As I first started reading Libra, I happened to always find myself seeing Lee as a fictional character. I mean, Lee is a fictional character in a sense but I just couldn't associate him with the Lee Harvey Oswald I learned about growing up. It's not like I always thought "How could this book portray this cold blooded murderer as an innocent and naive character?" it's just that Lee in Libra and Lee Harvey Oswald had no connections with each other in my mind, they were separate people/characters.
I have a few theories as to why I never associated the two. My first theory is that Lee is more fictional than Lee Harvey Oswald in a sense that Lee has everything a fictional character has. We get Lee's feelings, thoughts, motives, etc. in the book whereas in history all we really get from Lee Harvey Oswald is the the laid out facts. Another theory that I have, and this may be intertwined with my first, is that all I knew about Lee Harvey Oswald before reading Libra was that he killed the president. Thus, reading about Lee's upbringing, life while serving in the army, marriage, etc. was all new to me. The reason I can easily see this playing a big role in how I perceived Lee as a fictional character is because as I neared the assassination in the book, I kept seeing Lee meld more and more into a historical figure. Maybe also by the point Lee's fictionality was withering away as I could look back on Lee's life in the book and understand why the assassination went down the way it did.
Interesting. I had the exact opposite reaction: right from the start I couldn't separate the fictional Lee from the historical one, and as it went on he seemed less like the historical one. I think this is partially because I already knew about historical accounts of Oswald's life, so nothing was really new--Atsugi, defecting to Russia, taking a photo with a gun and Marxist pamphlets--I already knew those were part of the historical Oswald, so once the first few chapters were over he seemed firmly cemented in the factual past.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Lee Harvey Oswald will always be connected to his life-defining final act--and I suppose once someone (allegedly!) commits murder, he's a "cold-blooded murderer" by definition. (And no matter what excuses or qualifications might be made as to the "cold-bloodedness" of the shooting of Kennedy, his killing of the police officer fully fits the bill.) And in a way, this what it means for him to "become historical"--everything about his life will now be viewed through the lens of this one defining act. But he wasn't "always" going to kill the president, and there's nothing obviously "cold-blooded" about Lee in the earlier chapters. (Except maybe his plot to kill Walker--but even that seems less about killing and more about a political statement.)
ReplyDeleteThe idea that a "murderer" could emerge from such a life is in some ways scarier than imagining him as "always" lurking with murder in his heart. Ferrie just "tips the scales" enough, and the murderer emerges.