Rethinking Postmodern Narrativity: Narrative Construction and Identity Formation in Don DeLillo's White Noise

With This essay explores how Don DeLillo's White Noise foregrounds the often unnoticed impact of narrative on identity formation, an aspect of the text that makes it particularly suited for teaching literature, since this foregrounding emphasizes the crucial interconnections between form and idea. More specifically, this essay looks at how White Noise examines the narratives that underlie individual identity formation as well as the way that narrative as an organizational apparatus shapes such a formation. Even though its protagonist fails to successfully use narrative to meaningfully construct a stable existence, the novel produces revised models for the reader's own positioning as an agent of his or her own construction of identity. As such, it allows us to see narrative not as a now-defunct system for explaining the world (as grand narratives attempt to do) but as a means of countering the loss of individual, meaningful experience so often associated with postmodernity.