Refuge From Truth: Historical Fiction vs. Historical Record in Don DeLillo’s Libra

Thomas Mallon calls “the fact-by-fact decision-making involved in composing mainstream historical fiction…uncodified and imprecise, conducted on a sliding scale that’s always a slippery slope” (Mallon). The process of writing a piece of historical fiction is just as difficult as disseminating, what Mallon calls, “not so much what might have happened, [but] what could have happened” (Mallon). A slew of writers have attempted to tackle this historical literary feat, some in the hopes of providing a sort of “historical therapy” for anxious time periods. John F. Kennedy’s assassination is one such anxious moment throughout American history that has both confused and intrigued critics, skeptics, and ultimately the American people. Despite the countless efforts to understand the assassination, according to Mallon one novel serves as the “best-known work of literary fiction to take up the Kennedy Assassination” (Mallon).

Libra by Don DeLillo was published in 1988 as a work of historical fiction that offers a glimpse into a supposed history of Lee Harvey Oswald from early childhood onward to the Kennedy Assassination. The novel also follows the misdoings of disenchanted CIA agents, as well as a separate CIA agent who, years after the fact, is tasked with collecting all that he can on the assassination, with no end in sight. DeLillo focuses less on the facts one would find in the Warren Commission report of the assassination, and more on the possibilities of Oswald as a literary character. In the ‘Author’s Note” DeLillo even makes mention of the fact that “because this book makes no claim to literal truth, because it is only itself, apart and complete, readers may find refuge here—a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years” (DeLillo 455). DeLillo’s intentional use of the word “refuge” suggests that there is unrest in the subject matter, and perhaps even in the time period.

Thus the reader uses historical fiction, through the use of Libra, as a refuge from that which cannot be explained. DeLillo even believes that “fiction rescues history from its confusions…the novel which is within history can also operate outside it—correcting, clearing up and, perhaps most important of all, finding rhythms and symmetries” (DeCurtis 56). Just as Libra can be seen as a piece of historical fiction, it can also be seen within the context of conspiracy and assassin novels as well, mainly due to the unexplained nature of the subject matter and characters. To examine this novel I will look at it on three levels: DeLillo’s role as the author and his connection to the subject, DeLillo’s Oswald as a round character rather than the simplified assassin from history, and finally the overarching role of conspiracy and assassins as a genre and as historical paradigms. This examination questions who an assassin can be and how we can possibly see he or she as more than a killer.

The Oxford Living Dictionaries calls a conspiracy theory “a belief that some covert but influential organization is responsible for an unexplained event” (Oxford Living Dictionaries). The unexplained propels our interests and curiosity further as those who are looking for “refuge” from an unknown anxiety search for answers. This search leads back to questioning the overarching purpose of this text within a literary genre and within society. Why would DeLillo write something with a controversial figure such as Oswald in mind? Furthermore, why does his portrayal matter in terms of a literature genre and 1960s society? To possibly resolve the first question we can look to DeLillo’s past, in which he, like Oswald, was a boy from the Bronx. DeLillo believes that he understands Oswald even saying “I experienced it when I saw the places where he lived in New Orleans and in Dallas and in Fort Worth. I had a very clear sense of a man living on the margins of society. He was the kind of person we think we know until we delve more deeply” (DeCurtis). In that sense, we think we understand the history behind Oswald based on video footage, personal accounts, and the Warren Commission report, that is, until DeLillo unpacks this story to see the life of a boy from the Bronx. Despite everything collected by the Warren Commission and countless others interested in the Kennedy Assassination, DeLillo provides an alternative to the elusive truth. Libra works to embody the anxiety seen throughout the Cold War, by stepping back and looking at it from several perspectives.

Such anxiety is seen throughout Shannon Herbert’s essay, “Playing the Historical Record: DeLillo’s “Libra” and the Kennedy Archive.” Herbert focuses on the ways in which the Kennedy Assassination has been researched and dissected “in both the fictional and the real world” to better comprehend motivations and theories (Herbert 287). As mentioned earlier, DeLillo’s novel frames the assassination in such a way that it “is not an event to be known but an evidentiary landscape to be mastered” (Herbert 288). Therefore, the uncertainty seen throughout the novel thus “registers a cultural anxiety about and fixation on how our society produces truth” (Herbert 288). DeLillo recognizes this anxiety, and according to Herbert, used the Warren Commission report and documents from the Kennedy archive to provide context, but to also allow Libra to serve as “a critique and a symptom of the empirical apparatus” (Herbert 290). With this portrayal of Oswald DeLillo has merely created a work of fiction, but it is still unsettling to those who think that we produce fiction based on the truth we believe. If we believe, despite this being a fictitious account, that Oswald had all the makings of anyone else, with dreams and shortcomings, he becomes a little less like the hardened man of history he is made out to be. Through the fabrication perhaps we can find even a little bit of truth, less to do with Oswald’s actual life and more to do with the discomfort of looking at Oswald in a different light.

