Primal Scenes in Americana and White Noise Written in 1989, Frank Letricchia's essay on the dominant themes of Don DeLillo's writing offers a brief but concise eulogy of two of Don DeLillo's major works DeLillo: Americana and White Noise White noise. Letricchia proposes in his essay the thesis that "two scenes in DeLillo's fiction are central to his imagination of America" ​​(Osteen 413). It seems that Letricchia is using "primitive" not to denote an animalistic sense, but more along the lines of a basic need. The first of these primal scenes takes place in DeLillo's first book, Americana (Osteen 413). In one particular part of this novel, DeLillo describes the invention of America as the invention of television (Osteen 413). One of his characters even describes him as having "arrived on the Mayflower," which Letricchia interprets to mean that not television itself has arrived, but the desire for a "universal third person" (Osteen 414). Letricchia argues that television offers modern Americans today what pilgrim ships offered immigrants in the old days: something to dream about (Osteen 414). DeLillo also writes that "Consuming in America is not buying; it is dreaming," which, according to Letricchia, means saying "that the object of television advertising is not the consummation of desire but the preliminaries of desire" (Osteen 414). That is to say, it's not the job of advertising to make you buy something, but only to make you want to buy it, a point I find not only accurate, but also somewhat disturbing. The second "primordial scene" of Letricchia touches comes from the book White Noise. In the book there is a small but significant part where two of the main characters drive twenty miles out of town to visit a tourist attraction known as "The Most Photographed Barn in America" ​​(Osteen 415). Although this is the superficial topic of the passage, Letricchia states that the underlying issue at hand is actually “a new kind of representation as a new kind of excitement” (Osteen 415). In the scene in the book, the characters stand among a crowd of people who are photographing a very ordinary barn. One of the characters (Murray Siskind) begins a monologue about the fact that no one came to see the barn, but only "to be part of a collective perception" (Osteen 12).