From the very beginning of the novel, we've seen Lee Oswald's desire to be in the spotlight. He's always stood out well in a crowd and strives leave his mark in history. As a kid we saw him with his pretentious tomes on Marxism and his accent that left him mocked wherever he travelled. He really didn't fit in very well with neither the marines nor the Russians, and has never been taken particularly seriously for his ideas. Reading this last section with the long-anticipated assassination of Kennedy, I couldn't help but wonder if Lee's childhood dream finally became reality here.
What made this chapter a bit frustrating for me was just how detached it was. The whole novel so far has been up and down everyone's thoughts, all building suspense for the famous shot. This section, while insightful and tied nicely to the plot that DeLillo has spent the previous 400 pages setting up, was more or less just a retelling of the famous Zapruder film. I immensely enjoyed how slow and carefully the whole event was written, but we unfortunately got very little insight into Lee's mind at all. It's as if DeLillo is teasing us, at the time when we want to hear Oswald the most, he seems to have gone silent.
Still, it sure appears to me that Lee's remained a fairly static character throughout the course of this novel. He's seemed to maintain his rather opportunistic tendencies, building multiple guises for himself, demanding that history examine him with a microscope. Of course the infamous Lee Harvey Oswald smirk has persisted as well, that half-smile he always seems to have, as if he smugly knows something nobody else does (and also appears on the covers of most of our books). Lee also takes it extremely hard when he realizes he's not the sole assassin of Kennedy (despite how history seems to remember him) and inadvertently completely tears apart the rest of Mackey's plan to have Lee shot immediately. I do believe that while he's firing the weapon Lee completely believes that this is his destiny, his Lee-Harvey-Oswald-sized spot in history, and once he realizes he's been played, his confusion and distress is genuine, not part of some grand scheme.
Ultimately though, it sure seems to me like Lee got almost exactly what he's always wanted, and his dreams did come true in a way on that Nov. 22, 1963.