This narrative is no longer framed as an ode to Kennedy’s life, but rather as a fictional account of what Oswald’s story could have been. Oswald’s actual history proves to be a bit unsatisfying as he died before he was able to tell his side of the story. Perhaps this early demise plays into why there is a sort of resurgent interest in his story. DeLillo creates a true character in Oswald, one that can give insight into the mind of an assassin.

DeLillo’s Role

In 2005, DeLillo discussed the aura surrounding the assassination and the role that Lee Harvey Oswald plays in modern society:

In the summer of 2004, in New York, the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater offered a production titled The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald. I wasn’t aware of the show until the run was over and so I don’t know how the enduring mystery was solved, three shots or four, or maybe five, in the knee-jerk world of jointed puppets manipulated by strings (DeLillo 2).

DeLillo appears to be unsettled by this portrayal perhaps because it does not serve to prove anything other than what people expect, a cookie-cutter version of events, told similarly and in line with historical record. Oswald’s backstory is often left out of the Kennedy Assassination narrative, simply because it would humanize a killer rather than demonize him for killing the president. There is a great deal of truth and humanity when telling different sides of a story and perhaps it is difficult for our society to grapple with that; a tension exists between truth and impossibilities, but what if we were to entertain the two in the same sphere? The believed truth is often due to the video recordings of the time, but they do also leave out a lot. As DeLillo points out in an interview, “Kennedy was shot on film, Oswald was shot on TV. Does this mean anything? Maybe only that Oswald’s death became instantly repeatable. It belonged to everyone” (DeLillo “The Art of Fiction No. 135”). However, despite the existence of film footage DeLillo feels:

We’re still in the dark. What we finally have are patches and shadows. It’s still a mystery. There’s still an element of dream-terror. And one of the terrible dreams is that our most photogenic president is murdered on film. But there’s something inevitable about the Zapruder film. It had to happen this way. The moment belongs to the twentieth century, which means it had to be captured on film. (DeLillo “The Art of Fiction No. 135”).

This “dream-terror” as DeLillo calls it is linked to our fascination with this assassination and to looking at DeLillo as a post-television writer. In an interview given by DeLillo he is asked “one of the points you make is that television didn’t really come into its own until it filmed Oswald’s murder. Is it possible that one of the things that marks you as a writer is that you’re a post-television writer?” (Begley). DeLillo’s reliance on film and audio is made abundantly clear as he listened to Oswald’s voice, his mother’s voice, and watched compilations of amateur footage from the day of the assassination in order to prepare for writing this novel (DeCurtis 53). DeLillo has also said, “Listening to this man and then reading the things he had earlier written in his so-called historic diary, which is enormously chaotic and almost childlike, again seemed to point to a man who was a living self-contradiction” (DeCurtis 53). DeLillo’s perception of Oswald as a self-contradictory character also relates back to the intention with the title.

DeLillo chose “Libra” because it was Oswald’s astrological sign, “and because Libra refers to the scales, it seemed appropriate to a man who harbored contradictions and who could tilt either way” (DeCurtis 55). An astrological sign is often a powerful constant in one’s life, those who believe in its validity ascribe to its power. The concept of fate is also interwoven into this intricate understanding of one’s astrology. In terms of the novel, this fate is two-fold because DeLillo’s Oswald thinks a good deal about his future and the fate of his actions, however as a reader one goes into this novel knowing Oswald’s real fate. Fate is not just central to the literal meaning history gives us, but also to the view that DeLillo provides. The title connects DeLillo’s writing to actual historical record; in both scenarios Oswald is a Libra. In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake there is a relevant line that embodies DeLillo’s attempts to connect historical fiction to historical record in that “there’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too” (Atwood, MaddAddam). Even evidence becomes one more part of the many stories that are told, there is nothing that will completely answer who Oswald was, but DeLillo does attempt to see the alternative to history by giving a rich history to his already historical figure. DeLillo further attempts to reconcile these differences as a sort of reactionary piece to the Kennedy Assassination.

