This took a while....

The title of this most recent/rather late post both represents my thoughts on this post, though more importantly it  pretty much sums up my views on reading Libra: it drags on forever. I don't think the reading sections themselves are super long, it's just very dense and detailed writing that can be very demanding if you want to go try to stay focused and retain all of the information. I find the sections that follow Oswald's life around to be moderately interesting; it's more the scenes with the C.I.A. agents that can  be confusing to  keep straight and dull hearing going through their monotonous dialogue and shenanigans. It seems like it takes twice as long to read the C.I.A. chapters than the ones about Oswald.

Before we started DeLillo, we had watched a film in history class about the whole JFK assassination by giving us pretty much a four day play by play of all the events before and after. In the movie there was so much speculation and mystery around Oswald that I didn't feel like it was concrete that it was completely confirmed that Oswald was the one who shot the president since he was completely denying it (which I realize many people deny committing crimes to get out of trouble, but perhaps I imagined more of a defiant revolutionary reaction to being caught) and there was the whole issue about the grassy knoll and multiple shots. I found it interesting that the DeLillo addresses the possibility of Oswald being set up by the C.I.A.  pretty much right off the bat as he shows all the secret levels and clearances and plots that even the president doesn't know about it. The immediate shadow of a doubt that DeLillo gives Oswald made it easier to take Oswald as his own character in the story instead of being labeled throughout as a killer.

A Not-So-Happy Ending

I'm a big fan of happy endings. It gives a sense of closure when the problem is resolved and you're happy with how things turn out in the book. I don't see the point in reading a book if the ending is just going to make me angry or annoyed. The ending is one of the most important parts of the book since it's probably what the reader is going to remember the most, so it has to be done well. Normally when I finish reading a book I like to be left with a satisfied feeling that I've gained something from all the time I spent reading it. That something was achieved in the book. That it wasn't a waste. When I finished reading Kindred I didn't really get that satisfied feeling. Probably because the ending wasn't a satisfying one at all. I was really enjoying the novel up until the last couple chapters. Well, I guess until the last section. Everything just started to fall apart once we found out Alice killed herself. You could pretty much tell from that point on in the novel things weren't going to pan out so well but you just had to endure it, and it just becomes like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

What really bothered me about the ending of the book was that it was Dana who had to take Rufus out. Like, really? We just spent the entire book watching her spend years of her life in 19th century helping Rufus and being a slave on his plantation and enduring all kinds of hardships and she's just going to stab him after all that? She could've just let Rufus commit suicide like he was going to anyway. At least that way his death would have seemed somewhat justified. Rufus would've gained a lot more of my favor if he had killed himself (kind of weird to say, but true) since then it would've seemed like Rufus was remorseful of his actions and that he had learned his lesson. Instead he just turns around and tries to rape Dana.

The fact that Dana lost  an arm to her time traveling experience also bothered me.  She had plenty of scars that she got from whippings and even Kevin has a scar on his forehead, isn't that enough of a physical reminder of what they experienced?  I realize that Butler is trying to make a point about slavery and how it scars the individuals permanently, but regardless I don't like that Butler made it impossible for Dana to go back to normal life afterwards since she's now disabled. I don't really know why, but somehow that doesn't sit well with me.