Although other critics, most notably Leonard Wilcox, have also interpreted the novel through Baudrillardian paradigms, perhaps the most extreme statement of this viewpoint is that of John Duvall, who argues in the essay reprinted on pages 432-455 that White Noise is "an extended gloss… on Baudrillard's notion of consumer society." Duvall makes the radical claim that consumer society, which pretends to foster free choice, actually inhibits it and thereby promotes a "protofascist" system that recapitulates the abuses of Nazi Germany. Like Frow, Duvall concentrates on television, which inverts the relationship between mediated and immediate experiences, so that only what is broadcast by the media seems real. Other critics, such as Ferraro, have offered more moderate versions of Duvall's arguments. Still, Duvall's piece is exemplary in its treatment of Murray Siskind as the novel's Mephistophelean spokesman for what, Duvall argues, DeLillo finds most dangerous.

Cornel Bonca opposes critics like Duvall and their inferences about DeLillo's Baudrillardian views (see page 456 of this volume). Drawing evidence from both White Noise and The Names, Bonca distinguishes between two kinds of "white noise": one issuing from capitalism and commodities, the other deriving from a deeper source in human consciousness. This latter may, he argues, counteract our mortal dread. Bonca isolates three scenes-Wilder's wailing in chapter 16, Steffie's chanting of "Toyota Celica" during the airborne toxic event, and the German nun's words about belief near the end of the novel-to expose the way that DeLillo discovers a "purer speech" beneath and within the novel's babble of voices.

Arthur M. Saltzman also scrutinizes DeLillo's language; unlike Bonca, however, who reads white noise as symbol for the denial or fear of death, Saltzman hears as it as a monotonous, narcotizing sound (see page 480 of this volume). The toxicity of our world resides, for Saltzman, as much in our saturation by formulaic language as in black, billowing clouds; the antidote for this aural poison lies in the incisive originality of DeLillo's metaphorical language. Like Bonca, Saltzman finds the novel groping for something luminous within the quotidian, that "radiance in dailiness" cited earlier.