In an interview with Xan Brooks entitled, “Don DeLillo: ‘I think of myself as the kid from the Bronx,” we can see just how the Kennedy Assassination impacted DeLillo. Brooks even recalls a time when DeLillo said, “the Kennedy Assassination made him a writer,” and pushes that further by questioning what he meant by that. DeLillo’s sense and understanding of turmoil and the interest in writing on this subject become apparent in the below response:

Well, in the sense that it influenced me, although it probably influenced everyone. The assassination had an enormous impact, it changed everything. And all the turmoil that followed – the riots, the race problems, the violence – I think flowed from that one moment in Dallas. It was an enormous shock to the American system. It was like a bolt from outer space. Then you had the attendant question: was this done by a single individual, this lost boy Lee Harvey Oswald, or was it part of an elaborate conspiracy? And that uncertainty became a part of the environment we slept in and swam in. The sense that we were living in troubling times. (DeLillo “Don DeLillo: ‘I think of myself as the kid from the Bronx”).

DeLillo understands the troubling times because he lived through them and witnessed, just as many other Americans, Kennedy’s assassination. His experience allows for a more personal response toward the event, while also analyzing the possibilities if things were different, or at least framed differently.

The framework for this novel is crucial because it exposes where historical fiction deviates from actual historical events. Jeremy Egner’s piece “In Movies, Books and TV, a Rabbit Hole of Kennedy Conspiracies” for The New York Times provides a nice analysis of DeLillo’s work in which he “weaves together fact and literary invention to create a fictional biography of Oswald, [a] would-be assassin not unlike many angry men of literature: misunderstood, antisocial and emotionally isolated” (Egner). Egner also touches upon Oswald’s role in the novel: “he’s the crux of the whole thing, though, like most of us, a victim of circumstance” (Egner). Seeing Oswald as a victim of circumstance is a complicated viewpoint to take on, however, Anne Tyler tracks Oswald’s movements throughout the story in a review from 1988 called “Dallas, Echoing Down the Decades.” Tyler mentions Oswald “as a high school dropout in New Orleans, a marine at a U-2 base in Japan, a factory worker in Russia and finally as an order filler at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas” (Tyler). These various roles throughout Oswald’s life were all culminating to his last memorable role as the man who assassinated President Kennedy.

DeLillo’s Oswald

In terms of our actual history, the question of who killed Kennedy becomes the overarching reason we are interested in Oswald, rather than the historical fiction produced by DeLillo. However, DeLillo’s Oswald has a personality that complicates the narrative that was constructed after his death. He is portrayed as a boy who has emotional and psychological issues as he struggles to live with his mother in cramped spaces. Marguerite Oswald often takes on the position that the world operates according to cause and effect so as to justify or explain Oswald’s questionable character (Michael). Just as she knows him, Oswald knows her better than anyone else,

He could smell the air she moved through, could smell her clothes hanging behind a door, a tropical mist of corsets and toilet water. He entered bathrooms in the full aura of her stink. He heard her mutter in her sleep, grinding the death’s-head teeth. He knew what she would say; saw the gestures before she made them (DeLillo 35).

Marguerite Oswald’s very nature begins to have a direct effect on Oswald from an early age. They are so close that they both know all of their external ticks, everything that she does throughout the day is observed by Oswald, which only annoys him more and more as he starts taking up new hobbies. Despite his annoyance with his mother, she also serves as a humanizing character who defends her son’s humanity saying, “Lee was a happy baby. Lee had a dog…he used to climb the tops of roofs with binoculars, looking at the stars, and they sent him to Russia on a mission. Lee Harvey Oswald is more than meets the eye” (DeLillo 451). She aims to portray Oswald as misunderstood and used by various organizations, however no one can definitively ever separate his name from the conspiracy surrounding the assassination.

