Postmodernism in Don DeLillo's White Noise

In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, a postmodern novel is achieved through the perspective DeLillo presents to certain objects as well as people, in the sense that their appearance and presence insist upon what they knowingly represent, presenting an unclear and meshed distinction yet definitive enough on its own that not only remarks the nature of its existence, but also the social reaction to its existence, therefore creating a certain air of realism that accompanies the stark and exposing nature of DeLillo’s writing style. It’s these distorted representations that are the result of the huge impact of technology that is the focus of the novel. Considering that modernism has the intent of breaking tradition, and realizing the changes in society, DeLillo’s novel in itself represents the effects of the technological and consumer dynamic, especially so concerning the timeless nature of the story in the sense that many of its own numerous references to consumerism still hold mostly true and equivalent even today. For instance, in the opening of the novel, the narrator Jack describes the middle-class parents sending off their children to the college he teaches at: “The conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people’s names. Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggestive massive insurance coverage.” And in a critical essay by John Frow, he notes this in the way the author depicts the parents of the students attending the College-on-the-Hill: “the middle-class parents know the ideality they are supposed to represent, and are deliberately living up to it. But this means that the type loses its purity, since it can always be imitated, feigned; or rather that there is no longer a difference in kind between the social category and the lifestyle which brings it into everyday being the type ceaselessly imitates itself.” He also goes on to further explain the novel’s use of representations of objects and characters in which they “neither precede now follow the real but are themselves real,” while also inhabiting the appearance of both “preceding another reality (as a model to be followed) as well as following it (as a copy).” By blending this sense of parody and/or satire with realism, the writing style then becomes demanded to be taken seriously, as the question of whether to accept the force of technology becomes more prominent, being that the author does not seem to set a definite stance, though the main character and narrator Jack certainly does; take this excerpt for example, showing Jack after a successful usage of an ATM: “Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed.”

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. Penguin Books, 1998.
Frow, John. "The Last Things Before the Last: Notes On White Noise." South Atlantic Quarterly. 89.2 (1990): Print.

Celie's Progression and the Epistolary Format in The Color Purple

The format of The Color Purple, written entirely in letters, seems here to serve a more directly personal narration by the speaker, Celie. For most of the novel the letters are consisted of Celie’s letters to God. Through the letters sent, the reader is able to immediately and boldly recognize the kind of life Celie has. These “written” passages pretty much equate to a diary, already then giving off a confessional, private tone of sorts. But what also makes these letters is Celie’s voice. With this epistolary format, the reader can see that the tragic occurrences in Celie’s childhood have an added weight being that her approach to these situations is so downplayed, frightened yet nonchalant almost, convinced of the happenstance of her life. And though you don’t get the primary perspectives of the other characters like Albert and Shug, Celie’s character is somewhat synonymous to a blank slate, in that the way she describes their actions and associates them directly to their personalities causes a clearer interpretation of the other characters moreso than most first-person narrators.
Also, the novel’s format presents an immediate display of Celie’s growth as a character, given that the progression is addressed by herself. In the beginning letters of the book, the passages are short, blunt, to-the-point as she describes her horrid living experiences: “He act like he can’t stand me no more. Say I’m evil an always up to no good. He took my other little baby, a boy this time. But I don’t think he kilt it. I think he sold it to a man an his wife over Monticello.” As the pages go on, the letters get longer and longer, and we also see more insight into her sister Nettie; with her as with Shug, the reader easily gets a sense of how they are, and because one knows that Celie cares very deeply for these characters, one can better see the motives behind their actions in the way she writes about them. Because Celie’s maturity rested on her own shoulders, there’s less of a front and defensiveness and bias that comes with more and more contemporary first-person narratives (in fact, her moral basis is a most general and basically instinctive sense of right and wrong, given that no one else was there to guide her, furthering her, as I would claim, near-objective presence in the novel). And when Celie changes the recipient of her letters to Nettie, the questionably empty void of her personality begins to shift, the reader knows even more into Celie’s mind, and more and more she becomes less a mere product of her environment. For instance, towards the end when Shug leaves Celie and Albert for a nineteen year-old, of all people, it’s those latter two that end up consoling each other over their loss. Celie says, “Here us is, I thought, two old fools left over from love, keeping each other company under the stars.” And by the end of the novel when Nettie and the rest of Celie’s family arrive from Africa, one can see the happy ending, but this is almost tragic in itself, one can see Celie’s transformation (“Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.”), from a tortured childhood to Celie receiving what each person deserves in the least.

