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.
1 comment:
"Accepting the role" might be one way to look at it. In a rather Joycean sense, what Lee seems to be proposing is to *study* his "role"--the "character" and "plot" of "Lee Harvey Oswald." (Not so unlike James Joyce making a study of "Stephen Dedalus.") Lee is ready to become a *writer*, which makes sense, in a way.
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