Blog Post #10 Summary & Response

I chose to respond to Thomas "Tom" LeClair's "Closing The Loop:  White Noise."  LeClair, born in 1944, is a book reviewer for the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World, as well as the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati.  LeClair's point of view on White Noise cleared up alot of questions I had while reading and trying to comprehend all that was going on.  As I read White Noise, I felt as though the story was skipping around and had alot of meaningless information in it, with the one definite plot of the fear of dying.

One of the passages I didn't understand why it was put into the story with such a vivid description was the trash compactor, "dreadful wrenching sound, full of eerie feeling" (33), (393).  As LeClair states it is "an expression of his passionate concern with human survival, his rage at and pity for what humankind does to itself" (393).  This explanation opened my eyes to understanding the hidden meaning behind the story and began to make more sense to me, including the fragmented sentences.

There were many moments while reading White Noise that I had a hard time following, until LeClair's explanation "Gladney's strings of declarations effect a primer style, an expression not of ignorance (for Gladney knows the language of the humanities) but of something like shock, (391).  After getting this into my head, I was able to read and comprehend the meaning of what Gladney was saying, and the way it was being said, versus what I thought to be a very confusing, unrelating book that had many chapters that didn't seem to relate to one another.

Works Cited

LeClair, Tom. "Closing The Loop: White Noise." The Viking Critical Library:  White Noise. 'Ed'.Mark Osteen. New York:  Penguin Books, 1998