18 August 2013

White Noise, by Don DeLillo

Emily commented a while ago that my scenes often end with everyone going home or everyone going to sleep. I told James this and he said that it’s because I am very tidy.

I looked through a few books to get an idea of ending of chapters, and I particularly liked the ones in White Noise. This book has forty chapters, each one a small scene as far as I could establish (that is another question I have been thinking about – what is a chapter?). Here are a few ways he ends chapters:

• - a smoke alarm during lunch followed by an observation that they finished in silence
• - an observation of a character’s attitude, that represents a slight rise in emotional tone in the chapter
• - a cryptic statement
• - a man in a rocker staring into space
• - a philosophical question
• - question: who will die first?
• - line of dialogue – ‘yes yes yes’ said Babette
• - report of a rumour
• - sentence fragment - ‘The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.’
• - a line of overheard conversation from a stranger
• - a leap forward in time
• - a set of instructions

If there’s a connection between these, perhaps it’s to do with their tendency towards a dark tone, but mostly they are noticeably different from each other. Sometimes there’s a shift from the banal to the philosophical or a slowing of the pace, or a wide shot from a close-up. Quite often the chapters end with single sentence paragraphs. Because there are so many chapters, it doesn’t feel jarring to stop pretty much anywhere. The action in the book is very low key, so that it doesn’t feel like it needs to resolve.