"Who Will Die First?"

The fear of death is prevalent in all characters throughout the novel.

Babette and Jack often ask one another the question, “Who will die first?” They both claim that they hope to die first so that they don’t have to live without the other. In Chapter 20, Jack’s internal monologue reveals that he was lying. Death and loneliness are two of his worst fears but he says that he would not hesitate in choosing to die last. Both Babette and Jack see their children as a route to escape death. The concept of reproducing so that one’s legacy may continue is common, as is the idea of retaining youth through close contact with children. This novel takes that one step further. Babette and Jack suffer under the delusion that, by some unwritten natural order, they cannot die while they have children dependent on them.

This offers insight into their desire to have as many children around as possible.

Technology and death are strongly connected in Chapter 18 when Bee’s (Jack’s daughter from a previous marriage) plane nearly crashes. The engine shuts down and the plane begins to fall out of the sky. The panic and futility of efforts to survive foreshadow the consequences of reliance on technology. Before it hits the ground, the engine returns to power and flight staff pretend that they had maintained professionalism and order. After this traumatic experience, passengers were unsure about their own emotions. They hover around one man as he tells the story, seeming to draw certainty about the sequence of events from him. The inability of these characters to come to terms with the possibility of their mortality is a social commentary by Delillo about delusions that Americans subscribe to. Jack explicitly connects technology, and the so-called "white noise" that emanates from it, with death when he says,

“What if death is nothing but sound?”“Electrical noise.”“You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.”“Uniform, white.”