a secret group of advanced theorists. Tweedy Browner is Jack's third wife and the mother of Bee. Mary Alice is the nineteen-year-old daughter of Dana Breedlove and Jack's first marriage. Eugene is Babette's eight-year-old son who lives with his unnamed father in Western Australia. His father is also Wilder's father. Murray Jay Siskind is a colleague of Jack's. He wants to create a field of study centered on Elvis Presley in the same way that Jack has created one around Hitler. He teaches a course on the cinema of car crashes, watches TV obsessively, and cheerfully theorizes about many subjects, including media saturation, mindfulness, and the meaning of supermarkets. Orest Mercator is Heinrich's friend who trains to sit in a cage with vipers. Vernon Dickey is Babette's father who visits the family in chapter 33 and gives Jack a gun. Willie Mink is a compromised researcher who invents Dylar. Winnie Richards is a scientist at the college where Jack works, to whom Jack goes for information about Dylar. Analysis White Noise explores several themes that emerged during the mid-to-late twentieth century, e.g., rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty academic intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and reintegration of the family, human-made disasters, and the potentially regenerative nature of violence. The novel's style is characterized by a heterogeneity that utilizes "montages of tones, styles, and voices that have the effect of yoking together terror and wild humor as the essential tone of contemporary America." Themes Death A recurring question that Babette and Jack constantly battle is, "Who is going to die first?" Throughout the novel, Jack's low self-esteem is noticeable. Jack believes that he is a fraud and he would have no importance in death. He believes his academic career is insignificant. Jack's battle with his fear of death is a constant conflict throughout the book. Similarly, Babette also battles death but in a different way. Babette takes Dylar in order to forget about the fear of death, whereas Jack acknowledges what death is and his fear of it. Although the couple's fear of death is different, it also permeates their lives and causes them to experience insanity and obsession. In a meta commentary on the role of narrative plot in storytelling, Gladney, and the novel itself, assert that once a plot is set in motion it only moves "deathward". All courses of action that center around a plan ultimately end in death.