Legacy, History & Reception of The Beat Generation

The Beat Generation came to prominence in the public eye during the 1950s, representing a used, and worn out offspring, the evidence of repression and the choices of America’s leaders leading up to the Great Depression and into World War II seen in the character of the young adults who survived these major historical events since youth. It was Jack Kerouac who coined the term, the label for those like him who did not accept their leaders, the social stigmas of the time, and did not accept the dependency on consumerism that was so emphasized during the time period. Before Kerouac’s conversation with John Clellon Holmes where he first referenced the term “beat generation,” he gives an account of talking to some hipsters in Times Sqaure, who ended up inspiring him to remember the term: “One of them, Huncke of Chicago, came up to me and said, ‘Man, I’m beat.’ I knew right away what he meant somehow.... And so when Huncke...said ‘I’m beat’ with radiant light shining out of his despairing eyes...it was a new language...[and] couldn’t be a more economical term to mean so many things” (Tamony 275).
With works like Kerouac’s On the Road, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the Beat generation poets were launched, and their anti-materialistic values and preachings surely dictated and persuaded the cultural movement of the Sixties and Seventies, for when the Beats first emerged in the mid-Fifties, the culture still offered some resistance to the controversial values the Beats advocated, but this soon lead to the countercultures of the Sixties. With a change in terminology from “beat” to “hippie,” also came a split in the stances held by the Beat poets. While Jack Kerouac criticized the multiple protest movements (“an excuse for spitefulness”), Allen Ginsberg became directly involved with anti-war protests and became an activist himself, channeling his inspiration through poetry. Reflecting on the Sixties’ counterculture twenty years later, Ginsberg believed that what remained as a legacy from the period was “a permanent change in awareness; remember, the notion of Armageddon apocalypse before the Sixties was considered eccentric, whereas now as a possibility it’s a universal awareness.... I think there was a glimpse of possibility of survival of the planet, partly through spirit, partly through imagination and poetry, partly through psychedelic insight” (Ginsberg 463).
By the time the Sixties and the Seventies’ hippie movement, survivors of the poets, like Allen Ginsberg (Kerouac died of alcohol poisoning in 1969), still continued their literary work, but as for what the Beat Generation caused and represented, I believe was fate; a rejection which led to movements and near-revolution, and an essential part of the Fifties and Sixties with their new approach to literature and understanding human thought. They emphasized free expression, a unfortunately controversial stance, that inspired their affluence for non-comformity.



Ginsberg, Allen. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-96. New York: Perennial, 2002. Print.

Tamony, Peter. "Beat Generation: Beat: Beatniks." Western Folklore 28.4 (1969): 274-277. Web. 16 Oct 2009.

