Lee and MYB's major difference
Despite (allegedly) murdering the president of the United States, I felt that for most of Libra, Lee Harvey Oswald is actually depicted very sympathetically. Even though he’s so arrogant, delusional, or just flat out annoying for so much of the book, I found myself feeling sorry for Lee, or almost rooting for him (at least until he began abusing Marina). Lee spends his entire life as an outsider, which makes him somewhat antisocial, and definitely awkward with other people. In Libra, we read or hear about so many of Lee’s manifestos, journals, or dramatic letters that all share the common theme of a desire for influence and to be remembered as a part of history. If viewed from another lens or narrative, I feel like Lee’s self-obsessed, overdramatic worldview would be much less sympathetic. Instead of seeing Lee as malicious, Delilo’s depiction of Lee makes him seem more so just pathetic and ignorant. It’s hard for the reader to take anything Lee says seriously because of how delusional he is, and from how seriously he takes himself. In the way that the author’s depiction that makes us take Lee less seriously works in his favor, E.L. Doctorow’s irony in Ragtime works in the opposite way.
Mother’s younger brother is a similar character to Lee in many ways. They are both self-absorbed social outcasts with dreams of having a revolutionary legacy. Both of them aren’t taken seriously by the author or reader, but I felt like this treatment did a lot more favors for Lee than it did for MYB. MYB doesn’t even do anything that bad, definitely nowhere near an assassination, but to me, he came off so much more insufferable than Lee. One major difference between the two characters is that MYB is constantly joining movements, but never really fully commits to anything; MYB is able to just take off the blackface and leave the confrontation at J.P. Morgan’s library unscathed to pursue his next pipe dream. As weird as it sounds, Lee going through with the assassination kind of validates his overdramatic revolutionary ideas in a way that MYB is never able to do. Where Lee Harvey Oswald feels like a kind of dumb, misguided kid, MYB looks like an annoying poser.
If narrated as true crime novels, for example, Lee would appear much worse than MYB for actually going through with his plot. In this kind of narrative, MYB would gain favor for choosing to back down, and not blowing up the library. However, in the ironic depictions that Delilo and Doctorow present, this idea is reversed because the characters aren’t taken seriously.
- Sahnan
Hi Sahnan, I really think that the similarities between MYB and Lee are very interesting. As you mention, they are both social outcasts, and they both seem to love attention. For MYB that means the attention of his radical peers, and for Lee that means the attention of the public. I actually disagree with your statement about MYB though, and in my opinion, Lee is honestly the more insufferable one. It is true that MYB jumps from movement to movement without really having a purpose behind it, but you can say the exact same thing for Lee, except at least MYB's actions are theoretically helping people.
ReplyDeleteHey Sahnan! I really like how you tease out the role of narrative tone in shaping our sympathy for these characters. Your point that DeLillo’s portrayal almost softens Lee by making him seem delusional and pathetic rather than evil.
ReplyDeleteHi Sahnan! I really liked your analysis of the ironic tone that the authors use. It's interesting how a character like Lee, when depicted in a pathetic way, can actually strip away the malice we expect from an assassin. Moreover, MYB's lack of commitment also says similar things about him. Great post!
ReplyDeleteI don't know that I'd let MYB off too easily--he takes part *as a shooter* and as the bomb-maker in the firehouse bombings, which lead to dead firefighters. Goldman isn't too far off when she notes that he "reminds her of Czoglosz," and indeed MYB is depicted as precisely the kind of guy who could fall under the sway of a David Ferrie or TJ Mackey. But I see the distinctions you want to point out here, and it's interesting that MYB seems like so much more of a poseur to you, when Oswald is a *literal* poseur, posing in his back yard with his weapons and Marxist literature. But I definitely see what you mean about Lee being depicted as more of a *protagonist* (the one who struggles, in its literal definition)--DeLillo tries to compel us to "see the struggle" and therefore to maybe root for the most notorious assassin in the twentieth century. Partly this has to do with how JFK doesn't really make sense as a target for Oswald--General Walker is much more logical, as an ideological statement, and Oswald is on record as an admirer of Kennedy for his work on civil rights. We see him as a political idealist, and in the novel, he has no intention of shooting at the president even two weeks before, when the plotters are all nervous that he's not on board. There's nothing inevitable about the assassination, and thus it's easier to see Lee as a more or less innocent doofus who gets himself in way over his head (which he has a history of doing throughout his life).
ReplyDeleteHey Sahnan, I liked how you explained that even though Lee does something terrible, Delillo makes him feel kind of pathetic and human rather than just evil. The comparison to MYB from Ragtime was really interesting and made me think differently about how irony affects how we see characters. Good post!
ReplyDeleteI agree, the MYB seems much less committed to his convictions than Lee. However, I wonder if it is a question of character or narrative. MYB is not the only nor the primary person committing to social actions in Ragtime, and while Lee is not the only, he is the main individual we follow. Not to mention, we see Lee as a child, and thus sympathize with him as a more complex person than the 'poser' that is Mother's Younger Brother. Nice blog.
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