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White Noise is an intellectual novel based around death, packed with references to create humor, but many of these references are no longer contemporary causing the humor to be flat. One day as Jack is waking up; he looks out the window and sees "a white-haired man sitting erect in the old wicker chair" (pg. 242) outside his house. Jack at first believes that this must be "death, or death's errand-runner" ready to take him. Jack is clearly frighten by this and begins to say his goodbyes. At first, this seems like just a simple description of what Jack is witnessing, but what many do not realize is that this imagery is actually referring to a movie. It's supposed to add on to the humor when Jack finds out that "it was not death that stood before [him] but only Vernon Dickey, [his] father-in-law". However, today the movie is so old many people can fail to pick up Don DeLillo's reference. Without fully understanding the reference, the reader then cannot completely appreciate the joke. .
However, even in a scene like this, there is a constant underlying theme throughout White Noise which continues to make it a contemporary work and that theme is death. Don DeLillo goes into all the different stages of death. The novel is centered on death; from the prevention, to denial, fear, what's after death, and even how to cheat death itself. Jack and Babette put the idea about death further in the story with their debates about who will die first. Both claims they would be more miserable then the other if they were to be left alone. As Jack gets infected by Nyodene Derivative, a chemical which will slowly kill him, he discovers his wife is taking Dylar, a new synthetic pill supposedly able to remove the fear of death in humans. When Jack informs Babette about his situation, she is completely devastated "beating [Jack] on the chest" and sobbing in a "grunting sound, full of terrible desperate effort" (pg.