White Noise

After reading Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise and witnessing the ever present theme of death in the novel, I got to thinking about how I view death. Death, as a topic is intriguing no matter the circumstance because it is the unknown. In many regards the fear that Jack and Babette have of death is because it is the unknown, yet as a college student about to graduate my future is unknown and yet I see it as a new exciting challenge that I am eager for. In many senses this is how I see death, obviously I would rather not die and don’t want to die any time soon, but I am not afraid or preoccupied with that point in my life.
Almost as intriguing as the subject of death, is the character Murray Jay Siskind and his philosophical take on life and death. The conversation that he and Jack have at the end of the novel, I thought was one of the most important scenes in the entire book. The way in which Murray intertwines death and technology is so disturbingly honest, yet it is still beautiful in a philosophical way. The paragraph on page 272 in which Murray states, “You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immorality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature,” is one of the most poignant and important in the entire novel. The last sentence in the quote really emphasizes society’s dependence on technology and gives me the feeling that my life and its natural occurrences and interactions are almost all fake because they are in some way shaped by technology. Is the life we live today actually natural and are we meant to live this way?
He then goes on later to mention that we focus our lives on something bigger and attach ourselves to it as a form of identity that sweeps us away from the reality of the world. It seems almost ironic that we spend so much of our lives fearing death and its obscurity, latching onto something or someone else to absorb our fear and yet death is the only thing that is sure in “life.” Should we instead embrace death for its assuredness, or are we subconsciously already doing that so that we don’t live every single day of our life in fear of what it might bring?