The Supermarket: Consumerism, Simulation, and the Fear of Death in Don DeLillo's White Noise
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through a study of Don Delillo’s metafictional novel, White Noise, this paper portrays the ways in which the novel reflects upon the postmodern American world of consumerism and simulation. The space of the supermarket reveals not only the post-modern subject’s obsession with the erratic shopping mode of life, but also the detachment of the subject from the reality of the product he or she buys. Polyphony or the diversity of discourses, similar to the Bakhtin’s theory of the marketplace in his definition of the novelistic genre, translates the invasion of media communications, advertising, TV commercials, and conversations in the daily life of the contemporary fictional characters. These discourses, in their polyphonic aspect, function as mediated representations which obstructs the subject’s relationship with reality. This paper demonstrates that, behind the surface, the supermarket, as both a space and a metaphor for the world of Simulacra and consumerism, hides another existentialist issue—man’s fear of death. The supermarket is, therefore, not only interpreted as a metaphor for the American Simulacra and consumerism, but also as a self-reflexive element which, in Bakhtinian terms, reflects the polyphonic nature of the fictional world of the novel. The paper discusses Gladney couple’s defence mechanism strategies to defy or repress death, and the metafictional nature of ‘white Noise’ which fears its own hermeneutic closure, another name for death.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".