Don DeLillos White Noise :: Free Essay Writer

Don DeLillos White Noise ovalbumin ruffle is probably Don DeLillos most popular novel, largely because most readers check up on it as DeLillos warmest and most human book. In this story, the ideas that seem to captivate DeLillo ar fleshed out in real life in a counselling that none of his other books quite achieves. Of course, there are a few stubborn souls (like me) who still feel THE NAMES, or one of his other books is better. plainly I think everyone agrees, WHITE NOISE is a winner. It won DeLillo the guinea pig Book Award in 1985, and it also won a bigger reading audience for a great American writer. DeLillo has said that Ernest Beckers THE self-renunciation OF DEATH was a book that influenced him at the time he wrote WHITE NOISE. Theres sealedly no denying that death, and the many things we do to nullify facing it, is a major focus of DeLillos novel. Beckers book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1974, has as its thesis the assertion that the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human carnal like nothing else it is a mainspring of human activity---activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final exam destiny for man. Beckers point is that this is *the* driving force in the human mortal today...which I think is overstating the matter a bit...but it certainly is a earth that all of us face in some way, sooner or later. As I looked through Beckers book last month, I was surprise to discover that its actually an exposition of the work of Otto Rank. Rank was the third of the tether famous defectors from Freuds inner psychoanalytic circle early this century (the others universe Alder and Jung), and hes known in the literary world to a certain extent because of his intimate involvement with Anais Nin. Like Jung, Rank developed a psychology of mythology and religion...and, in particular, Ranks emphasis was The Hero motif. This is what Jung called the puer a eternus (or the female puella)---the eternal youth...who never ages...who never dies...to whom death is nothing. In psychology, this idea is linked closely with that of narcissism, which is considered customary in society today. Just look at all the things we do to avoid the appearance of aging Jack Gladney is, at best, an unlikely Hero, I think.