Don DeLillo takes every popular conspiracy theory surrounding JFK’s death and compiles it all into Libra. It is a chilling novel, showing how a few angry CIA agents managed to plan a major historical event due to their bitterness and even more chilling to think about how this possibly could have actually happened, with those actually responsible for JFK's death never being caught. Libra also takes a deep dive into Lee Harvey Oswald’s personal life. I always believed Oswald’s motivation for the assassination of the 35th American president was due to his communist views. However, reading through Libra makes me think that Oswald’s main goal was simply to get attention, which somehow is far worse than differing political ideology.
As we discussed in class, Oswald clearly wanted to go down as a major historical figure. He desperately wants to be different from the crowd. Sometimes when reading Libra, I felt like Oswald mainly became a communist so that he could stand out of the crowd. We see him praising communism to his fellow marines while stationed in Atsugi, and he quite literally acts like a redditor. He clearly thinks he knows better than everybody else, and always tries to insert some sort of “well actually” comment into his conservations. One theory I had for why Oswald would end up the way that he was because he did not grow up with a father. The lack of a parental figure during childhood might have driven Oswald to crave more attention then one normally would.
One might wonder how different would history have been if Oswald had received an amount of attention he thought was adequate enough. I personally think that JFK would not have been murdered, at least not by Oswald. Unfortunately though, he never did get enough attention and decided to change the course of history so that he could finally get some. What is ironic is how Lee Harvey Oswald spent his entire life trying to become the center of attention, and when he finally achieved that, he died just two days later.
