Lee Harvey Oswald's Dream Biography

Libra is Lee Harvey Oswald’s dream biography. In Don Delillo’s telling, Lee is pardoned for his crime of murdering a president and only receives significant judgement for having abused his wife Marina. His writing the “historical diary” is depicted as just endearing, and his relationships with women in Minsk are made to seem redemptive and romantic. Sympathy towards him is shown down to the title of the book, Libra. Referencing Lee’s star sign, its uncertainty is meant to represent his contradictory character. Yet I never found myself thinking of him as contradictory or complex, but just as an arrogant character created by Delillo. The premise of Libra is the center of a lot of its problems. When someone so blatantly violent and troubled kills someone, there should be no decision to write a book imagining that they were not behind the attack, bringing up unlikely circumstances for the purpose of entertainment and contemplation. When it comes to a fake moon landing or whether aliens created fire, there is no harm in entertaining ideas as long as they don’t spread fear, but when someone has been killed, blaming the government instead of a clearly crazy man spreads hate and skepticism, and romanticises the life of a murderer. Lee’s childhood was unfortunate and I sympathized with him in the beginning, but his adult decisions should not be depicted as endearing, pitiful, or romantic: all of which are sprinkled into Delillo’s writing. A man capable of murder should not be given a platform that pardons him from his crimes and depicts him as endearing and pitiful. I found Lee’s “historical diary” to be particularly obnoxious, and reminiscent of the writing left behind by school shooters today (Delillo, 150). He describes his life with minute detail and sticks a deeper, special meaning to situations in which he, in actuality, felt insecure. He wanted to be special in the army but felt left out, leading him to say he was arrested in the army not for a childish reason but due to “politics” (293). He gives himself the story that he is not just a regular soldier, but a troubled conflicted one, a representation Delillo endorses by depicting the rest of the army as regular men just going along with the higher-up commands. Still, Delillo does agree that his longing to be special is not meaningful but a stumbling effort to be well-known by people, regardless if his impacts are good. Lee does not want to change the world for the better or influence the political world to create good, he wants attention, and we are just giving it to him. I began to find that Delillo playing so much into Lee’s troubled life also feels somewhat indicative of his own character as well. Purposely bringing in his misspelled words or writing that he is “misarable” when a girl rejects him softens him to the public and brings sympathy to a lot of problematic behaviors (157). This subtle endearment towards troubled men also appears with Delillo’s depiction of Jack Ruby, a violent strip club owner that protects his “girls” (185). These characters, written by Delillo, seem, to some extent, noble and intriguing. In reality, Lee was a serial dater with no real respect for women, and Jack Ruby owned a strip club. Adding clarifications that he also “protected” the women does not soften my view on Ruby, but harden my view on Delillo. He found it necessary to justify his actions with added misogyny. And while the book was written in a time where this romanticization was normal, we are reading it in a time that it is not. What solidified a lot of my ideas was seeing the photos of Lee Harvey Oswald in the army and holding the guns. His facade of being mysterious and special, created by Delillo, turned into just a scary man in a photo, staring down a camera or hastily bringing a gun down for a photo. He is a violent, sexist, narcissistic man with a troubled past who killed a president and wants attention. Why are we giving it to him? DeLillo, Don. Libra. Viking Press, 1988.