisles, and she tells Jack
that Denise has been reading the Physician’s Desk Reference to
find information about a drug Babette has been taking. Jack says
he knows nothing about any drug.
In another part of the store, Murray helps Babette push
her loaded cart and talks about the Tibetan philosophy of death.
He tells Babette that he finds that the noises, colors, and psychic
energy of the supermarket spiritually recharge him. Supermarkets
contain untold amounts of hidden symbolism, he tells her, and reading
the symbols is only a matter of learning how to peel back the layers
of inscrutability. Babette nods, smiles, and shops her way through Murray’s
lecture on dying. Wilder disappears briefly into someone else’s
cart but is quickly recovered.
As they check out, Murray awkwardly invites Jack and Babette over
for dinner, which they accept. In the parking lot, Jack and Babette
hear a rumor that one of the Mylex-suited investigators died during
the school inspection.
Summary: Chapter 10
As Jack observes the student body at the College-on-the-Hill,
Jack feels that he can actually see the college’s high tuition reflected
in the students’ bearing and the particular ways they sit, stand,
and walk. To Jack, the students’ mannerisms signal a shared membership
in some kind of secret fellowship, determined by their economic
status.
At home, Denise chastises her mother for her gum-chewing
habits. Denise lists the many potentially harmful effects of gum,
such as its tendency to cause cancer in rats. Denise tells her mother
that she can’t chew gum anymore and, in the course of their argument, brings
up the memory lapses that Babette has been having recently.
Upstairs, Jack finds Heinrich studying moves for a chess
game he plays via mail with a convicted killer named Tommy Roy Foster. Heinrich
describes their correspondence and tells Jack that Foster committed
the crime because he wanted to go down in history. Now, however,
Foster realizes that shooting a few random people in a tiny town
wasn’t enough to guarantee him fame, and if he could do it all again,
he would just assassinate one famous person. Jack comments that
he won’t go down in history, either, and Heinrich comments that
Jack, at least, has Hitler, while Tommy Roy Foster has nothing. Jack
and Heinrich discuss the fact that Heinrich’s mother wants him to
visit her that summer at the ashram where she lives. Jack asks Heinrich
if he wants to go, and Heinrich responds that he can’t tell. He
might want to go, but then that desire might just be the result
of a random misfiring neuron in his brain.
The next morning, Jack goes to the ATM to check his balance. He
finds comfort in the fact that his own accounting has been corroborated
and validated by the bank’s computer system.
Summary: Chapter 11
Jack wakes up suddenly in the middle of the night, gripped
by a powerful fear. The clock reads 3:51, and Jack wonders if the
number might be significant. Perhaps, he wonders, some numbers are
threatening, while others are life-affirming.
The next morning, Jack wakes up to the smell of burnt
toast. Jack says that Steffie often burns her toast because she
loves the smell. When he goes downstairs, he finds Steffie and Babette
in the kitchen. Jack remarks that he’ll be fifty-one the following
week. Babette asks how being fifty-one feels, and Jack says that
it’s no different from fifty. Except, Babette points out, one number
is odd and the other is even.
Steffie asks about her mother, Dana Breedlove. Dana is
a contract agent for the CIA who conducts covert drop-offs in Latin
America. Later, when Steffie is distracted by a telemarketer’s phone
call, Jack tells Babette that Dana liked to plot and was often getting
him entangled in domestic and faculty battles. He remarks that she would
speak English to him but that when she was on the phone she’d speak
Spanish or Portuguese.
Jack and Babette go to Murray’s house for dinner that
evening, and Murray cooks them a Cornish hen on his hot plate. Murray expounds
on his theories about television. He describes how his students
think television is worthless junk, but Murray insists that television
is a primal and important force in American life. If you can open
yourself up to television, Murray says, you can observe all kinds
of incredible things concealed in the grid of buzzing dots and blips.
As Jack and Babette walk home after dinner, Babette brings
up the memory lapses that Denise claims to have witnessed. Jack
tries to reassure her that they are probably nothing. They discuss
the pills Denise says she has seen, and Babette says she doesn’t
think she is taking anything that could account for memory loss.
Analysis
In these chapters, the novel begins to move into threatening
territory. However, the accumulating dread still isn’t attached
to a particular event or cause. Instead, this dread, continuously
hovering in the distance, seems to linger around Jack. Menace seems
to lurk around every corner, often in seemingly innocuous places.
Gum chewing, according to Denise, can have fatal consequences, and
the supermarket, according to Murray, resembles the Tibetan holding place
for the dead. The mysterious ailment that afflicts the girls’ school
represents the novel’s first real brush with danger. However, the
threat passes almost as soon as it appears, dissolving away with nearly
no consequences—except for the anonymous inspector, rumored dead.
Throughout White Noise, ominous situations
arise, only to be quickly deflated. But, as is the case with the
dead, Mylex-suited inspector, discomfort and uneasiness never truly
dissipate. This tendency will be most clearly demonstrated in the
airborne toxic event of Chapter 21, in which Jack finds himself
exposed to a chemical that will surely prove lethal, but probably
not for several decades, at which point Jack will already be well
into old age. This evaluation confirms Jack’s suspicions that he
has been marked for death, yet it keeps the actual realization of
Jack’s death at bay. Jack lives under the shadow of an unnamed threat
yet can never be truly sure of the nature of that threat.
Heinrich’s relationship with Tommy Roy Foster represents another
threatening element in these chapters, confirming Jack’s earlier
suspicions that Heinrich “brings a danger to him.” Heinrich’s relationship
to Tommy Roy Foster is typical of the relationship Jack’s family
has to danger, in that Foster remain distant and separate from Heinrich,
safe behind bars and only communicating through letters. Like the
unnamed menace that seems to hover around Jack, Foster makes his
presence felt without actually being present, tangible, or visible.
While he discusses Foster with Jack, Heinrich is the first to note
the way Jack’s interest in Hitler is more than simply academic.
Heinrich remarks that Tommy Roy Foster won’t “go down in history,”
since he only killed some anonymous civilians. Jack, however, “has
Hitler,” while Foster has nothing. Just as Foster would capitalize
on a famous victim’s personal glory, Jack capitalizes on Hitler’s
fame to bolster his own identity. The fact that Heinrich equates
his father with a convicted mass-murderer foreshadows the events
of the final chapter, when Jack attempts murder. In a more general
way, it also suggests the voracious way Jack consumes Hitler’s mythos
in order to strengthen himself.
Finally, these chapters develop the theme of codes and
code-breaking more fully. Throughout the novel, characters analyze texts,
symbols, and images to divine deeper meanings. Denise pores over
the Physician’s Desk Reference in an attempt to
diagnose her mother’s illness. Murray is an extreme case of this
tendency, as he claims to find evidence of codes everywhere—from
television transmissions to the colors and shapes of food packaging
in the supermarket. To Murray, the entire modern world pulses with
hidden messages and secret languages, and the act of decoding is
a source of endless fascination and wonder to him. Jack also thinks
he sees codes working all around him, but he isn’t sure whether
they are benign or malicious. He notes, for example, that he wakes
up at exactly 3:51 and frantically tries to grasp the meaning of
this mysterious number. He wonders if he should find significance
in the fact that 3:51 ends in an odd digit or in the fact that he
will be fifty-one on his next birthday. Jack would like to believe
that the world operates in such systematic, precise ways, because
such regularity would lend his life shape and meaning. However,
as the novel progresses, whether the world is, in fact, methodical
becomes increasingly less clear.
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