Yet Oswald’s dissatisfaction with most people becomes more apparent as his interactions are terse and hostile, especially when overstaying his welcome at a friend’s house. However, the most interesting part throughout all of this is knowing how the narrative ends. Although DeLillo creates a fictional tale, Kennedy is still assassinated and Oswald also dies before telling his side of the story. Perhaps in a way, this is a fictionalized ode to Oswald’s story, as if DeLillo understood the people’s frustrations and chose to play out what it would mean to have a tangible story. DeLillo even voices his opinion of Oswald: “I think [he] was a person who lost his faith—his faith in politics and in the possibility of change—and who entered the last months of his life not very different from the media-poisoned boys who would follow” (DeLillo “The Art of Fiction No. 135”). There is a reason the novel begins with Oswald as a child riding on the subway in New York City; his shift from a curious boy to disenchanted man plays into the mounting anxiety and hysteria surrounding the 60s. In the beginning he enjoys the thrill of the world beneath the city as he watches people come and go; he feels this “inner power” that he would never feel again “in his short life” even though “he was riding just to ride” (DeLillo 13). DeLillo repeats this last phrase several times to emphasize Oswald’s youth and curiosity for the world. And yet there is no comfort in his youthful ignorance and enjoyment as we are reminded of “his short life” in the same breath.

Soon Oswald becomes not only the lone gunman who is known throughout history, but the man of DeLillo’s choosing. DeLillo’s choice to create a pseudo-past for Oswald serves to remind his readers of the secrecy and pervasiveness of assassins throughout and beyond the Cold War. Furthermore, this assassin is less like the flat, dark, shadowy figure of imagination and more like a round, complex, and even sympathetic man with a past. DeLillo does not aim to comfort the reader with his subject matter and when prompted about this discomfort he believes “this reader…he already feels uncomfortable. He’s very uncomfortable. And maybe what he needs is a book that will help him realize he’s not alone” (DeLillo “The Art of Fiction No. 135”). Resolution is something that the reader seeks, not only within the novel, but with history as well. However, a definite resolution is complicated because there is no fixed meaning to Oswald’s story, some believe that he has a history that should be explored while others only see him as an assassin.

Magnali Cornier Michael complicates the historicity of DeLillo’s framework in the essay “The Political Paradox Within Don DeLillo’s Libra.” Michael recognizes that there is neither a complete truth nor resolution to a conspiracy such as the one that surrounds JFK’s assassination. Michael’s reading of this novel does not see DeLillo as constructing a “radical political reading” of the assassination, but instead proposes that this endless search for information and truth simply leads back to sheer coincidence. This theory focuses less on the skepticism that follows this conspiracy and more on the cultural significance that this novel creates. Michael suggests that DeLillo’s work in Libra “considers only the breakdown of the Western tradition, of the certainties on which it depends, and of its version of political agenda and individual agency” (Michael 154). Michael’s interpretation looks into the role of coincidence that DeLillo similarly explores as well as his look at fate.

However, from George F. Will’s perspective, DeLillo misses the mark with his work in Libra. Will provides a literary critique of DeLillo’s choices in an article entitled “Don DeLillo’s ‘Libra’ From Jfk Killing, Ideological Debilitation Of Literary Talent.” This article criticizes DeLillo’s choices within his novel, Libra, as it is “one of about 20 pouring forth on the Kennedy assassination [and] is an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship” (Will). Yet DeLillo prefaces this unsettling subject matter in the ‘Author’s Note’ where he calls “this a work of imagination. While drawing from historical record, I’ve made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination” (DeLillo). DeLillo’s seemingly bad citizenship is merely speculative as he attempts to grapple with the assassination after the fact. He feels that there is this missing sense of “manageable reality” despite being removed from the time period, while also a greater sense of awareness for “elements like randomness and ambiguity and chaos since then” (DeCurtis). DeLillo situates himself within this unsettling and uncertain feeling “about our grip on reality” and responds to Will’s criticism that we should be “bad citizens” in the sense that “we’re writing against what power represents, and what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job” (Michaud). DeLillo adopts the same outsider mentality that he believes himself and Oswald to be.

