Characters
Jack Gladney is the protagonist and narrator of the novel. He is a professor of Hitler Studies at a liberal arts college in middle America.
Babette is Jack’s wife. They have four children from previous marriages. She has an affair with Willie Mink, aka Mr. Gray, in order to obtain Dylar.
Heinrich is the fourteen-year-old son of Jack and Janet Savory. He is precociously intellectual, prone to be contrary, and plays correspondence chess with an imprisoned mass murderer.
Dana Breedlove is Jack's First and Fourth wife and the mother of Mary Alice and Steffie
Denise is the eleven-year-old daughter of Babette and Bob Pardee. She suspects her mother is a drug addict and steals the bottle of Dylar.
Steffie is the nine-year-old daughter of Jack and Dana Breedlove.
Wilder Babette’s three-year-old son, and the youngest child in the family. Wilder is never quoted for dialogue in the novel (however, at one point, it is said that he asked for a glass of milk), and periodically Jack worries about the boy’s slow linguistic development.
Mary Alice is the nineteen year old daughter of Dana Breedlove and Jack's first marriage.
Murray Jay Siskind is a colleague of Gladney’s. He wants to create a field of study centered around Elvis in the same way Jack created one around Hitler. He teaches a course on the cinema of car crashes, watches TV obsessively, and cheerfully theorizes about many subjects.
Orest Mercator is Heinrich's friend who trains to sit in a cage with vipers.
Vernon Dickey is Babette's father who visits the family in chapter 33 and gives Jack a gun.
Willie Mink is a compromised researcher who invents Dylar.
Winnie Richards is a scientist at the college where Jack works, to whom Jack goes for information about Dylar.
Read more about this topic: White Noise (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“Of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question whether the characters are not significant of themselves.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)