The Lee Oswald Paradox: a Hero or a Pathetic Fool?
In Libra, we are given lots of information about young Lee in his journey to become the notorious Lee Havey Oswald, and in the mix of details and self-accounts, we can paint two contradicting pictures of him simultaneously. On the one hand, he is a resilient and determined aspiring revolutionary who rises from difficulty to answer his true calling as a historic figure. On the other hand, he is a foolish kid pursuing an idealized picture of historic fame. No matter how paradoxical, these two faces are inseparably embedded in Lee’s core identity, demanding a deeper review of how this contradiction came to be.
Let’s start with his heroic side. What impressed me the most about Lee was how he raised himself up from the challenges of his upbringing. We learn that, as a teen, he struggled to fit in with his peers and felt displaced wherever his family moved to; he lacked a fatherly figure and was generally disconnected from his mother and siblings. But rather than letting all this hardship oppress him, our Lee comes into this world and thinks, how do I place my struggles in the broader context of history? He channels the difficulties in his life as motivation for thriving, exploring, and rising up to become a bigger person. Through devouring Marxist texts and the Marine manual, he constructs an internal purpose based on his pursuit of curiosity and search for meaning, unaffected by how lowly others might treat him. To further add to his respectable qualities, he has an amazing work ethic and grit, pushing through the dense books without external help despite his dyslexia and working his way into the Navy by the age of 17.
When viewing only these facts, a heroic protagonist trope easily emerges, and we can almost imagine this kid growing up to be the Elon Musk or Obama of his time.
Yet, our analysis of Lee is complicated by his flaws, which reveal themselves from the beginning of the novel. Though certainly smart and hardworking, 15-year-old Lee is cocky and works hard to flaunt his “superiority” over other people–and this behavior continues through his service in the Navy. He is, as his fellow Marine notes, smarter but also dumber than others. He thinks he knows what he’s doing but reveals gaps in planning and thinking ahead, as shown in the humorous depiction of him shooting his arm. With a worldview informed solely by stuffy Marxist tomes, he is blindly idealistic of socialism and lacks practical wisdom (even a 10-year-old would know to not trust everyone who flatters them). He is fickle and guided mostly by his yearning for self-importance: underneath the facade of a passionate socialist, he is willing to join either side of the political rivalry as long as he can be a part of something “important”. He also seriously lacks humanity, showing no sympathy for his cellmate, Dupart, when he is getting beat up by the officers (he just stands there and watches so that he won’t get beat up–with no emotional reaction at all to the situation). Together, all these flaws lead him astray into a sketchy life chasing meaningless frenzy, despite his initial potential to actually do something great.
As the novel progresses, our characterization of Lee becomes increasingly ambiguous. Knowing how far he had come from his impoverished background in New Orleans, it's difficult to strike down Lee as a complete antagonist or blame him for all his failures in his adult life. However, seeing him emerge as a violent, irresponsible father and husband and knowing the assassin that he would become later in his life also makes it impossible to forgive him or fully sympathize with him. This complexity connects with the overarching theme of the main plot--namely, that human life is full of contradictions.
I think your point about Lee's limited intelligent thinking is accurate. I think he often thinks too big-picture for his own good, leading him down dangerous paths throughout history. Also like you said, Lee's flaws and character traits are easier to point out in his childhood which is depicted in the novel, and as the novel progresses we somewhat lose sight of the many factors that made him the obvious choice for a fake assassin, even from a young age. It almost starts to become possible to feel bad for Oswald, at least from the point of DeLillo's narration, knowing that if even part of what DeLillo says is true about the story, Lee was entirely set up and taken advantage of.
ReplyDeleteI love how you acknowledged Lee's heroism throughout the novel. Although I didn't initially read him as a heroic figure, I thought some of his endeavors could be seen as Lee trying to be annoyingly outside of the box. But with your framing I think the beginning of Lee's story does give him some sort of Hero's journey and it does set him up in a very appealing light. I also agree with you that Lee is entirely too inflated by his ego and arrogance and it leads him to making lots of foolish mistakes. Lee is unable to ever truly take the advice of another person or admit his own mistakes. Even when he was attempting to retrieve his passport from the soviet union he acted angry that he couldn't get it back easily as if he didn't do everything in his power to get it taken away. I also think that this arrogance adds to the degradation of his hero storyline. Lee's thinking out of the box thinking is (as you said) way too idealized and it leads to some very annoying tendencies in Lee. Great post!
ReplyDeleteThe complexity of Lee's character in Libra somewhat started reminding me of good ol' Mother's Younger Brother back in Ragtime, and maybe even Thor Wintergreen in Mumbo Jumbo. More specifically in the aspect that they're both kind of misguided, and want to have a purpose in a grander scheme, but when they finally participate in something with relative salience, there's always some part of their plans that ends up being ... undercooked and underwhelming. There's Lee trying to shoot his arm like you mentioned, and there was MYB and Thor entering such meaningful coalitions and political movements...as white guys. Nice blog post, and happy graduation Yelim :D
ReplyDeleteLee being the protagonist of a story about his own manipulation is an interesting way to approach a book. We get insight on the life factors that led to Lee being an easily woed, little kid with his unique preconceptions. We know how the story will end (to an extent), but not all the intricacies of what leads to it, which to me is uncomforting and fascinating. He definitely seems like he has a bright future at the beginning of the novel, which slowly gets taken away from him; and obviously this is not your first instinct when hearing about an assassin's story.
ReplyDeleteLee's contradictions make him in many ways an ideal subject for fiction--these morally ambiguous types tend to make the most fascinating protagonists, and I like the way DeLillo gives LHO his own "coming-of-age" arc in the early chapters. And it simply is easier to sympathize with a person when you can see their struggle "from the inside," especially when that struggle is rooted in childhood. My general sense is that DeLillo's fictional portrait of Lee is aligned closely with the historical record--Normal Mailer's nonfiction _Oswald's Tale_ closely fits DeLillo's fictional portrait, not only in the facts and details but in the character traits.
ReplyDeleteBut it's one thing to enjoy pondering the moral ambiguities of a fictional character from the comfort of our armchair; it's quite another when the guy has been credibly accused of one of the most notorious crimes of the twentieth century, and the ambiguities both support this accusation AND suggest there's more to the picture. Lee manages to be both completely plausible as a "lone gunman" AND exactly the kind of guy who could be subject to Ferrian manipulation. And DeLillo manages to split the difference here, as well: he IS part of a larger conspiracy, which he only understands a tiny part of, but he believes that within this conspiracy he is the lone gunman. Exactly as "they" have manipulated him to believe.