Lee and Identity

We talked a lot today about Lee having issues with a concept of self. He has a certain willingness to maintain the difficult position of being a communist sympathizer in the marines, but his idealism as a marxist is almost constantly undermined in a fashion that can't help but remind me of Joyce. Much of Lee's character is left very ambiguous, so the question becomes that if it hard for us to know who lee is does he even know? Is that smile holding the powerful secret of the true interpretation of who Lee really is or does he have no clue just like everyone else and is laughing at the absurdity of his own situation?

I think one important aspect of Lee as a negative Libran is the sense in which he is influenced by others because he doesn't know who he is and is looking for someone to craft an identity for him. It is possible to read his struggle to merge his life with a marxist version of history as a surrender of the struggle to forge his own identity and instead embrace his role in history. This becomes nearly literal for him with Win Everett who tries to create an entire other persona for Lee, when he is with the Russians they remark that they believe defectors go to Russia to be given "a second and safer identity." Lee because he is a spy and a double agent is constantly having various  personas created for him and being taught how to be different people.  It is hard to see this as Lee purely taking on other peoples roles because he is never just who people say he is, he simultaneously fulfills multiple interpretations of who he is without ever being just one of those interpretations. 

It is fascinating that at the end of the novel Lee would seem to finally accept a role, his epiphany in which he decides to become the lone gunman could be seen as his acceptance of a role someone else has written for him. Ferrie's talk that he has been pulled towards this by fate and Lee's fatalistic acceptance of the fact that he must shoot Kennedy further reinforce Lee giving into a role created for him, this time by fate rather than a plotter. Because Lee is such an ambiguous figure in this novel I am unwilling to say whether at the end Lee becomes the easily influenced negative Libran who accepts roles written for him, I think the question of which Lee is is still very much up in the air, and Lee never really got the chance to decide for himself as he is killed at an incredibly young age.

The Night Lee Spent in Prison

In our class discussions we mostly focused on lee’s time in prison as an example of DeLilo keeping Lee ambiguous. Lee sees himself going through an intensely transformative experience that all the great men of history have undergone and we see him doing 28 days in the Brig for a minor offense. The passage in which his cell mate masturbates is a prime example of this, Lee looks for some sort of crafty older figure in prison to show him the ropes and he gets this instead.
    What is interesting though is that Lee does undergo a transformative experience but it is not a personal realization in his cell, it is a lesson beaten into him by a prison guard when Lee tries to use the bathroom. Lee and another man are quizzed on the marine handbook the other man is beaten because he does not know, Lee is beaten because the guard thinks he is arrogant to assume he can give a correct answer. I think this is the point where Lee, who had studied the Marine handbook frantically ever since he was a small child, loses some sort of faith in the concept of being a marine and any tolerance for being part of the U.S. which he believes to be a police state.
    What I find most interesting about this is that just like at the end of the novel, when Lee seems reluctant to shoot JFK and does it anyway and then undergoes a transformative experience. Here Lee, who believed in his ability to transform himself in prison, does not transform himself but is transformed. He seeks out history in the prison, but doesn't find it in the contemplative time in his cell as he expected, he finds it in the prison beatings. Lee is swept into history even when he tries to join it, foreshadowing some of Ferrie’s mystical beliefs about the nature of history.