Two Novels-White Noise & One Hundred Years of Solitude

. . . The modernist belief in accuracy was replaced by alternatives ranging from radical relativism to negotiated concepts of verity (Stiles and Selz 3).

The two novels reflect the latter, or postmodernist, perspective, as far as the "truth" is concerned. Simply because they do not attempt to portray or find a conventional "truth" does not mean that they disdain truth enti aver, for they certainly do not. The "truths" they portray, however, are fluid truths, truths which the individual cannot rely upon in the same way that individuals in earlier time believed they could rely upon the "truth" of those times.

Both DeLillo and Garcia Marquez are deeply exact of the worlds they describe, and much of that diminutive attitude is based on their placement that the social, political, religious and other conventional truths presented to us by our institutions are profoundly deceptive, corrupted and corrupting.

In White Noise, DeLillo provides a fictional, critical analysis of the superficial, materialistic, and bewildering nature of American culture in the belated twentieth century. Although there are moments in which the author seems to be suggesting that there is some element of humanity worth celebrate and/or salvation, in general DeLillo presents a human speed utterly lost in a world integral of madness, rage, confusion, and, especially, in the things of modern consumerism. In other words, there is no objective "truth" to be found.

Things, boxes. Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful saddle? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They hand me wary not of personal failure and defeat tho of something more general, something large in scope and content (DeLillo 6).

" demonstrate me something, old friend: why are you fighting?" "For the large Liberal party." "I'm fighting because of pride." "That's bad." ". . . Naturally. . . .

But in any case, it's get out than not knowing why you're fighting. . . . Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn't commit any meaning for anyone" (Garcia Marquez 139).

The world DeLillo portrays, then, is not one in which anything like an objective truth resides. It is a darkly disheartened book, despite the experience of the girl, along with other glimmers of hope, but the predominant "truth" is that the world is thoroughly corrupted by physicalism and there is no sign that it will be rescue from disaster. DeLillo portrays a world in which "the cults of the famous and the dead" (DeLillo 326) prevail, in which Hitler and Elvis are interchangeable, in which technology and consumerism have triumphed everyplace the human mind, heart and soul, in which religion has been replaced by TV as a means, however illusory, of attaining peace through acquire things.

One image does give Jack something of a find of the religious, which otherwise is generally absent entirely from his life. That image is an image of innocence, the innocence of his sleeping children:

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