White Noise: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

From his office, Jack Gladney surveys the campus of the College-on-the-Hill, watching a long line of station wagons arriving to drop off students for yet another school year. He watches them unpack their cars, listing the junk foods and technologies they carry with them. The wealthy, confident parents proudly assess their grown children, feeling pleased with their happy lives. Jack has watched this procession every Fall for 21 years, intrigued by the crowd of “the like-minded and the spiritually akin” that the students and parents embody.

Leaving his office, Jack walks down the hill and into the town of Blacksmith, which boasts Greek revival and Gothic churches, as well as an old insane asylum. The chairman of the College-on-the-Hill’s Hitler Studies department, Jack lives in a suburban house at the end of a quiet street with his fourth wife, Babette, and four children, all of whom come from different marriages. In describing the street he lives on, Jack notes that it was once “a wooded area with deep ravines,” but now there is an expressway in the distance, stretching out below and beyond their backyard such that their house looks over it. When they sleep, “sparse traffic washes past, a remote and steady murmur.”