White Noise characters

Also known as J. A. K. Gladney

Appears from the start

The narrator, a professor who founded the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. Known professionally as J. A. K. Gladney, Jack has built an imposing academic identity around a subject he cannot discuss in German. At home he is a husband and father preoccupied by the possibility of death.

Appears from the start

Jack's warm, capable fourth wife. Babette teaches posture and movement to older adults and reads tabloids aloud to a blind man. Her openness and steadiness make her seem free of the secrecy that troubled both partners' earlier marriages.

Appears from the start

Jack's fourteen-year-old son, skeptical, argumentative, and intensely attentive to technical facts. Heinrich challenges everyday assumptions and follows reports of environmental danger more closely than the adults around him.

Appears from the start

Babette's sharp-eyed eleven-year-old daughter. Denise watches her mother's habits, worries about her health, and searches for explanations when she notices Babette taking an unfamiliar medication in secret.

Appears from the start

Jack's quiet nine-year-old daughter, whose sensitivity to language sometimes gives ordinary phrases an uncanny weight. She shares the crowded Gladney household and absorbs the unease carried by television, radio, and adult conversation.

Appears from the start

Babette's six-year-old son and the youngest child in the household. Wilder speaks little and moves through family life with an absorption that the adults find both calming and mysterious.

First appears in chapter 2

A visiting lecturer in popular culture who becomes Jack's friend and intellectual companion. Murray wants to establish Elvis Presley studies as a field comparable to Jack's Hitler program and treats supermarkets, television, and packaging as systems of belief.

First appears in chapter 8

One of Heinrich's school friends, a determined boy who trains himself to remain inside a cage with poisonous snakes. His project turns endurance and danger into a pursuit of recognition.

First appears in chapter 17

Jack's daughter from an earlier marriage, visiting after living abroad with her mother. Bee is self-possessed and observant, and Jack becomes unusually conscious of how his home and academic life appear under her inspection.

First appears in chapter 21

A field worker for the evacuation-simulation organization SIMUVAC. During a genuine chemical emergency, he processes Jack's exposure data while also treating the disaster as useful practice for a future simulation.

First appears in chapter 30

A neurochemist at the College-on-the-Hill whom Jack approaches for help identifying Dylar. Informal and elusive, Winnie understands the experimental drug's intended effect and warns that scientific knowledge cannot simply remove the human fear it targets.

First appears in chapter 33

Babette's father, an aging man with direct habits and a taste for practical self-reliance. During a visit he gives Jack a loaded handgun, believing that possession of a weapon gives its owner a form of independence.

Also known as Mr. Gray

First appears in chapter 39

The former project manager associated with the experimental drug Dylar. Jack finds him in a motel room, disordered by prolonged use of the drug and unusually vulnerable to words that refer to danger.