Waste and Mortality in Don Delillo’s White Noise and Michael Zadoorian’s Second Hand

Starting from Don Delillo’s White Noise (1985) and Underworld (1997), Tristan Egolf’s Lord of the Barnyard (1998) and Michael Zadoorian’s Second Hand (2000), this paper aims to analyze how and to what effect these authors use wasted objects and landfills as material manifestations of a “mass metabolism” (Underworld 184) of mankind, where appetites and desires are fed with objects in futile attempts to ward off our sense of mortality. The residue – the trash - which these hankerings produce then functions as a sort of archaeological repository of our human behavior, habits and impulses. Be it by collecting junk, tending to public refuse or rummaging through the trash of others for personally motivated reasons, the characters of these novels all manipulate wasted objects in attempts to establish or maintain order in their lives. As waste – in its incongruity with regard to history - can be employed as a literary device to signal towards human fears of mortality, it is hardly surprising that all four of these novels contain a character whose death is somehow related to – or interwoven with – conspicuous garbage. However, the less predictable element –which this paper intends to investigate - is the way in which these three authors manage to reverse the typical paradigm: rather than being the instrument of mortality and the inevitable passage of time, garbage and waste objects here become what sustain the surviving characters in their struggles against chaos and personal disintegration.