The swift, cinematic Running Dog marks DeLillo's first analysis of what Gladney calls the "continuing mass appeal of fascist tyranny" (25). Much of that appeal, according to Running Dog, issues from the insinuation of filmed images into every crevice of our lives. If in White Noise television is a ubiquitous voice droning at the edges of consciousness, in Running Dog the omnipresence of cameras transforms all behavior into acting, disabling characters from discriminating between real things and images. The Names, the novel about American expatriates that immediately precedes White Noise, explicitly investigated for the first time what had always been DeLillo's implicit subject: the nature and value of language itself. Although the plot outline resembles those of DeLillo's earlier novels, The Names leaves us with DeLillo's first hopeful denouement, as narrator James Axton recognizes in his son's exhilaratingly mangled prose a source of redemption that, prefigures Jack Gladney's discovery of "splendid transcendence" in the utterances of his children (155).

The works that followed White Noise have shown DeLillo continuing to experiment with form and subject. In 1986, The Day Room, a play, was first produced. It meditates on the relationship between madness and inspiration and features a straitjacketed actor playing a television set (which, as in White Noise, provides absurdly apposite comments). DeLillo's subsequent novels have equalled the critical and commercial triumph of White Noise. Libra (1988), brilliantly synthesizing a fictional biography of Lee Harvey Oswald with a plausible account of a conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy, earned nearly as many critical plaudits and even more commercial success than White Noise. Although distinct in both theme and structure, it shares with White Noise a self-reflexive consideration of our need for plots. Mao II, like Libra, won a major national award and for the first time directly addressed DeLillo's understanding of the writer's place in society.