Who is Lee Harvey Oswald? This is a question that we are just starting to get an answer to as we start this book. Our initial picture of him is not a particularly nice one. Delillo paints him, rightly, as an angsty teenager. He is rebellious against his mother and talks back to her. He skips large amounts of school and takes pride in doing so. He also just seems to be an annoying kid, touting his reading of Socialist Work’s in his friend’s faces (A habit he keeps all the way into the marines)
Still I feel a little bit of sympathy for the boy. While it may seem weird to feel bad for a boy who would grow up to join the ranks of those who have assassinated American presidents, I feel it's justified. He really had a rough childhood growing up. His father died when he was young and he kept moving around with his mom, which doesn’t make for a great environment to make friends, and it doesn’t really sound like he has many, considering that he would rather hang out with animals at the zoo than people. What really killed me though was that he never ends up earning the respect of anyone. In the documentary we watched on Lee, the KGB discussed why they didn’t accept him into the Soviet Union and it is just brutal. They describe him as having no skills, value, or intelligence (both in the military sense and the intrinsic one). They even go so far as to imply that it would be disrespectful to the C.I.A to suspect them of using this man as an agent. Although this is quite ironic, considering that it sounds like Winn Everett is going to use him in his plot.
Libra even supports the idea that he has minimal value to the KGB, as what little intel he has on the U-2 plane and American radio dishes is lost when he gets court-martialed, twice. Dr. Braunfels even tries to convince him to stay, as he will be of greater value if he gains some intelligence. Which is really quite devastating to him, considering his admiration for Russia. So even though it is probably ridiculously un-American to say, I kind of want him to have some success in his defection to the Soviet Union. This is really a remarkable thing that Delillo has done, he has managed to make me sympathetic for an almost insufferable human being, whether Lee deserves this though, is an entirely different question. So what do you think, does Lee Harvey Oswald deserve our sympathy? Or is he just an awful person?
Lee screwed himself over by being so focused on Communism and ignoring all other studies. To be actually useful, you have to be a well-rounded individual in many different subjects and fields, and Lee gets picked on and ignored his entire life because he doesn’t fit that category. Even worse, he never realizes that that is the reason for his misery since he always just hides behind his knowledge of Communism and those ideals that are obscure to many in the United States. Then he just becomes an unstable laughingstock wherever he goes instead of being treated like the serious professional he wishes to be.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that DeLillo is either trying to make us sympathetic for Lee Harvey Oswald or make us think that he is an awful person. The main goal of Libra is to give us a more passive and less opinionated approach to theories surrounding assassination of JFK. However, Lee's inability to join the Soviet Union and his perceived craziness by many of those around him make him easy to feel sorry for.
ReplyDeleteI think that Oswald deserves our sympathy for the environment he is born into. You make a good point about how rough his childhood was. If he had gotten help from others with his emotional instability then events could have turned out very differently. However, in the end it is Oswald who pulls the trigger on the life of the president. Despite his tough luck as a child and young man, I don't think we should feel sympathy for him in making this choice.
ReplyDeleteI mean if he had success defecting to the Soviet Union, he wouldn't have killed the president, right? So every time you see him fail it's bringing him one step closer to the only thing he'll really succeed at. And it's not like he was really evil, he just seems like he needs help. So I understand feeling at least a little bit sorry for the guy.
ReplyDeleteI think Oswald gets a bad rap, especially from the KGB guys, because what he lacks in skill he makes up in heart. By no means am I defending him from what he's done, but he is a little misunderstood and I feel maybe if he received a little more (human) attention as a child maybe he would have found a strength and pursued it, other than basically just wanting to be in a Marxist society. Maybe he could have become a conscientious politician with a Marxist agenda, simply for the benefit of the people.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the main reason people are tempted to root for Lee is because he's the protagonist of a novel. In Libra, he's no longer a piece of history but a fictional character. He's got a character arc! And you tend to think of characters differently from real people. You don't expect people's lives to follow a neat storyline with satisfying payoffs or anything, but you feel justified in expecting a character arc to be meaningful, interesting, and whatever because that's how you're supposed to judge fictional characters and the quality of the literature they belong to. It would feel wrong not to get caught up in Lee's plot because if you don't really care either way what happens to him, it'll only turn out that you've been reading a crappy novel, not that you've been a dutiful little historian keeping yourself from getting biased.
ReplyDeleteLee deserves sympathy.
ReplyDeleteCommunism brings euqality to the weak
ReplyDelete