Throughout DeLillo's Libra, Lee has been portrayed in such a manner that the reader could see him as having been used. The extent by which Lee is being used or is the user is not clear, but towards the end when Ferrie comes to give Lee that final push on the scales, I cannot help but feel sympathy for him. In this scene, Lee does not seem very enthusiastic about the prospect of shooting Kennedy. In fact, it looks like he does not want to do the dirty deed that he is faced with here.
I felt sympathy for Lee when he was being persuaded into killing JFK, but for me one of the most tender and sympathy endorsing moments of the novel occurs after Lee has committed the crime. Lee is in Jail and Marina comes to visit him. When she is thinking back about "the boy she'd married," it is practically heart wrenching. I was one who found myself wishing that Lee would not go to shoot Kennedy, wishing that DeLillo could change the course of history. But as Vonnegut shows in Slaughterhouse Five, the moment is structured this way. DeLillo of course cannot rewrite history. As with Slaughterhouse Five, from the beginning of the novel, we know the climax of the novel and we know how it will end. We know that Lee is going to shoot Kennedy from the window of the Book Depository and is then in turn going to be killed by Jack Ruby. We know that all of this is going to happen, but that in turn made it more painful for me to watch the history play out.
So when Marina comes to the jail and thinks about Lee's progression from the "mild face of the boy she'd married" to "this man with a beak nose and dark eyes, one brow swollen, clothes too big for him. This specter with grey skin. She looked at the lumpy Adam's apple, the prominent nose. His cheeks were sunk under the bones, leaving this nose, tis bird beak. He had to be guilty she thought, to look so bad." This scene is incredibly sad because as the reader, along with Marina, we have watched Lee grow up. We have seen this boy spiral down the wrong path caught up in the momentum of history. And as Marina says, he was a boy that she married. Forced into becoming this man by his circumstances.
"He told her now to buy shoes for June. Don't worry, he said. And kiss the babies for me. The guards got him out of the chair and he walked backwards to the door, watching her until he was gone" (425). The humanity in these few lines is tragic. Especially because we know that Lee holding Marina's gaze until he is taken away is the last time he will see her. DeLillo does an excellent job of playing upon the emotions of the reader. I want so badly for things to turn out well for Lee. In this way, DeLillo has succeeded in bringing light to one other side of the JFK assassination story. In this moment, I see Lee as not being at fault for Kennedy's death. I see him as having been caught up in the movement, a boy whose scales were tipped too soon.
With any great or terrible moment in history, there are many factors leading up to the event. There is rarely ever just a single cause. Lee Harvey Oswald may be pinned as the cause of Kennedy's death, but DeLillo has shown us that no matter what side we take, there was much more at play than simply a lone gunman at the window.
For both Marina and Marguerite, the use of "boy" to describe Oswald reminds us how *young* he is (he's *just* turned twenty-four). His guilt seems more that of the misguided juvenile who's been influenced by the wrong crowd, and who's subject to delusions of grandeur. Marina's not quite recognizing this "beak-nosed man" is one more way that the "Lee Harvey Oswald" whose every televised step in the last two days of his life enters history is somehow not the same person he was only days before. The act transforms him.
ReplyDeleteI feel a similar emotional tug in the passage we looked at in class, where Lee is getting used to the idea of a life in prison, devoted to careful and thorough study of his case. We know this is a doomed expectation, but what DeLillo holds out here is not only the possibility that his protagonist has a new lease on life, but the tantalizing possibility of what killing Lee has forever *sealed off*--access to the "real story." We see Lee positing an alternative future where all this uncertainty wouldn't surround the case.