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.