This document provides a dense analysis of Don DeLillo's novel Libra and the complexities involved in understanding the identity of Lee Harvey Oswald. It discusses how Oswald has been transformed from a living person into a dead cultural icon mediated through endless reassessments in media. Due to this endless mediation and proliferation of conflicting information, fully understanding who Oswald was is impossible. The document examines how DeLillo's novel attempts to negotiate these complications without providing definitive answers, reflecting how Oswald's identity remains an open question.

1. The Three Lees – Physical Absence, Media Presence, and Identity Negotiation in DeLillo’s
Libra
Joe Anderson
PhD Candidate, Literary Studies
Georgia State University
Consider the potential interpretive differences between the following questions: Who is
Lee Harvey Oswald? Who was he? The obvious difference is one of tense, and while we as
theorists are sometimes quick to leap past the obvious implications of basic sentence
construction, the Hegelian attitude we will come to assume in this examination of DeLillo’s
Libra relies on an intimate understanding of a mediative process that is far too complicated to be
taken on in its fullness here, or probably any place else. For what we will ultimately be
considering here is the evolution of media through the processing of a media-borne cultural icon,
and to fully assess the change in perceptive character of the mass of human language users from
even the most well-defined pair of separate historical points, to take a fully-inclusive diachronic
view of the media discourses on Oswald from the day of the Kennedy assassination (and, likely,
some time before) to today, would, itself, require not simply the assessment of the process of
mediation of Oswald as a single subject, but a metacognitive mind warp in which language
would need to be removed from and observed dispassionately by itself1
. As the mediation of a
“regular”2
subject is so complex3
as to be impossible for others to know4
, how much more
1
Having language “look at itself” is not the problem, as language is the very thing that makes a metacognitive
approach possible for the theorist. But the assets of pervasiveness are counter-balanced by our inability to
remove language, or anything else we as language users can perceive, from language, from recognition and
placement within the symbolic order.
2
A subject who, in comparison to a celebrity of some kind, experiences unexceptional interactions with media,
who is more often a media consumer than an individual media subject.
3
Consisting of, among other factors, the full breadth of the subject’s thoughts and acts, influences (of any and
every kind), and an understanding of how each affects the other and is affected by the surrounding environment..

2. complicated the process of understanding the subject when he has been transmuted from a living,
“regular” individual into a dead icon, a fetish object who’s own meaning and role in the event
that has precipitated his fame only becomes more inscrutable as he returns, over and over again,
to the public eye for reassessment and redefinition?
Add to this the implications of tense, as noted above, and we begin to get a better idea of
the myriad complications that an answer to either question—not to mention both, or even both in
relationship to one another—must entail. For, considering the various and divergent contexts at
work, the respective environments that must be taken into account, we must understand that,
within this two-question context, we are dealing not with a single Oswald, nor even two5
, but at
least three. The first Oswald—the Oswald of the first question and the first entity to be
addressed by that name—is the “unprocessed” individual, he who pre-existed the insertion of his
name into popular media; “the man himself.” This is Oswald as he existed for the great majority
of his life; largely anonymous, and whose anonymity acts as a screen, a degree of individuation,
which we cannot penetrate. For, while he may have consumed and interacted with media in the
normal ways and to the average degree for his time, this Oswald6
was not yet the central subject
of almost any media that he did not create himself, such as his own writings and correspondence,
or that was not created both about and for him, such as military records, citizenship documents,
and other bureaucratic texts which demarcated his identity as a subject within various social
contexts.
4
Freudianism would, of course, say that the subject is actually at a decided disadvantage in his self-assessment,
given the suppression of certain urges and the over-valuation of others.
5
Real and fictional, perhaps. Or even organic v. constructed, though this would require a baseline definition of
organic which would take into account the constructedness of any subjective identity as separate from identities
even more ensconced in media culture. Such distinctions would then, of course, merely be matters of degree.
6
We might be tempted to say “Oswald at this point in his life,” but this would be a mistake of ignoring that the
human lifetime of the subject is but a phase in that subject’s mediation. It is easier, then, to identify the living
Oswald as something separate from but influential in the development of the Oswald media profile we will deal
with later.

