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Unlike in DeLillo's other novels, all the characters in White Noise are caucasian. Critics are divided in how they interpret this lack of diversity.[1][3][4] Tim Engles asserts that it is a deliberate commentary on white privilege: “White individuals tend to conceive of themselves in more individualized terms than do people ‘of color’”[1] and suggests that the protagonist, Jack Gladney, illustrates a privileged lack of awareness of his cultural status. Jack is isolated in a white community, which, Engles argues, implies a certain unease with unfamiliar races or ethnicities. Another critic adds, “White Noise communicates the often unnoticed impact of narrative on identity formation” declaring that it affects the shaping of the cultural imagination of the reader.[2] Critic Thomas Peyser has made comparisons between the lack of diversity to Germany’s Nazism stating that the whiteness is created with the character’s “needs to establish definitions of [others] in order to define” themselves.[1] This critic relates the racialized status of white-America, to that of Nazism due to the Nazi’s desire for one national identity, where everyone is the same and easily identified as one. The beginning of the novel verifies this sense of “communal recognition” with white parents looking “for something to confer them a national identity,” and a critic asserted it is found by the characters seeing “images of themselves in every direction.”[3][1] On the other hand, critic Rosemary Clark blames characters, referring to them as “colorblind” to the diversity that is around them. Concluding that Jack is in the middle of a “colored presence”, the narrative defines the color perspective as “seemingly insignificant.”[4]

1. Engles, Tim ""Who are You, Literally?": Fantasies of the White Self in White Noise." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 45.3 (1999): 755-787. Project MUSE. Web. 19 Apr. 2016. . 2. Wiese, A.."Rethinking Postmodern Narrativity: Narrative Construction and Identity Formation in Don DeLillo's White Noise." College Literature 39.3 (2012): 1-25. Project MUSE. Web. 21 Apr. 2016. . 3. Peyser, Thomas. "Globalization in America: the case of Don DeLillo's 'White Noise.'." CLIO 25.3 (1996): 255+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Apr. 2016 4. Clark, Rosemary. "Colored Spots: Race Constructions at the Periphery of Don DeLillo’s White Noise." The Sigma Tau Delta 36 (2012).