• Bazila Farhat

Abstract Death, in every epoch of human history, has been an unsolved mystery for various saints, philosophers, thinkers, and scientists. Because it is all pervasive and omnipresent and its effect irrevocable, it instils fear in everyone. The fear of death is one of the primitive fears which humans have now learnt to repress by constructing culture of consumerism. In the essay “The Culture of Postmodernism” Ihab Hassan quotes Ernest Becker having said that “the human body represents the “curse of fate” and the culture stands on repression, not only of sexuality as Freud thought, but also of mortality, because man, according to Becker is primarily an avoider of death. In other words, humans have, over the years, raised a culture that has repressed the source (sex) as well as the end (death) of their existence. The pervasive prevalence of consumer culture of the 20th century that dovetailed with the boom of cyber capitalism of the 21st century has given rise to culture of fetishism in the realm of which humans have learnt to repress their primal fears. The paper endeavors to study how the fear of death, though repressed, governs the lives of the fictional characters of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise.

death, culture, consumerism, Postmodernism, Freud, repression, cyber-capitalism.

"Death and Consumerism: A Study of Don DeLillo’s White Noise", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.5, Issue 2, page no.392-394, February-2018, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1802062.pdf

"Death and Consumerism: A Study of Don DeLillo’s White Noise", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.5, Issue 2, page no. pp392-394, February-2018, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1802062.pdf