3. The only other significant, pre-assassination interaction that the living Oswald may have
had with media comes in the form of ambiguous references to subversive political behavior, the
importance of which is hard to measure in light of the fact that it is only discussed within the
context of the singular event that would popularly define the man’s life even as it brought that
life to an end. It is this most scant and obscure documentation which, by its very nature as
mysterious and, thus, discursive, serves well as a starting point for the popular appropriation of
the rest of Oswald’s texts and, in that same motion, the conversion of mediated man into media
manifestation. The question of context, or respective contexts, comes back into play, then, as we
are left to navigate our way through the situation—the mass of situated media elements—that
constitute and are designated as “Lee Harvey Oswald”. And, while the living subject is left
inaccessible in the conversion to media manifestation, that media profile is, itself, such a massive
body of texts that to propose a path toward a complete understanding of its nature is even more
inappropriate than it was when we were considering only the boundaries of the living, pre-
media-appropriated individual. Thus, while we might be able to identify any number of traits,
elements, or germane concerns as we study Oswald-in-media, any findings must be modest if
only for the sustained, ever-deepening inscrutability of the larger cult figure franchise.
It would be oversimplification to say that Libra delivers what is being implicitly asked
for, but DeLillo at least gives us a version, a textual edition, of that ongoing process of media
negotiation that constitutes not “the man himself”, but an iteration of his media profile; Lee
Harvey Oswald, a name the man himself did not use, was formulated in the space vacated by the
man’s death, but we must not make the mistake of assuming that the parameters of that identity
are thus set, or that they must manifest themselves in any particular fashion upon the iteration of
the name. Just as the man himself is made forever unknowable, so the media construction that

4. follows him is, by its nature, ever evolving to fit the requirements and permissions of the time.
Such is the reason that Oswald gets another look now and again, as a new film or other media
product concerning the Kennedy assassination is released, prompting a resurgence in popular
interest. Upon those occasions, the act of refreshing Lee Harvey Oswald necessitates some novel
difference, some change in the way he is regarded—the Warren Commission Report that
authoritatively claimed Oswald’s sole guilt; the 1991 release of Oliver Stone’s JFK, not the first
time Oswald’s culpability would be called into question; and even the 1992 Quantum Leap
storyline that featured Oswald as a central, murderous figure and asked how an iconic act of
violence might have been made even worse.
Oswald’s post-demise mediation, the generation of a third, a fourth, an nth Lee, has even
taken on metacognitive dimensions. The question of guilt will likely hang over Oswald for as
long as the public attention is taken by him, but DeLillo’s structure allows the answer to that
question to be as ambiguous within the immediate historical context—to those who were there,
who were involved, who should know something—as it has become within the larger media
consumer context, to those of us who have only ever known Oswald as a dead (maybe-)assassin
or (maybe-)patsy7
. At the point when the reader might expect DeLillo to provide a single,
definitive answer, an answer for the instance of his own story if not for the historical record,
there is only the familiar frustration of too many possibilities; it is a situation that might be more
emblematic of what Oswald has come to mean than even the fact of Kennedy’s murder. Even if,
as DeLillo tells it, Oswald acted, the nature of the inquiry is only revised rather than obviated:
7
The inclusion of (maybe-) creates the illusion of a spectrum of culpability. Yet, more importantly and
inaccurately, it assumes that those who are exposed to and interact with the media figure have any opinion on or,
indeed, assume any truth whatsoever in a mystery that is, every moment, becoming more and more a piece of
historical trivia. Nothing necessarily precludes our descendants from engaging in the guilt question any less than
we ourselves have, but there are, likewise, fewer and fewer interested parties to indefinitely guarantee its cultural
maintenance.

