White Noise: A Gladney Family Tree
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White Noise: A Gladney Family Tree |
| In Don DeLillo's White Noise, Jack (J.A.K.) Gladney and Babette are married and live together with their four children "by previous marriages" at the "end of a quiet street" in Blacksmith, home of College-on-the-Hill, where Jack is the Chair and Professor of the Hitler Studies Department. Jack has been married four times previously to three different women (his fourth marriage is to his first wife); he describes all of his previous wives as "a self-absorbed and high-strung bunch with ties to the intelligence community" (6). Babette has been married twice, she teaches classes in an adult education program, "gathers and tends the children," and "belongs to a group of volunteers who read to the blind" (5). Her father is Vernon Dickey. Jack and Babette have seven children total between their previous marriages and none together. Jack turns fifty-one during the course of the novel, Babette’s age is never mentioned. |
Jack---- |
|----Dana Breedlove | ||
_____________ |
|___________ | ||
Mary Alice (19) |
Steffie (9) |
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Jack----- |
|----Janet Savory (a.k.a. Mother Devi) | ||
Heinrich (14) |
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Jack----- |
|-----Tweedy Browner | ||
Bee (12) |
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Babette----- |
|----unnamed man doing "research in the outback" (50) | ||
_______________ |
|______________ | ||
Eugene (8) |
Wilder (2-3) |
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Babette----- |
|-----Bob Pardee | ||
Denise (11) |
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| This genealogy of the Gladney’s can only be compiled near the end of the novel when Jack receives a postcard from Mary Alice and remarks that he had been married to Dana Breedlove twice with "ten years and two marriages" in between (236). Since Wilder is between two and three years old, Jack and Babette cannot have been together for more than two years. It’s not clear whether or not Eugene has ever lived with the Gladneys, but Babette implies that he might have when she tells Murray that Eugene is "living with his daddy this year" (50). In the plot-time of the novel, none of the children is living with a full sibling. According to Mark Osteen, much of the comedy of the novel "is derived from DeLillo’s slightly skewed depiction of the postmodern family, where the once-solid core of mom, dad, and kids has given way to a loose aggregate of siblings, step-siblings, and ex-spouses rotating in various impermanent groupings" (viii). |