The criticism does not end with the novel, but it continues on as Will shuts down DeLillo’s “lunatic conspiracy theory” calling into question DeLillo’s search for evidence and “historical likelihood” (Will). Will takes direct quotes from interviews given by DeLillo, and turns them into negative and unfounded thoughts. While he does call DeLillo a good writer he questions his paranoia, skepticism, and outlook for the American consciousness when he accuses DeLillo’s rejection of randomness as leading to the “intimation that America is a sick society that breeds extremism and conspiracies; and that Oswald was a national type, a product of the culture” (Will). He further calls DeLillo a bad influence and says that his “lurid imaginings will soothe immature people who want to believe that behind large events there must be large ideas or impersonal forces or conspiracies” (Will). Although a bit scathing at times, Will does help to complicate the conspiracy narrative. His approach is much more realistic and rooted in the randomness of life rather than the much more fatalistic viewpoint that DeLillo offers. As DeLillo calls the assassination “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century,” Will provides various other examples of assassins such as Sirhan, Ray, Bremer, and Hinckley. Unlike DeLillo’s Oswald who Will calls a “lonely neurotic who tried to shed ordinariness by lunging into the theater of the Kennedys” these other assassins have “been marginal, not social successes” (Will). Success aside, Will’s critique touches upon society’s interest with the conspiracy narrative and how it can be viewed within a larger context.

Conspiracy and Assassins

The conspiracy narrative can be seen throughout various mediums such as film and television. The 1960s gave rise to a new age in surveillance and subject matter with the rise of the Cold War and threats to America as seen with emerging Communist ideology. The unrest of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis framed the 1960s as a turbulent time. Oswald’s depiction is an extremely relevant portrayal of the anxiety-driven time period. Although Libra was written and published after the Kennedy Assassination and Oswald’s death, the timing is incredibly important. Louis Menand makes mention of the way Kennedy is viewed in society in his article “Brainwashed: Where the “Manchurian Candidate” came from” for The New Yorker. Menand frames the 1962 film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate, originally written by Richard Condon and directed by John Frankenheimer, in a way that complicates the view of the Kennedy Assassination:

Almost no one thinks of Kennedy (except in some convoluted way) as a casualty of the Cold War, and his death does not represent the culmination of the national anxiety about Communist infiltration. It represents the end of that obsession, and of the panic that Condon’s novel and Frankenheimer’s movie both so happily exploit (Menand).

This film adaptation questions the role of the original author and director. Menand describes an encounter that the author experienced “immediately after Kennedy was shot, Condon got a call from a newspaper reporter asking if he felt responsible” (Menand). To blame Condon for his writing plays on a bit of the anxiety and turmoil that directly followed the assassination. However, as Menand suggests, Condon “had not introduced political assassination to popular American culture” (Menand). In several ways Condon, Frankenheimer, and DeLillo are very similar. They each have a vision of what it means to portray a political assassination. Where Condon and Frankenheimer draw from a time before the assassination, DeLillo responds to it. This way the assassin genre becomes much more diverse as we see the Kennedy Assassination within the context of the time before and the time after.

DeLillo uses his historical knowledge as a guide to historicizing a piece of fiction, such as Oswald’s. Tyler supports this historical glimpse into fiction and some of the questions that DeLillo may have asked himself,

What if, Mr. DeLillo asks, the assassination was a C.I.A. conspiracy? What if agency operatives, disgusted by the Bay of Pigs debacle and alarmed at signs of growing rapprochement between Kennedy and Castro, schemed to stage an unsuccessful attempt on Kennedy's life that would implicate Castro supporters? And what if they seized upon Lee Harvey Oswald - a onetime defector to Russia, sole member of his own unauthorized branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee - as the man to shoulder the blame? And finally, what if they decided in the end that a successful attempt would be even more effective than an unsuccessful attempt? (Tyler).

Tyler’s questions provoke an evocative and poignant approach to DeLillo’s work and frame his novel in a way that is new from all other theories and work. DeLillo’s approach to writing Libra is developed in a book titled “Introducing Don DeLillo” by Frank Lentricchia.

And yet, as previously mentioned above, there is another example of the assassination genre in the 1960s. The Manchurian Candidate’s protagonist, Raymond Shaw, is thrust into the limelight after “saving” his fellow soldiers during the Korean War. However, all of this fame is manufactured to ultimately turn Shaw into a weapon as well as an assassin. Shaw is similarly “manipulated by strings” as DeLillo mentions in his introduction of a 2004 play on Oswald, The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Despite different mediums and time periods (pre-Kennedy assassination and post-Kennedy assassination), Shaw and Oswald parallel one another because they serve as contrasting and atypical assassins due to their humanizing portrayals in The Manchurian Candidate and Libra. Susan Carruthers has even compared “the role of Raymond Shaw, who serves as the young ex-military man, recently returned to the United States from a Communist nation to Lee Harvey Oswald” (Carruthers). Furthermore, both men, within the framework of DeLillo and Frankenheimer’s artistic licenses, have problematic relationships with their mothers, love interests, and authoritative male characters.

