EXISTENCE THROUGH MOVIES OR FEAR OF DEATH: THE MOVIEGOER AND WHITE NOISE

Abstract

Don DeLillo is one of the prolific writers of the postmodernist era in literature. He established his place in the literature with his award-winning book White Noise. The book describes the protagonist Jack Gladney’s questioning of his own place in life through his identity. He evaluates the incidents around him constantly through the scope of skepticism. When it comes to Walker Percy, His first novel The Moviegoer was accepted as one of the most substantial works and awarded. This enabled Percy to be one of the echoed voices in Southern literature. Thus, he is considered a member of the New South movement which promotes the modernization of society and its attitudes within an industrial society. The Moviegoer describes a stockbroker, John “Jack” Binx Bolling’s life, and his efforts to find a meaning or purpose in life. Binx is a protagonist that is fed up with mundane everyday life. He chooses to go to the movies to find out the meaning of life and to contribute a new perspective to the way he thinks about real life, reality, or existence. Considering the protagonists of White Noise and The Moviegoer and their situations in which they struggle to get meaning from life and certify their existence as free individuals, these two notable works have been analyzed through the existentialist philosophy, especially in the frame of the views put forward by Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre.