Pick one of the following four
prompts about White Noise: “Heinrich,”
“Ontology, Epistemology, and Jack (J.A.K.)?,”
“The Most Photographed Barn in America,” or “The Society of Kids,”
and write a well thought out, analytical response. 200-400 words, due by 11:59pm on Sunday 4/15.
Analyze the following quotes/scenes
from Ch. 4 in the context of the novel at large thus far:
In Ch. 6, Jack and his son from another marriage, Heinrich, have a conversation about the weather. Well, Jack attempts to have a simple conversation about the weather, and Heinrich turns it into a phenomenological debate. Here’s an excerpt:
“Just give me an answer, okay,
Heinrich?”
“The best I could do is make a
guess.”
“Either it’s raining or it isn’t,”
I said.
“Exactly. That’s my whole point.
You’d be guessing. Six of one, half dozen of the other.”
[…]
“It’s the stuff that falls from the
sky and gets you what is called wet.”
“I’m not wet. Are you wet?”
“All right,” I said. “Very good.”
“No, seriously, are you wet?”
“First rate,” I told him. “A
victory for uncertainty, randomness, and chaos. Science’s finest hour” (24).
There’s no need to frame this prompt further.
Heinrich is turning out to be one of the more interesting characters in a already quirky cast. In the passage about rain, Heinrich argues for the idea that certainty is never certain. Jack and Heinrich hash out the age old argument of, “How do I know your blue is actually my blue,” but with rain as the subject instead of color. By breaking down his father’s definition of rain,” the stuff from the sky that gets you wet,” Heinrich achieves victory in the discussion. While I do find Heinrich as an entertaining character, he is by far the most pretentious character we have been exposed to thus far. The idea of arguing about whether or not the stuff falling from the sky is rain is almost unbearably Nihilist. The passage is entertaining, but when my thoughts turn to the people who truly possess such mannerisms, I become the slightest bit agitated. Sure, it is possible to spend all day and night of wondering what is real and what isn’t, but it never progresses. You can never definitively say what is or is not real, in the same way that you can never say that you for a fact know what happens after a person dies. When looking into Heinrich in a deeper sense, I merely see an individual who is suffering an existentialist crisis of the highest degree; lost and confused in a world that seems impossible to make sense of Heinrich hides behind the ever so uncomfortable blanket of uncertainty, believing he is right because everyone else is wrong and just doesn’t understand. While Heinrich as a character is an intelligent and odd individual, he could not be more of an insufferable person if he we were real. If the kid was a few years older I would say he desperately needs to get laid, but then I remember he is fictitious.
ReplyDeleteHa!
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ReplyDeleteHeinrich strikes me as one of those people who would get on my nerves in a heartbeat. He’s the type of character that is worried about what is and isn’t real to a point that it is almost a fault. He is one of the more interesting characters in Jack’s quite colorful family, but also, unfortunately, the one I’d like to spend the least amount of time with. Heinrich seems almost too pensive, doing too much speculating into things that most people wouldn’t take the time to question. He seems far too involved in his own mind, his own thoughts, and questions what is real and what isn’t. Argumentative would be the best way to put it. After all, how hard would it be to simply answer his father’s question? Isn’t rain the stuff that falls from the sky that gets you wet? It seems as though Heinrich is looking for a way, a means to annoy his father. Or, more simply, he can’t see the black and white of certain things, but gets so caught up in the grey area. This makes Heinrich one of the more interesting characters, and I’m looking forward to read more of his questioning ways. I have to ask what he’ll wonder over next?
ReplyDeleteOlivia Broderick
ReplyDeleteI found this entire conversation between Jack and Heinrich extremely stressful to read. I know he is an odd kid, his pen pal is a prisoner who murdered six people, but I cannot tell if he is trying to be difficult or if he really cannot answer Jack's question. On the one hand, I wanted to grab Heinrich, shake him and yell, "Be normal! Give me a straight answer!". However, another part of me slightly understands what he is saying- there are so many uncertainties in the world. How can we possibly know if every person interprets every thing in the same way. What one person calls rain, another may call soap, so how can you state the truth when you don't know what you are speaking about. The part I don't understand as much about this episode is the beginning when Heinrich says that he heard on the radio that it is going to rain tonight. What is it about the broadcast that makes him believe it is true, while he is unable to make a decision about whether or not it is raining at that precise moment? Why has he put more faith in something he heard on the radio than what is actually going on right then?