Despite his complicated childhood DeLillo’s Oswald is described as having,

Such naked aspiration in his eyes. He was trying to get a grip on the world. Facts, words, historic ideas. He struggled against his fate, yes, exactly, like someone in the social universe of Marx. He believed genuinely in high principles and aims even if he was not yet assured of a sense of perspective. At twenty years old, all you know is that you’re twenty. Everything else is a mist that swirls around this fact. He slit his wrist to stay in Russia (DeLillo 165).

DeLillo’s Oswald has a difficult time coping with the way his mind works. He is twenty years old, but has been through a great deal in that short time period. A passage such as this one allows DeLillo to continually humanize Oswald. While this does not mean that he is innately good or bad by any means, it does show that he struggles with things just as all humans do. You can start to see that he is in no way a flat character because he is too complicated to be reduced down to that. Here DeLillo is pushing against historical accounts that leave out a great deal of his life in exchange for creating a villain who killed the president.

In one scene Oswald sits down to watch television, Suddenly starring Frank Sinatra comes on. DeLillo provides a short summary of the film in which “Frank Sinatra is a combat veteran who comes to a small town and takes over a house that overlooks the railroad depot. He is here to assassinate the President” (DeLillo 369). Oswald’s reaction is a bit odd considering he “felt a stillness around him [Sinatra]. He has an eerie sense he was being watched for his reaction” (DeLillo 369). While Oswald’s mind could simply just be wandering as he watches, the experience becomes even more surreal as he “felt connected to the events on the screen. It was like secret instructions entering the network of signals and broadcast bands, the whole busy air of transmission” (DeLillo 370). This moment in the novel serves as a movement toward a different theory that is alluded to by DeLillo but not explicitly expressed. In the context of DeLillo’s novel perhaps the films that Oswald watches have served as a trigger for his hostility and exposure to political assassinations.

From Oswald’s true historical life, Menand refers to a book by John Loken, Oswald’s Trigger Films, where he believes that Oswald saw The Manchurian Candidate in Dallas, Texas. The real Oswald “had a habit of going to the movies by himself…[and] was [even] in a movie theatre when he was arrested on November 22, 1963” (Menand). Menand calls attention to Loken’s issue that The Manchurian Candidate is almost never referenced “in the literature, official and otherwise, on the Kennedy assassination” (Menand). Loken believes “the probably Oswald connection, so utterly obvious if one but thinks about it, has been suppressed for decades by a powerful conglomerate that might aptly be called the ‘media-entertainment complex’” (Menand). We can begin to see where DeLillo’s interpretations blur with reality because of the connections to film/TV and how they seemed to facilitate hostility within Oswald.

In the novel Oswald is troubled by his connection to the assassin in Suddenly and in real life it is suggested that he saw The Manchurian Candidate. These are deeply troubled men, who are portrayed as such for a reason. In a larger context, the assassin genre works alongside the conspiracy genre and ultimately the search for truth, even where truth cannot be found.

On one level we can see these characters for who they are: troubled young men who are disenchanted with the American political system. But they can also be seen as controlled and trained killers. Yet these two levels seem to point back to their upbringing and experiences. Both men are seen as awkward with antisocial tendencies; they are incredibly intelligent but have problematic relationships. DeLillo highlights Oswald’s difficulties in connecting with family and friends, but he also has a sordid past with authority and institutions.

As a young boy he took to reading Marxist books and “his brother’s Marine Corps manual, to prepare for the day when he’d enlist” (DeLillo 41). Oswald retreats into books and difficult ideology to escape from the taunting that he is a Yankee in the south, but it soon begins to cultivate and develop his understanding of the world. The books began to “[alter] the room, charge it with meaning,” despite the otherwise dismal surroundings (DeLillo 41). He started to see not only his surrounding differently, but “he saw himself as a part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law (DeLillo 41). He began to feel a part of something despite always feeling like an outsider.

