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Lee Harvey Oswald: Sympathetic or Not

 Throughout the book Libra, we follow Lee Harvey Oswald through his short life, from his childhood to his death. We see all the decisions he takes in life that get him to where he ends up - someone involved in a scheme to assassinate the president of the United States. There are times when we feel bad for Oswald, but is he a sympathetic character overall?

From the limited view of his childhood, we see that he is raised without a father. Already his life is not off to a strong start. Throughout his childhood, he struggles for various reasons, from bullying to switching schools. The reader gets the feeling that maybe Oswald isn't as bad as we thought he was, and maybe he was just a result of his circumstances. However as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to root for Oswald.

We see in Oswald's adulthood, all he seems to desire is fame and importance. He openly carries communist texts on the street to show everyone that he is different and that he is a revolutionary. He wants to be in the history books as someone who changed the world in one or another. Several times we see this, from his obsession with switching to the USSR/Cuba to his assassination attempt on General Walker. During the attempt, Dupard talks about his reasons for wanting to assassinate Walker. All of these reasons seem to be really important to him and have significance in the real world. On the other hand, Oswald doesn't have nearly this much resolve or reason for committing this act.

Even when Oswald is about to kill John F Kennedy, we see that he is upset that he is not the lone gunman that he was told he was going to be. The fact that he was going to kill the president doesn't matter to him, only the fact that he does it and everyone knows he did it. He even talks about how he and JFK are "inextricably linked," and how they will go down in history as a pair. His utter lack of understanding or guilt over his assassination attempts makes him far less sympathetic to the viewer.

Overall, while I think DeLillo was trying to make Oswald sympathetic to the viewer, I don't think he completely succeeded at it. Oswald's true nature in this book was unlikable, which is further compounded by his actions. However, I will say that I have a LITTLE bit more sympathy for him after reading this book compared to before, so I suppose to some extent DeLillo did succeed.

Comments

  1. JanakiMay 31, 2022 at 11:20 AM

    Hi, I feel like I'm more sympathetic to Oswald than I should be - after all he is a murderer who took someone's life, regardless of who that person is. I do appreciate though that Don DeLillo digged through the entire Warren Commission Report because my perception of Lee Harvey Oswald before reading Libra was quite one-dimensional and DeLillo really showed that even for someone as messed up as Lee, he has a backstory and 'reasons' (should I say) for the way that he turned out. I don't think that DeLillo is trying to defend Lee but if making him sympathetic means that showing that Lee ended up the way he did because of societal trends, maybe that's what he's doing. Great post!

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  2. MitchellJune 3, 2022 at 12:56 PM

    The structural role of Lee as protagonist of the novel may not automatically generate full "sympathy" for all of his actions, but it's maybe more a matter of *understanding* or pathos, having a fuller picture of the conditions that produced the feelings of alienation and disenfranchisement that makes him want to think of himself as a revolutionary. For me, it's not so much that I "like" Lee or admire anything in particular about him, but when we engage with someone story from their point of view, we "see the struggle," and I have a natural inclination to side with underdogs and critical thinkers who don't passively accept the status quo but question and challenge it. When we think about Lee in the early chapters, it's entirely possible that this could be a person whose life takes a drastically different course--we would look at his efforts to read _Capital_ and to renounce capitalism rather differently if he had found a more productive and less criminal means of expressing those ideas. The narrative of someone rising from underprivileged circumstances to make a mark on the world is one that we respond to positively all the time--it's just something of a tougher sell when that person grows up to be a notorious assassin.

    Normal Mailer's _Oswald's Story_ is a rigorously research biography of Lee, published in I think 1995 (after _LIbra_ definitely), and while Mailer fleshes out Lee's story to an extent that could enable something like sympathy (you can totally recognize DeLillo's Lee in this portrait), it's clear throughout the Mailer has utter contempt for him as a weak and manipulable person. If you're interested in thinking further about this character and his role in history, I recommend this nonfiction account.

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