When I first read this conversation between Heinrich and his father, I was taken off guard by Heinrich’s argument. I would have guessed that Jack was having this conversation with one or his colleagues or students. Although none of the children seem to be ordinary, Heinrich, by far, seems to be the most controversial. What seems to be a simple conversation starter from his father turns into an entire debate that many scholars and scientists have fought about for years. This conversation gives us a good insight to the relationship between Jack and his son. It also gives the reader a good idea of the type of person Heinrich is. He’s the type who questions things no one else would care to bother thinking about. He seems to get caught up in the small details rather than the larger picture. As the old saying goes children are the product of their parents. Could this be a foreshadowing of Jacks personality? Or what caused Heinrich to become a child full of questions? But I do believe by the end of the conversation when Jack states his last comment it seems to me that he is proud of his son, and admires his questioning of such a simple thing of rain.
ReplyDeleteRebecca Indest
ReplyDeleteHeinrich is clearly a strange kid, with his individual quirks just like any other young boy. In his case, though, they are rather extreme. Most young boys would not be having an argument like this with his father. He seems to be outlining any typical argument people have about the existence of a god or supreme being. If you can't see or fully explain it, then how it is correct? It seems that while being difficult, he is broaching a much broader subject matter, possibly without even realizing it. While being aggravated about how difficult Heinrich is being about the simple subject of rain, I also understand what he is getting at because of other philosophical debates that are frequently held. There are so many things that are uncertain in the world that people have to take on faith. Well, maybe some people do not want to have to just take another person's word for it; some people would like hard, solid evidence. If this is the case, then it makes sense for Heinrich to be arguing about something such as the rain. How do we know for sure that rain is really rain, and that we get wet from it falling on us?
What is knowledge and how does one acquire it? Heinrich, a quite clever fourteen year old, is skeptical of how readily his father accepts what we experience through our senses as viable truth. Heinrich is deeply rooted in his beliefs, to the point where he cannot even accept the empirically observable phenomenon of rain without evidence beyond the reason of doubt. This frustrates Heinrich’s father, because he so clearly sees rain-washing over his car. Heinrich, however, knows senses can be misleading, as has apparently been proven in the laboratory, and believes things exist beyond our capacity to know or understand them. Just like a dog can hear a higher pitch then we can hear, the workings of the world are perceived differently through the filters of different levels of consciousness. Since there are so many possible perceptions, what makes our understanding ‘truth’? Since all particles are constantly in motion and changing, and time only exist in our verbs, how can we say something is happening a certain way now, when by the time that is said it could be happening a completely different way? Heinrich’s father argues from the point of utility. There has to be a denotative, surface level understanding for people to cohesively exist. The suspension of doubt for the utility, cohesion, and understanding is a major conflict progressing this novel.
ReplyDeleteI think, as most people have already pointed out, that Heinrich is anything but normal. Weird, quirky, irritating- the adjectives to describe him are all synonymous of those words. His character will, more than likely, prove to be one of the more interesting characters that we will see, mostly because of the precarious ways that he tends to handle situations. His father is using a conversation starter, almost a "So how about that weather, huh?" just to try to talk to his son, and Heinrich turns it into this bit philosophic debate on whether his perception of rain is the same as his father, thus is it raining to him or is it not. You could essentially say that he is too smart for himself which causes him to be almost a smartass. At the end of this conversation turned debate between the father and son, it seems that Jack is returning Heinrich's smart-ass questions of "are you wet?" with smart-ass answers of "Exactly". The father/son chemistry between these two should prove pretty entertaining throughout the rest of the book- I'm looking forward to it.
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