Primary Scenes of Americana and White NoiseWritten in 1989, Frank Letricchia's essay on the dominant themes of Don DeLillo's writing offers a short but eulogy concise account of two of DeLillo's major works: Americana and White Noise. Letricchia offers the thesis in his essay that "two scenes from DeLillo's fiction are paramount to his imagination of America" ​​(Osteen 413). It seems that Letricchia uses “primal” not to refer to an animal sense, but rather 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 it was not television itself that came, but the desire for a "universal third person". (Osteen 414). Letricchia argues that television today offers modern Americans what Pilgrim boats once offered immigrants: something to dream about (Osteen 414). Even DeLillo writes that “to consume in America is not to buy; it’s dreaming,” which, according to Letricchia, amounts to saying “that it is not the consummation of desire but the preliminaries of desire that are the object of television advertising” (Osteen 414). That is to say, it is not the role of advertising to make you buy something, but only to make you want to buy it, a point that I find not only true, but also somewhat disturbing . The second "primitive scene" that Letricchia touches on comes from the book White Noise. In the book, there is a small but significant part in which two of the main characters travel twenty miles outside of town in order to visit a tourist attraction known as "the most photographed barn in America" ​​(Osteen 415). Although this is the superficial subject of the passage, Letricchia asserts that the underlying problem is actually "a new type of representation as a new type of excitement" (Osteen 415). In the scene from the book, the characters stand among a crowd of people taking photos of a very ordinary barn. One of the characters (Murray Siskind) begins a monologue about how no one came to see the barn, but only "to be part of a collective perception" (Osteen 12).