5. did he act alone? If he didn’t act alone, did he know his were not the only shots? And right
there, with the sudden approach of subjective, unknowable truth, we again find ourselves
blocked by necessary speculation from anything definitive or even supportable.
What we are left with, instead, is an amendment to our original pair of questions: ‘who
was Oswald v. who is he’ must somehow accommodate not his guilt as known, but as unknown,
as a question itself. How do the questions then situate themselves with respect to one another?
How does the answer, or lack of answer, to this new question redefine how the first two
questions relate? If Oswald was a murderer, is his current media personality built upon only that
act, or does the media that tells other stories about him, whether historical or fictional, find
something besides that singular act to vindicate our interest? On the other hand, if the answer is
no, is the media that surrounds him nothing more than that reinforcement of what might be
anything from a tragic mistake to an orchestrated lie? Or, we might choose to view the guilt
question as a catalyst for a Hegelian synthesis: Oswald-as-assassin v. Oswald-as-patsy equals
Oswald-as-cypher. But such a conclusion, besides being itself irritatingly obscure, is neither
legitimate, as it is borne not of a fully realized understanding of the melding of contradictions,
but a novel recognition of a convenient theoretical structure; we might recognize that we can put
the assassin and patsy models together, but the synthesis yields only more profound lack, rather
than a scrutinizable, rationalizable product, capable of being expressed in positive terms.
But if our emerging theoretical framework is capable of anything substantial, it seems
decidedly fit in guiding the reader toward an acknowledgement of, if not adherence to, a
definition of truth as subjective. For, as truth can only be conceived of in any meaningful way in
the mind of the linguistic, human subject, he who can conceptualize unrealities yet is barred from
a Hegelian form of absolute knowing by that same ideology-inducing linguality, so the only

6. meaningful definition of truth (even given the ‘objective’ modifier) is thus colored by
subjectivity. Though we might assume the media model of Oswald must inherit something more
of the man than his name, the divide between man and media is made all the more sharp as,
being dead, Oswald’s subjective truth is rendered all the more inaccessible to modern audiences
than it would have been even to his own contemporaries. Though DeLillo and others would
scour whatever literature available, perhaps assigning special status to primary texts such as
correspondence, all anyone will ever be able to come to in answer to the question of Oswald’s
identity is just that—a collection of texts, what DeLillo’s Agent Branch calls “a room of dreams
(181).” The irony, of course, is that the room—be it the room in which Brach compiles all his
materials or, metaphorically, the situation of the media figure in relation to the mind of the man
himself8
—is a puzzle, possessing not a single, manageable route to a universally-satisfying
conclusion but, like language itself, the discourses of a topic of sustained public interest which
continue to spread and proliferate, turning even into competition between conflicting versions of
“G-d’s honest truth.” All we can definitively say for certain is that, while there may be any
number of Lees, the first one9
isn’t here now.
Others have used DeLillo’s novel as a touchstone for considering the problems of
Oswald’s identity, so we might think we’ll have better luck consulting them. But our course has
been established as one of frustration and, rather than providing relief, critic David Applen
exposes another problem with diachronic analysis right off. While we previously identified the
unfulfillable need for a complete analysis to be able to effectively account for a broad span of
information between the chronological points of the assassination itself and the reading of the
8
These two interpretations are simply manifestations of the same inaswerability of the question of Oswald’s
identity. Though they may be described differently, they are not simply alike, but the same.
9
The ‘real’ one? The ‘original’? I resort to chronology here only because a modifier is necessary and the
alternatives are themselves problematic. Or, perhaps, they cut to the heart of the issue too quickly. Better to take
the long way round.

