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.
Yeah, Nov. 22 does seem to be the sealing of the deal for putting Lee's name into history. Whether Jack Ruby ends up shooting Lee or not, Lee would be the focus of the whole shooting. We see Lee contemplating spinning a story of him as the lone gunman instead of giving details on the conspiracy. And, as we know, if Lee is silenced, everything becomes a giant mystery, which is almost even better for Lee than if he lived. Being a mystery, Lee has potentially kept himself a public figure longer than if he had lived and spoken.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite possible that the end result would have fitted Lee's plans just fine had he not been shot dead by Jack Ruby. The detachment of the novel at this point actually follows and continues the pattern set by Lee's planning and actions throughout earlier sections of the novel. Although it does feel anti-climactic in a sense, this book isn't a drama or a movie but instead partakes in an exploration of Lee's psyche. In addition, while in earlier sections of the novel there were pretty big gaps to fill, giving DeLillo some free reign over the fiction, once you hit the actual assassination there becomes too much historical evidence to be able to seriously alter what we already know. This resulted in the analysis that we got instead of a story that we could expect to be the climax of such a novel.
ReplyDeleteI think that by failing to give us Lee's thoughts he leaves us with the theory of the crazy Lone gunmen and that it is what is frustrating. We want it to be dramatic, we want Lee to be pacing around trying to decide if he should do it, we want this momentous action to be me with equal deliberation. But what DeLillo is telling us is that it wasn't. He just kind of did it, and his lack of thoughts isn't a white space left by DeLllo but rather the reality.
ReplyDeleteAt least part of Lee's shock and despair upon realizing there's another shooter is more practical: he realizes in an instant that he's been toyed with, manipulated, set up, and that this probably won't end well for him. The realization that his historical status will be affected is maybe in the mix somewhere--certainly later, as he contemplates how to "play" the situation in his cell, he's very much thinking of his legacy, and even enjoying the power he now has to control the shape of the narrative.
ReplyDeleteBut he doesn't live to control the shape of his narrative, and in this sense his dream doesn't come true--he enters history as either a patsy or a misunderstood loner.