Jack Gladney’s Character Games: A Study through New Media Demonstration

Abstract

Don DeLillo is a contemporary American novelist who portrays the present world through his characters. DeLillo has been called postmodernist due to the plethora of postmodern features employed in it. DeLillo shows technology having a major role in affecting the individuals through his characters. The current paper studies, Don DeLillo’s White Noisefrom contemporary techno-literate approach that uses internet and games to understand its protagonist Jack Gladney in a better way. Jack is not a modernist living in a postmodern world as many critics have claimed. In depth study of the character in the book White Noise has been made in order to understand it with clarity. Jack is instead a postmodern human simulacrum sampling different character types to avoid his lack of discernable self. He takes up different roles and faces failure at the end of each role. The paper asserts that Jack's character games and DeLillo's text featuring them are prescient exercises about how we similarly interact with the Internet and games in ways that complicate subjectivity through digital narrative extension by looking at the year 1984 in which DeLillo's novel was completed and using Gregory Ulmer's avatar theory.