Are Books Like Libra Harmful?

Libra’s subject matter made me question the ethics of historical fiction when I first started reading it. Something about using JFK’s assassination for fiction felt a bit off. We’ve had other historical figures in previous books, such as Evelyn Nesbit and Houdini in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, but political assassinations felt a bit too touchy.

I think what initially made me feel iffy about E.L. Doctorow's depiction of Lee Oswald was how he set him up to be perceived as an underdog. The book starts off depicting Lee’s hardships, namely his bullying. He skipped school often due to bullying, and when he did, his bullies beat him up because they thought it was funny Lee sounded like a Yankee (DeLillo 32-33). Although I felt bad for Lee, I couldn’t help but feel like DeLillo was in a way trying to sympathize with someone most readers knew to later be a killer.

I remember later having a discussion in class about whether we found Oswald likeable or not. Diza was not super fond of him. She didn’t like how DeLillo painted him out as this poor guy who was coerced into shooting someone, and per her blog, she wasn’t exactly fond of how DeLillo was platforming an arguable attention-seeker. Why not focus on the person who died and what that event did to America? In that discussion, though, someone (I believe Kyle?) talked about how including Lee’s past humanized him. I think there’s some merit to that. Everything is caused by something, in Lee’s case, a rough upbringing among many others. There’s also some truth in that DeLillo never explicitly told us what to think of Lee, rather, he wrote with neutrality and let us form our own opinions.

Now that I’m close to the book’s end, I’ve decided that Libra’s subject matter is in fact too touchy, but it nonetheless has its purpose. Writing fanfiction (if you will) about someone’s murder is uncomfortable and ethically questionable, but those types of things make people think and discuss. Delillo’s rather neutral depictions of the different events in Lee’s life invites readers to come up with their own interpretations. As seen in the discussion about Lee’s likeability, it was still easy for readers to determine his hardships weren’t good enough to excuse his actions, and it was just as easy for other readers to say they understood Lee more. Books like Libra invite us to discuss how we understand morality and whether it’s productive to sympathize with people we know are wrong at the end of the day. Not very many people will disagree that murder is wrong, but the context that surrounds it is more than worth talking about.


Work Cited

DeLillo, Don. Libra. Viking Press, 1988.

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