What Did Lee Harvey Oswald Really Want?
Almost the entire world knows the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. His assassination of John F. Kennedy sparked the creation of the original conspiracy theory, and the exact details of the assassination are still greatly disputed to this day. One such detail is the why. Why did Oswald want to murder Kennedy? We will never be able to learn the true answer to the question, but Delilo's Libra provides a convincing narrative of the life of Oswald by using historical context and helps us understand some his motivations behind the assassination.
Through Libra, Delilo takes us through the life of Lee Harvey Oswald starting from his childhood. We get to see Oswald's path from his humble beginnings to the man he is remembered for today. Oswald was raised by a single mother and his half-siblings were often gone from the house, being much older than him. His father died before he was born, leaving his mother to take care of him and all his siblings. Growing up, he was often a loner, having little company in his own home. Due to this lack of attention, Oswald seeked to make a name for himself through other means. We learn that Oswald liked to be different from those around him. As a young boy, he would carry around Marxist literature in a time when it was deeply stigmatizing to be associated with the Communist agenda. He knew that being associated with Marx would garner him negative attention, but he reveled in whatever attention he would receive.
This mindset would continue on well into his adulthood. When Oswald had gone to jail, instead of surrendering and waiting for his sentence to end, he decided to bother the guard. He memorized the Marine Manual and would use it to taunt the guards. At no point in his life does Oswald base his actions on what is accepted by society. He is hungry for attention in whatever form it comes. We also learn that he idolizes revolutionary figures like Castro and Marx, his apartment room being filled with literature from the men.
I believe that Oswald's deep desire for recognition is what spurred him to murder the president. Throughout his entire life, Oswald chose the path that would get him more attention, even if it was negative. He knew that killing the president of America, the most powerful man in the free world, would put him in the history books. As sick as it sounds, Oswald wanted to be remembered and recognized by the rest of the world, and the assassination of JFK is how he achieved his goal at the end of the day.
Oswald is definitely hungry for attention, and it shows in the way he lives his life and his interaction with others. This aspect of him is exploited, and he ends up being tricked into becoming the patsy/scapegoat for JFK's assassination. Even though Oswald tries to do all sorts of things to satisfy his hunger for attention, he never really succeeds. I find it sad that he had to go as far as assassinating a president to finally achieve the notoriety he sought his entire life (and it wasn't even Oswald who shot the killing bullet in the end), though perhaps at a price he wasn't willing to pay.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! Lee's starvation of attention definitely led to the actions he takes in adulthood, such as wavering a knife around his brother's wife, traveling to Russia, attempting to go to Cuba, and assassinating JFK. His burning desire to be recognized can be seen by those around him, which explains how people are able to pin the assassination on him. He decides not to speak out about the second shooter and other essential details to further his reputation and boost his ego. Additionally, before his own murder, he longed to be interviewed about what happened and put in magazines, posing with his guns.
ReplyDeleteAlthough it’s somewhat evident, I like how you bring up that the entire novel centers around the question of why Oswald would do such a thing. In reality, we have no real explanation that is globally accepted and through this fact, Delillo is able to craft his own expert narrative to detail events in Oswald’s life that have led him down this path. Delillo inserts his own fictional story into the broader historical narrative and in this way, we don’t actually know if these events are based in reality. Just as you stated, the mindset that Delillo makes for Oswald creates explanations for all these events, and it all fits together into a coherent narrative. A part of his mindset is his need for attention, and it’s great that you mentioned that his motivation stems in part from this need. I don’t think it’s necessarily his need for attention that spurs him to kill the president, but rather his need to make a noticeable difference in history (although the two motivations are similar). Great post!
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