Death in Don DeLillo's White Noise: A literary diagnosis of contemporary death culture

This chapter explores, by way of an important piece of modern literature, how fiction may inform and sharpen our understanding of the contemporary culture of death. The centrepiece of the chapter is constituted by American writer Don DeLillo’s 1985 book White Noise. This critically acclaimed book contains many different angles and multiple layers. However, the topic of death is indeed one of the most conspicuous themes running throughout the novel. The authors use the book’s literary genre as a sort of ‘vicarious’ source of sociological knowledge for understanding our contemporary death culture. In the chapter, the authors first present the main storyline of the book, then they delve a bit deeper into several death-related topics of the novel (death anxiety, medicalization, mediatization/commodification, simulation of death and disaster, and immortality), then discuss the book’s ‘findings’ in comparison with some selected sociological perspectives. Towards the end of the chapter, they discuss how White Noise in particular and fiction in general may provide us with important insights into contemporary society’s continuously constrained efforts to create meaning with the phenomenon of death.