7. novel10
, DeLillo’s novel works up to the assassination rather than starting with it. Thus, Applen
would count the text as Oswald’s biography (56); even though the label might be dubious for any
number of reasons, what is implicitly understood is that DeLillo, rather than simply navigating a
limited period of time surrounding the assassination, has chosen to guess at11
the psyche of the
man (boy) at a point far earlier than that which concerns the bulk of what has been written about
him.
He told her he'd played hooky again, ridden the trains out to Brooklyn, where a
man wore a coat with a missing arm. Playing the hook, they called it here.
Marguerite believed it was not so awful, missing a day now and then. The other
kids ragged him all the time and he had problems keeping up, a turbulence
running through him, the accepted fact of a fatherless boy (4).
What are the accepted facts of a fatherless boy? This would seem like a clear, if complicated,
question, but problems abound, such as who is asking the question—the assessor who defines the
experience of the fatherless boy, as having the boy answering the question for himself is not an
option here, if only because that’s just not how the narrative functions in such scenes. And
while even the subjective truth can only be guessed at through the amassed body of evidence and
anecdote —amassed here by DeLillo—that evidence, likewise, can only become more scant the
further backward one travels into the mediated existence of any linguistic subject, as the nuances
of meaning flatten out and even the most basic of engagements with language eventually turn
infantile and fade into the depths of pre-humanity.
Before the assassination, there were the Fair Play for Cuba leaflets, touting a clear
ideological message, but themselves made for dispersion to the masses rather than to serve as a
full, definitive clarification of the belief system of their author. Prior to those, we might examine
Oswald’s circuitous citizenship status or his bureaucratically-produced service record, each one
10
The second point being, of course, not only not set, but ever moving for and in relation to every reader.
11
As opposed to “entering” Oswald’s psyche; an impossible feat, for the reasons previously described.

8. likely filtered and perhaps even amended by those who, in the aftermath of the assassination,
wanted to stress or suppress certain pieces of information, thereby distancing recorded
knowledge even further from some idealized “truth” of the man. Go back far enough, as DeLillo
has done, and much of what you’ll find will be the peculiar, often-dissonant testimony of
Oswald’s mother, a discourse manipulated by influences or experiences that would be better
understood if the reader were to examine Marguerite Oswald’s own life, perhaps, but the
psychological effects of which are just as remote as her son’s subjective truth. By a
psychoanalytic measure, a mother’s testimony is less removed from the truth of the subject than
any other external insight by virtue of her role as the instigator of language for the child. That
the maternal voice may not be entirely sane in this instance is but a situational twist for the
subject Oswald to develop in reaction to, and such a twist but further lays the groundwork for a
question of Oswald’s sanity that is, to a degree, just a rephrasing of the question of his guilt.
But if the subject is truly inscrutable, what’s the point of all this fabrication, this utilizing
of historical facts and texts as the structure across which to span connections that are framed only
hypothetically or fictively? Maybe, like Applen, we should consult the oft-quoted, intricately-
worded disclaimer of the ‘Author’s Note’:
This is a work of imagination. While drawing from the historical record, I've
made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the
assassination. Any novel about a major unresolved event would aspire to fill
some of the blank spaces in the known record. To do this, I've altered and
embellished reality, extended real people into imagined space and time, invented
incidents, dialogues, and characters.
How does one extend “real people into imagined space and time”? First, the situation demands
at least two contexts: one being that historical moment from which the characters originate, the
other being situated within and suited to authorial intention. But, if we are to understand
language itself as both the material through which contexts are constructed and the lens through

