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Despite the striking similarities between "Little Expressionless
Animals" and White Noise there are basic differences. The most obvious
distinction of the novel concerns its structure: while Wallace deliberately
constructed his story in an achronological manner to engage the reader,
DeLillo (through Gladney) relates his tale in a sequential manner. This
leads to the question: in what way can White Noise be understood
as a piece of "serious" art; or rather: how does DeLillo make the reader
"work hard to access its [the novels] pleasures?" Since the novel does
not depict a well known TV-show, DeLillo's object of defamiliarization
must be something else. I suggest that this object is not so much a thing
or event of the real world but the perceptual processes themselves with
which we perceive them.
DeLillo mediates his tale through the consciousness of his "hero", Jack Gladney, for the same reason that Tolstoj depicted society from the point of view of a horse:(50) it allows him to represent the most ordinary things like malls and kitchen-appliances in such a way that they become jungles and mysterious objects. Jack Gladney is Weinstein's "Martian visitor", whose strange perceptions disrupt "the death that exists in routine things." (p. 248) The mediation of objects and events occurring in White Noise through the consciousness of its hero has a double function. It not only renders the world of the novel strange, the perceptual processes of Jack Gladney are also brought closer to the reader's attention.
The reader is made conscious of Gladney desperate attempts to familiarize
the strange world around him. At the same time that Jack perceives the
world around him with terror and awe, he tries to control it through the
use of stereotypical language and associations with media images. "DeLillo's
project of 'innocenting' [= defamiliarizing, V. H.] vision is rigorously
counterpointed by the awareness of vision as construct, the awareness of
the media's enormous shaping (and occulting) role in the way we see."(51)
This representation of the consciousness-shaping powers of the media makes
the novel an example of realist fiction: "DeLillo's fiction can be seen
as a new 'realism' in that images have come, paradoxically, to form the
real and determining cultural and social context of his characters' lives."(52)
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