«The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning». Don DeLillo finds the way to write the epic of a society with no major tragedy but its boredom and its chronic depression.
There is a theology behind and beyond these creatures’ lives. But it is has been established just to create an order. As a nun explains to Jack Gladney (this kind of Leopold Bloom figuring out what to eat today and where to go later, but in a little town in America at the end of the 20th Century): «if we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse.»
Paradise exists: an organized country where the lack of real problems creates a bunch of zombies eating pill after pill, moving through a place where there was «nothing to do but wait for the next sunset.»
This is the world of the Gladney family. White Noise is a scary portrait of a society where ignorance and routine is the rule. A creepy place where it makes perfect sense to ask ourselves, as his father-in-law asks Jack before giving him a gun: «Were people this dumb before television?»
The New York Street 