Marguerite Oswald

Lee's mother Marguerite is the one who really gets the bad end of the deal in Libra. A single mother who was divorced twice, that was cheated on and then received not a penny of a  settlement in one of the divorces even though the man she married was quite wealthy. She was then left to raise Lee on a minimum wage job that she has to work long hours at. She repeatedly is having to fight for her and Lee's livelihood, though she deserves so much better. Lee doesn't really help her out much either. All Lee does is skip school, ride the subways, and resent her and tell her things like "I am entitled to better."and "They're [Lee's brothers] in the service to get away from you." (DeLillo, 35) . Then after taking care of Lee, and working her ass off for him for years, he high tails it to Russia and gets married, without a word to his mother. Even when he gets back to the states, he avoids his mother for a while, then when he can't avoid her any longer he only begrudgingly agrees to allow her to visit himself, Marina, and her only grandchild June. Marguerite doesn't seem to be a particularity overbearing mother, or have an annoying personality, Lee just treats her badly because he can, much like he does with Marina.

When Lee is taken custody for the assassination of Kennedy, it has been a year since Marguerite has seen him and suddenly she is thrown into the chaos with Lee as reporters and F.B.I. agents hound her for information, as she tells Lee "I told them I didn't even know about the new grandchild. I had to endure a year of silence and now there is family news everyday on the radio." (DeLillo, 423). When Marguerite was telling all of this to the F.B.I. agents they kept saying to her "But you are the mother", which adds humiliation to the event because yes, she is the mother. She raised Lee, a murderer, an assassin. Not only that but she was so out of touch in his life, granted not of her accord, that she didn't even know about one of her own grandchildren being born, so now she has to answer to why her son turned out the way he did to the whole country.

When Lee is shot just days after Marguerite sees him for the first time in a year, she has to go through the pain of not only losing her son, but having his death broadcast and played over and over on television for the whole nation to see. She has to face preachers that turn her away because they don't want to pray over a murderer. Her son, the murderer. While Marguerite is at the funeral, she is pleading her case to a judge in her head, insisting that she wasn't a bad mother, and Lee wasn't a bad boy, rather that he was the victim of a plot his whole life.

I don't think Marguerite was a bad mother, she did what she could with what little she had and she obviously cared about Lee. Now all of a sudden, Lee is dead and was found guilty of killing the President of the United States, and she is left alone in the world to carry the burden of his crime.

Kudos, DeLillo

I don't know if I'm particularly  "enjoying" the reading the novel, though time seems to crawl a little faster while I'm reading it now that the plot is nearing the actual assassination. Even so, my attention is not quite captured. Maybe it's purely a generational thing, but I just don't find the Kennedy assassination to be something worth obsessing over. I guess I've always just taken the facts at face value. Plus, we know a lot more facts about the assassination now than people did when it initially happened. However, after attempting to create my own historical short story, I have much more respect/appreciation for what DeLillo had to go through to write this book that I find so hard to read, especially since the internet wasn't mainstream until the 1990s so he had to do all of his research without all the information at his fingertips.

There is so much detail, and research that must've been done to provide that detail, which is pretty unmatched in the books we've read thus far (though perhaps somewhat in Ragtime). I can imagine there was also a lot of pressure on DeLillo since there were probably a lot of people who were Kennedy assassination junkies and would be scouring the book for errors, along with the general pressure to represent a historically significant event in America well. I think DeLillo really did a great job representing all the known information, and even adding some speculated information with the grassy knoll shooter, as unbiased and accurately as possible. We talked a bit in class about how Branch really represents DeLillo in the novel, showing how varied, random, and obscure much of the evidence and data was on the Kennedy assassination. I really like the image of Branch sitting in his paper-covered office and spending hours sifting through it all and trying  to find what's important out of it, because I imagine DeLillo had a very similar experience.  (I experienced a minute version of this while writing my own novella, though I never encountered any photographs of goat heads filled with gelatin.)

Librans

There is a lot of talk about scales and balance when David Ferrie talks about Libras and Oswald. David Ferrie is an interesting character on his own, a devout believer in, well, anything. Astrology is no exception, so when he learned that Oswald's birthday was October 18 he immediately recognized  he was a Libra and decided he knew everything he needed to know about him. "He is well balanced, levelheaded, a sensible fellow respected by all. We have the negative Libran who is, let's say, somewhat unsteady and impulsive. Easily, easily, easily influenced. Poised to make the dangerous leap." (DeLillo, 315).  It surprisingly describes what we've seen of Oswald thus far very well. We've seen him several times heavily influenced by Marxist ideals and Trotsky, and his immediate buy-into the communist utopia of Russia. His impulsiveness is also evident. Oswald doesn't really stop and think, things through weighing the pros and cons against one another. Once he gets an idea, he just runs with it full speed, like his General Walker assassination plot, and moving to Russia.

All of these aspects of a Libra, plus his naivete, sets up Oswald to be the perfect candidate in the CIA's plot to take a shot at the president. He can be manipulated to do anything and won't have he good sense to stop and think about what he's doing, the things that could go wrong, and the consequences. Especially since the consequences turn out to be more than Oswald bargained for.