Gender Analysis in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

Through Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the author provided readers with a new, or complementary, definition of men, assigning personality traits like, as mentioned in class, stoicism and existentialism, or in other words the type of man that refuses to display emotions, and especially with Jake’s character, being that his war wound has left him impotent, severely, and that he’s considered to have “given more than [his] life” (39), one can only imagine the amount of personal pain, yet even with condition, continues to constantly act as the glue for the rest of the characters throughout the novel. But of course, to talk about Jake’s war wound would only segue into discussing his relationship with Lady Brett, a certainly complex one, which Jake sums up near perfectly after the end of the bullfights in Pamplona when she sends for him, this also being after when Romero, the young bullfighter Brett was so smitten with that Jake purposely introduces the two during the fiesta, departs: “That seemed to handle. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back” (243). Of course, this is after Jake would watch Brett go off to San Sebastian with Robert Cohn, the somewhat opposite of Jake, as well as with Michael Campbell, who for most of the novel, had plans with Brett to marry. I should note, simply, that nearly all the men in their group, except Bill, had these classic intentions with Brett, who, unfortunately for them, was a “new woman” of the 1920s, and “sexually peripatetic” (Onderdonk). Onderdonk also mentions that around Brett, men are seemingly supposed to be powerless around her due to her bold personality of the time, hence the usage of phrases referencing Cohn and Jake’s “behavior,” that is, whether they would succumb to her, despite whether she has any interest in them or not — playing to her nicer “expectations” would be considered “good behavior.” Even she mentions that at one point that Cohn “had a chance to behave so well” (185). Other things should be noted too about Brett other than her promiscuity. In the story, she is the only prominent female, and especially during multiple lines of unlabeled dialogue, Brett easily blends into the conversation with the rest of the men, and one can understand that she’s not at all different, yet, at the end of the novel it seems that it may be her that may find it harder to have the capacity to change, from the cycle of indifference that she continues to live through, just like the rest of them had during the story.
What’s interesting to note is that in Book I of the novel, Jake mentions that only bullfighters live their lives to the fullest, and despite a week of understanding Jake’s aficion for the sport, there’s a stubbornness to their indifference, there’s barely a time for reconsidering themselves, except the slight potential of self-realization for Jake, which we see in the final scene in the car with Brett.


Onderdonk, Todd. ""Bitched": Feminization, Identity, and the Hemingwayesque in The Sun Also Rises." Twentieth Century Literature 52.1 (2006): 61-91. Web. 25 Sep 2009. .

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Scribner Edition. New York: Scribner, 2006.

The Scarlet Letter: Romanticism & Realism

American Romanticism in literature, deemed by the Puritan-influenced society at the time (prior to 1875), would probably best be known as what some would call “classic” storytelling: a clear and obvious contest of Good and Evil with a moralistic purpose and catalytic guidance from the divine and other supernatural forces. In what would be my guess as an appeasement to the reader (being that the written language used was more complex than anyone was speaking back then), the story would be set somewhere exotic, in The Scarlet Letter for instance, the story takes place in “the wilderness,” a small town surrounded by the woods. In fact, it’s in these symbolic woods where the Devil exists, referred to in the novel as “The Black Man,” our prime supernatural being in the story. But when compared to Realism, which Hawthorne shows traces of with this novel, the morals are blurred, the focus is steered more towards the characters, with less dynamic plot turns and a closer look at everyday life.
And though The Scarlet Letter lies somewhat in between these two genres, there are more instances in the book that proves the case that this novel is much closer to Romantic literature. Mentioned earlier was the use of symbolism through nature, which is dominantly used in the forest for this story. Though there is the example in the very first chapter, of the rosebush by the jail house, the only good thing described in this scene, it almost seems as if it’s the only colorful thing, with the description of the surrounding gray and dirty atmosphere (36). The multiple forest references include all the major characters, for it’s where Hester lives on the outside of town (56), where her husband Chillingworth comes from just in time to see her get punished on the scaffold (53), and the only place where Dimmesdale feels safe and as himself, for he is the father of the “child of sin,” Hester’s daughter Pearl, a secret he hides until just before his death (126). But there is also many supernatural references as well, especially in the first twelve chapters of the novel (as where the latter half expounds more on the characters’ flaws in a “realistic” manner) (Rowe, 1208). Including moments when Chillingworth transforms in his anger toward Hester showing that the Devil is truly inside of him, for not cooperating with him as an aide (111), or when the great “A” appears in the sky at one of the end of Dimmesdale’s vigils (105). These examples set a clear example of what Romantic literature was/is like, elements like these, due to Westward Expansion and industrialization.
What’s important to notice is that the end of the novel doesn’t have a clear moral to tell. Despite what the rules were dictating at the time, unless is the story was referred to as “true” (i.e. “The Custom House”), certain things like shedding those high in the church in a negative or dark light as it was surely done in The Scarlet Letter.


1. Rowe, John Carlos. The Internal Conflict of Romantic Narrative: Hegel's Phenomenology and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. MLN, Vol. 95, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1980), pp. 1203-1231. Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2906489

2. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 2005. Published by: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.