complex. Jack's character's dialogue throughout the story provides a better meaning than the other characters'. Setting White Noise begins in the town of Blacksmith. Jack spends much time at his job at the college, the College-On-The-Hill. Blacksmith is a college town. The novel carries on about pollution issues regarding the weather. Toward the end of the book, the family tends to be on the move from different places and travels. The exact geographical setting of White Noise is unidentified, but elements of the novel evoke the Midwestern United States, especially the Rust Belt and Upper Midwest. The fictional Iron City shares its name with the Pittsburgh beer company of the same name. Critic John Pistelli wrote that a Midwestern setting was "thematically appropriate to the novel's concern with the vanishing of labor and laboring know-how." Characters Jack Gladney is the protagonist and narrator of the novel. He is a professor of Hitler studies at a liberal arts college in middle America. Babette is Jack's wife. They have seven children from previous marriages, and they are currently living with four of these children. Babette has an affair with Willie Mink, whom she calls Mr. Gray, in order to obtain Dylar. Heinrich Gerhardt is the fourteen-year-old son of Jack and Janet Savory. He is precociously intellectual, prone to be contrary, and plays correspondence chess with an imprisoned mass murderer. Denise is the eleven-year-old daughter of Babette and Bob Pardee. She suspects her mother is a drug addict and steals the bottle of Dylar to hide it. Steffie is the nine-year-old daughter of Jack and Dana Breedlove. Wilder is Babette's two-year-old son, and the youngest child in the family. Wilder is never quoted for dialogue in the novel (however, at one point, it is said that he asked for a glass of milk) and periodically Jack worries about the boy's slow linguistic development. Bee is the twelve-year-old daughter of Jack and Tweedy Browner. She lived in South Korea for two years. Dana Breedlove is Jack's first and fourth wife and the mother of Mary Alice and Steffie. She works part time for the CIA and conducts covert drop-offs in Latin America. She also writes book reviews. Janet Savory is Jack's second wife and the mother of Heinrich. She manages the financial businesses of an ashram in Montana, where she is known as Mother Devi. Before that she worked as a foreign-currency analyst for