     "Videotape" by Don DeLillo brings the reader to the harsh realization that they are not in complete control of their lives. In today's society, anything can happen to anyone at pretty much any time. This text illustrates the random nature of life and how a video camera can be a very good tool to capture this randomness.

     The story features a young girl who was in the car with her parents driving on the highway. She is playing around with the family video camera to help pass the time. The narrator does not mention the girl's name, starting the story off with a bit of suspense. She is just having fun videotaping the man in the car behind them, a man who is just minding his own business. There is no reason for her choosing to videotape that man other than the fact that he is simply in the car behind them. As the girl continues to videotape, she never strays from the man in the Dodge. He even gives a little wave to the camera here and there, as if he is playing along with the girl's game. All of a sudden, the camera jerks back as the man in the car is shot by someone in another car.

     This is a story that demonstrates the randomness of life. "It is just a kid aiming her camera through the rear window of the family car at the windshield of the car behind her" (DeLillo 59). The narrative explains the innocence of the girl's game. The girl and her family could have been on any other highway, on any other day, at any other time, yet she is in the perfect position to capture the shooting through the lens of her family's camera. DeLillo writes: "It shows a man in a sport shirt at the wheel of his car. There is nothing else to see. The car approaches briefly, then falls back" (DeLillo 60). At this point in the story, the man in the dodge could have been falling back to let another car into his lane, blocking his car from being videotaped by the girl. He could have passed the child's car and avoided being in the video completely from that point on, but instead he stays directly behind the girl's car in the center of the film. The chances that the little girl was videotaping a complete stranger so extensively when he just so happened to get shot are so slim that one must give some of the credit to randomness. The author directly addresses the randomness of the murder, 

The chance quality of the encounter. The victim, the killer and the child with a camera. Random energies that approach a common point. There's something here that speaks to you directly, saying terrible things about forces beyond your control, lines of intersection that cut through history and logic and every reasonable layer of human expectation. (DeLillo 61)

     It makes one think about the risks of simply existing. He touches on another important point when he says, "It is not just another video homicide. It is a homicide recorded by a child who thought she was doing something simple and maybe halfway clever, shooting some tape of a man in a car" (DeLillo 60). When the girl was videotaping the man driving his Dodge, she had no intention of creating a video that was going to make front page news. The girl had no clue that this video that she was making to entertain herself on a boring car ride would soon make her famous and be viewed by millions. This event is just too unlikely to be the work of anything other than randomness.

     In the text, DeLillo goes off the main storyline for a bit and dives deeper into the different aspects of a video camera. He explains how kids "break every trust" (DeLillo 60), capturing "a million things they never see with the unaided eye" (DeLillo 59). These are typically things that one would not want to be seen, such as "Mom coming out of the bathroom in her cumbrous robe and turbaned towel, looking bloodless and plucked" (DeLillo 60). This ability to see the unseen makes the videocamera a very important tool in crime investigation and news reporting. Randomness turned a girl's video that was originally "innocent and aimless" into a video of a homicide displaying the work of the Texas Highway Killer. DeLillo further depicts the realness of the video when he says, "there is a jolting movement but she keeps on taping  her heart is beating faster but she keeps the camera trained on the subject as he slides into the door and even as you see him die you're thinking of the girl" (DeLillo 62). This excerpt solidifies the reader's feeling of sorrow for the girl as she has just experienced a murder and will never be able to forget that moment.

     The narrator uses literary devices to effectively get his point across in the story. When DeLillo writes, "It is the kid's own privacy that is being protected here. She is twelve years old and her name is being withheld even though she is neither the victim nor the perpetrator of the crime but only the means of recording it" (DeLillo 60), he is using foreshadowing to put the thought into the reader's head that the video would end in some sort of crime. He states that media had to withhold the little girl's name, making one think that she is some sort of witness and may be in danger if her name were to be released. The speaker again uses foreshadowing a few paragraphs later when he claims that, "it is not just another video homicide. It is a video homicide recorded by a child" (DeLillo 60). This is put into the text before any mention of the shooting, giving the reader the idea early on that the crime that the girl recorded would be a killing. 

     Imagery is used throughout the story, such as when the speaker notes, "You don't see the blood, which is probably trickling behind his ear and down the back of his neck" (DeLillo 62). This description of how the victim probably looked immediately after the killing puts a similar image in the head of the reader as the one in the head of the person who sees the tape on the news.

    This story is a harsh example of how one's life is never fully in their hands. When things are going well for a person, they might be convinced that they are in control. But when something unexpected happens, they are quickly reminded about the role that randomness plays in their life. A famous actor, Sidney Poitier, once said, "So much of our life, it seems to me, is determined by our randomness."

