It is a universal reality that every living thing must die eventually. What sets humans apart from any animal, insect or being on this planet is our awareness of this inevitable end. Furthermore, what sets Americans apart from many other societies is the extensive amount of information available everyday within our country. This information fuels a constant, underlying awareness of crime, tragedy, and more specifically, death. As American literature is merely a reflection of American society, it can be concluded through reading several works that this constant, rudimentary fixation on death or dying is an unequivocally American theme. In several of the pieces we have read over the course of this past semester, a fear of or preoccupation with death is clearly evident throughout the texts.
In Don Delillo’s book, White Noise, he confronts this awareness and the effects that it has on the daily lives of a typical American family. Delillo easily constructs a scene where the Gladney family is gathered in front of the television set watching the evening news. He writes, “there