DeLillo frames Oswald’s hypothetical history in an interesting way as he begins to question what a lifetime of actions mean when compared to one tremendous action. DeLillo seems to prove that there is more to history than the few accounts and moments we can call upon. There are a vast amount of stories and lives that play into why a person becomes who they do.

Bernard Beck presents a unique argument toward this issue of understanding assassins in "This Gun For Hire: The Fascination Of Movie Assassins" because he focuses on our obsession with heroes, villains, killers, and death. Specifically, “assassinations have been offered that are contemporary and historical, domestic and foreign, noble and despicable, passionate and cold-blooded” (Beck 30). These stories are similar to other exciting genres where “the combination of killing and professionalism results in a unique kind of story that poses unique problems for modern culture” (Beck 30). The problematic nature that is at the heart of the stories solidifies our fascination, as a culture, with not only killing and death but with the motivations behind the actions. Beck argues that there is a sort of attachment that evolves from the assassin and assassin genre. He states, “in assassin movies the detachment of the noble professional is replaced by the cold-bloodedness of the senseless killer” (Beck 31). He says that we find ourselves being called back to this genre and character due, in part, to the cold-blooded and contractual nature of their work. Beck works to take out sentimentality when looking at an assassin because in the movies it becomes a “figure that is the ultimate professional, the efficient worker who is unconnected to any community or code of ethics” (Beck 31).

However, in both the film The Manchurian Candidate and the novel Libra the two assassins appear less than professional and are still tied to the community in some way. Frankenheimer and DeLillo frame the assassins in such a way that we see them as dynamic characters rather than shadowy and collected assassins. Shaw and Oswald have relationships throughout their time in the film and the novel. They each have an attachment to their mothers and to certain moral code, which complicates the view that they are both the ultimate assassins. Then again, as Beck goes on that “assassins are shown as nonexistent persons, with no ‘real’ names… furthermore, assassins have no idea of who they are…by brain washing, as in The Manchurian Candidate” (Beck 32). Perhaps Shaw and Oswald complicate what it means to be a full-fledged assassin, partly because we see them as humans rather than emotionless robots.

DeLillo’s Oswald can be seen as more of an accidental assassin; despite his telling past and exposure to trigger films, he is not groomed to become one like Shaw is. Shaw’s role is more akin to the brainwashed follower who has no real agency. DeLillo’s Oswald has plenty of free will and agency which he expresses and exercises. The Oswald of this novel is not presented as a born killer/assassin because we see his development over time. This leads back to the original question of whether or not one moment can define you. DeLillo pushes against that theory in order to create a fictitious, yet incredibly fascinating character.

Within the confines of post-TV era writing, DeLillo works to create a world that is embedded in Cold War anxiety. However, the question that comes to mind is if this anxiety already existed or if it was created as a result of the assassination? On a cultural level we can see that there were many films and novels before and after the assassination, which could mean that the issues were always there, but the assassination validated certain anxieties and fears. This single event in history was short, but had a tremendous impact on DeLillo as a writer and as an American citizen. Libra is often read as a piece of historical fiction because that is what DeLillo calls it. However, the issues surrounding a political assassination are not isolated to one example, they are embedded within our society. In the sense that this novel fits within the assassin genre perhaps means that there is now life and a face to a hidden figure. The real Oswald’s life has been dissected over the years with many theorizing and assuming they understand the truth.

However, DeLillo’s novel is embedded with ambiguities, so much so that one cannot necessarily come to a complete truth. This may be an unsettling fact for some, but for others such as DeLillo and Nicholas Branch, the agent in charge of collecting Oswald’s information in the novel, they are merely observers who absorb all of the information that they can. As a whole you look at this text and are confused by what it means—what DeLillo means, but certain parts give you a glimpse into the life of a man that never was—someone who DeLillo created. But also could have existed in all actuality. He questions whether Oswald can be a literary character as well as a real person and if both can occur at the same time.

There is no finality to this story because it will always go round and round. DeLillo makes it so that you cannot fully like Oswald, but you can’t fully hate him either. He is human and despite his actions, there was a great deal of purpose and meaning leading up to the event that would tie his name to the term assassin. While this is possibly an unnerving concept, to humanize a killer, this perspective may also be quite comforting, knowing there is a story to be told. Oswald was never given the chance to tell his side of the story, which only reaffirms our intrigue into the life of a man who is both forgotten and remembered throughout history. Ultimately we remember the name and the action, but forget the life before.

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