“White Noise” was the eighth novel of Don DeLillo and was highly acclaimed for its timely and pertinent themes. The novel has been read from various angles, and that’s how any good book would be read, but it is largely agreed that the book is a commentary on pop culture, consumerism, and globalization. Consumerism is an important theme in the book. The narrator, Jack Gladney, is concerned with the material things and feels that others are also governed by the things they own. The novel opens with an observation by Gladney, who is watching the students coming to the Midwestern college where he teaches Hitler studies: “This assembly of station wagons… more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation” (3-4). Consumerism does not only concern an obsession with material, it has other effects as well. When the obsession with material things begins, it causes a collapse of religious and spiritual worlds. This leads to moral and spiritual decay that makes people too concerned with the present world and less so with death and what happens after that. This kind of consumerism has made Americans numb. They are not sensitive to death anymore and have lost their spirituality which is partly due to media proliferation. That’s what we see in the novel. Gladney is also a consumerist. He cannot see the world in terms of the people that live in it. Instead, he is mainly concerned with the things that they own. There is a clear lack of humane perspective in the novel, and this is due to the narrator’s lack of concern with people. Both he and his wife Babette are people who lack spirituality so much so that they have developed a serious fear of death. To control this fear, they start using the drug Dylar. It is here that we see consumerism at its best. The excess of consumerism leads to spiritual decay, and that leads to increased dependence on drugs. In the case of Gladney, too, their fear of death is so pronounced that they have to depend on Dylar. Instead of tackling the core cause of their fear and trusting God, they turn to medicines. It is important to understand that fears and problems that are caused psychologically can be cured with faith and strong willpower. However, in the pit of their dead spiritual worlds, Americans have become so numb that they cannot connect with God and instead depend on drugs. The use of Dylar was symbolic of the lack of faith in God, and this was closely pointing to the proliferation of depression drugs like Prozac and Xanax that had become a staple medicine in the 1990s. While such medicine promised peace and serenity to those needing it, the fact remains that they do little to cure the causes and only allay the symptoms to some extent. Increased dependence on these can affect a person’s faith in God because he continues to treat the symptoms and never tries to address the real causes. It is when a person has faith that he looks inside of him and connects with God to allay his paranoia and unfounded fears. Dylar similarly promised to “interact with a distant part of the human cortex” (189) to minimize fear of death. The use of drugs can also affect a person’s own strength that can often effectively cure psychological probl