Significance of the title

White Noise

White Noise, in keeping with its title, consists of a chorus of background sounds that hum throughout the narrative. The traffic hums, Babette hums, the supermarket is filled with endless sounds, and commercials and fragments of television shows continually interrupt the narrative. Jack perceives the world as essentially constituted by this cacophony, as a stream of sounds, some human, some artificial. Jack and Babette speculate that perhaps death is nothing but an awful, endless stream of white noise, and so white noise filters into the narrative and becomes part of it, just as death becomes part of nearly every conversation had by the characters. These noises are not simply the background sounds of life—they are part of life, the very substance of which our days are made.