Echoes of Fear: Postmodern Anxiety and the Death Consciousness in Don DeLillo’s White Noise

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s White Noise stands as a profound cultural mirror of postmodern America, capturing the fragmented psyche of individuals overwhelmed by media saturation, consumerism, and the omnipresence of death. This paper explores how DeLillo’s narrative transforms ordinary domestic life into a stage for existential dread, where the fear of mortality becomes a constant background noise—an echo of collective anxiety in late capitalist society. Employing theoretical frameworks from Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, Fredric Jameson’s late capitalism, Jean-François Lyotard’s incredulity toward metanarratives, and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic notion of the death drive, the study investigates how the novel portrays death consciousness as both a suppressed and overexposed cultural phenomenon. Through close textual and thematic analysis, this research argues that White Noise embodies postmodern anxiety not as an individual pathology but as a social condition, revealing how technological mediation and commodified existence distort human perception of reality and mortality. Ultimately, the paper contends that DeLillo’s vision compels readers to confront the terrifying beauty of a world where fear itself becomes the last authentic emotion.