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.
No comments:
Post a Comment