White Noice Chapter 23-28

The story picks up a little more in this section as Jack finds Babbete has been hiding Dylar underneath the radiator cover. Jack eventually confronts her about this and she explains to him the entire story of how she is consumed with death and she takes these pills to help her not focus on them. But there were key things in the text that stuck out to me.

On page 171 Jack and Steffie are talking about calling Babbette's doctor and asking him about Dylar. In the text it says, "Call him at home," She said. "Wake him up. trick him into telling us what we want to know." First reading this I thought to myself that Steffie maybe wanted to call the doctor and have him tell them that Dylar was alright and that he prescribed it to Babbette so that they could feel better about the situation. But reading it a second time I got a different meaning from it. It seemed to me as if she wanted to call the doctor and coerce him into telling them everything he knew about Dylar wether it be good or bad. They wanted to force the doctor to say what they wanted to hear and not the actual truth of the matter. The word "trick" was a key word in this sentence. It does not say anything along the lines of "lets see what he says" or "get him to tell" but trick, implying that they think he will be reluctant to say anything about the medication so they are going to have to use a form of trickery in order to get him to talk. The real thing that caught my attention about this sentence was just the word structure in the sentence. Trick just implies to me that she felt some kind of necessity that the doctor wasn't going to be honest and they needed to resort to some other means of getting him to talk.

On page 177 Jack has confronted Babbette about the Dylar and they are discussing how he found it and that Steffie is worried about Babbette. In the middle of they page she immediately changes the subject of the conversation in an abrupt manner and just says, "Do you know what these cold gray leaden days make me want to do?" She then goes on to say she wants to become intimate with Jack. We discussed in class how she will change the subject when it becomes on her, but is she using sexuality to divert the attention? Many women have this power over significant others and they will exercise it to divert the attention on themselves. Because honestly as a guy who is going to say no to that, really? The point I am trying to make is that in my opinion when a woman uses sexual means to get out of a situation like that, they are very ashamed of what is being asked of them and want to have nothing to do with talking about it to the other person.

Once again the main recurring theme in these chapters is death. Babbette has made it very clear that she is consumed by it, almost like an OCD you could say. She has resorted to taking pills for a way to alleviate some of the pain she is obviously going through. What Dellilo thinks about death I'm not sure about but it is definitely the main theme of this book and I am curious to see what other things about death come up in the story later.