Heinrich Character Analysis in White Noise

Jack’s fourteen-year-old son, and the oldest of the children living with the family. Heinrich is an eclectic know-it-all determined to confound his father by intelligently employing obscure knowledge that distorts simple logic. Armed with esoteric facts, rhetorical finesse, and strange fascinations, he is constantly ready and willing to refute common knowledge. His friends are severe: one, Tommy Roy Foster, is a prisoner convicted of murder with whom Heinrich plays chess by mail; another, Orest Mercator, is an older boy training to beat the Guinness World Record for the length of time spent in a cage with poisonous snakes. As evidenced by these friends with warped interests and pasts, Heinrich is drawn to calamity and is brought to life by disastrous events, ultimately coming into his own while lecturing a group of panicked evacuees about the airborne toxic event.

Heinrich Quotes in White Noise

The White Noise quotes below are all either spoken by Heinrich or refer to Heinrich. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

). Note: all page numbers and citation info for the quotes below refer to the Penguin Books edition of White Noise published in 2009.

Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems?

Related Characters: (speaker),

Page Number and Citation: 23

Explanation and Analysis:

Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn’t it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? […] It’s all this activity in the brain and you don’t know what’s you as a person and what’s some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire. Isn’t that why Tommy Roy killed those people?

Related Characters: (speaker), , ,

Page Number and Citation: 45

Explanation and Analysis:

Heinrich Character Timeline in White Noise

The timeline below shows where the character Heinrich appears in White Noise. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

While driving his fourteen-year-old son, Heinrich, to school one day, Jack finds himself trapped in a circuitous debate about whether or... (full context)

Consumer Culture and Identity Theme Icon

Meanwhile, Jack goes upstairs to find Heinrich deliberating over his next move in a chess game he’s playing with an imprisoned murderer,... (full context)

Babette calls Jack at his office to tell him that Heinrich was down at the river during the search for the Treadwells (Gladys Treadwell, the old... (full context)

One night, Heinrich breathlessly summons everybody to the TV, which is playing plane crash footage. This greatly excites... (full context)

Approaching his house on foot one snowy day, Jack sees Heinrich perched on a ledge outside the attic looking east through binoculars. Going up to join... (full context)

An hour later—after failing to shovel the walkway, as his father asked him to do—Heinrich is once more in the attic, this time with a radio and a map. He... (full context)

Jack goes back to the attic and talks to Heinrich, who tells him that the radio is no longer talking about nausea, vomiting, and shortness... (full context)

...outside. Finally, they hear the voice of a fire captain coming from a passing car; Heinrich runs to the window to listen more carefully and learns that they are being told... (full context)

...in strip malls unaware of what is going on, deeply confused by the sudden traffic. Heinrich, for his part, seems to have become extra animated in his attention to the situation.... (full context)

...turns of the radio, “not to help [him] think but to keep [him] from thinking.” Heinrich notices that the car is almost out of gas. Seeing a gas station ahead, Jack... (full context)

...and making guesses. Moving from one crowd to the next, Jack is surprised to find Heinrich at the center of one such crowd, talking in great detail about Nyodene D. His... (full context)

...future. The blind listeners seem unfazed by the ludicrous nature of the stories. Jack and Heinrich fall into a conversation in which Heinrich points out that, despite the advanced society they... (full context)

Walking down the hall, Jack sees Heinrich hanging from a chin-up bar. Heinrich tells him that the bar belongs to his friend,... (full context)

...around somewhere in your brain.” Jack recognizes in this statement the same logic by which Heinrich argues that humans are “the sum of [their] chemical impulses,” a sentiment he hates, calling... (full context)

...herself a victim. “Is this the future she envisions?” he wonders. At home, he finds Heinrich sitting on the front steps with a clipboard. He too is participating in the simulation—his... (full context)

The insane asylum catches fire one night, and Jack and Heinrich go to watch it burn. They find other father-son pairs standing alongside them, making comments... (full context)

...of Mr. Gray, but Babette continues to withhold the man’s information. One night, Jack takes Heinrich and Orest out to dinner and quizzes his son’s friend yet again about his desire... (full context)

Stopping by Heinrich’s room, Jack asks if Orest has entered the snake cage yet. Heinrich tells him that... (full context)