9. which they are recognized, there becomes little difference to a reader between the “true”
historical moment and a fiction of extension—or of any other kind, really—as both are conveyed
are conveyed to the reader through the same medium. What DeLillo’s note really tells us is that
the text we’ve been given is not and can never be perfectly reflective of the historical moment.
Even if such informed insight was the author’s goal, the text is but the absence of the moment
being (mis)described.
But all of this refers to the text in negative terms—as something other than the thing,
rather than being something, anything of significance in itself, a philosophy which is accurate
considering the pervasive influence of language in the creation of its own subjects. Surely, even
if the text is never able to approach some perfectly-realized truth, it is representative of
something quite a bit more substantial yet; the reality of the media system that has borne it and
delivered it into the reader’s attention. Though we have considered Libra largely outside of its
context to this point, hacking away at the centerless, expanding blob of meanings and meaningful
connections, all of this has gone on within the incomprehensibly larger social structure, the
compounding and interweaving channels of flowing, changing meanings. Though there must
somewhere be edges or parameters of language, are they not crossed even in their recognition by
the subject, the herald of language who brings his ruler with him?
Another problem, though: doesn’t even this revised, thoughtfully-considered course
presume that grasping at truth, guessing at facts through leaps of fabrication, is somehow a goal
in DeLillo’s telling? This objection is really just a reminder that we can never stand outside of
ideology, but it is still valuable to remember just why this is. Besides being linguistic subjects,
humans as identified by our ability to symbolically, abstractly communicate, we are subject to
the trends and values that develop within that fluid language system. Social expectations, such

10. as the presumption of a historical text lying in some proximity to historical truth, are the
normative scaffolds that facilitate the reception of those texts. Cognitively, the linguistic subject,
at least in western culture, has, for whatever reason, managed to expect some factual basis for
even fiction, a physics or code of customs to which he can relate, so he thus puts familiar events,
settings, and characters in familiar structures, such as assuming that a novel about the Kennedy
assassination would make some attempt at clearly answering the question of that assassination,
as so many other media products have done. That such attempts have been made, and so often,
and to such varying results, was the initial nature of Oswald as media figure. But, as is the case
with language itself once it has grown sufficiently large and intricate, so many of these guilt
theories12
begin to contradict each other, respond to each other, and interact with other cultural
trends and emerging communications forms (like the internet), so that Oswald as media figure is,
even now, transforming into something further and further afield of the man; larger, less
definable, always more amorphous, always something other than the man himself. And this
growth is only engendered by each new generation of media consumers, so many levels further
removed from the event of the assassination, who come to develop their own valuation (or
devaluation) of the event, the guilt question, and even Oswald’s previous media positionings.
Eventually, only historians will truly care and Lee Harvey Oswald’s name will serve much the
same popular function as John Wilkes Booth’s does today.
None of this should be taken as an assumption that DeLillo is unaware of his own role, or
that of his novels, in our negotiation of Oswald’s media identity. It might be argued, in fact, that
DeLillo is intimately aware of the complex nature of these relationships, and that he calls
attention to such concerns even from the novel’s title. How much, after all, can a single
astrological sign, a standard symbol taken from a discreet collection of like symbols, tell us
12
Any theories on Oswald’s guilt or innocence, regardless of where one might come down.

11. about any random subject who happens to have been born in October? And yet there untold
adherents to this arbitrary belief structure, even to the point that the text of astrological readings
has certainly served as a guiding discourse in the lives of those who invest enough faith in that
system’s fidelity. Even David Ferrie, himself a conspirator in the would-be assassination, feels
moved to appeal to Oswald thus as he approaches him:
Here is a man who wants to spy on our operations. He wants to use us but we will
end up using him. Not through manipulation or political conversion. He believes
in his heart that he’s a dedicated leftist. But he is also a Libran. He is capable of
seeing the other side. He is a man who harbors contradictions (319).
Meanwhile, in the novel’s epigraph, DeLillo provides us with a platitude of Oswald’s, another
socially-constructed philosophy that, though it may seem of more solid rhetorical stuff, can be
questioned just as effectively as astrology: “Happiness is taking part in the struggle, where there
is no borderline between one's own personal world, and the world in general.” This sentiment
echoes Oswald’s own prominence within the media structure, but shows a misunderstanding of
the man himself with what would become his legacy. The struggle Oswald refers to, the place
without borderlines that sounds like the same communist utopia he hoped for in Russia and
advocated for in Cuba, is not where he has ended up in his post-human mediation. Instead, we
are more likely to find his familiar image, immortalized in silk-screen, hanging next to the Che
Guevara t-shirts at Hot Topic, or his name as the title of a rock band. For it is within the
media, rather than as a symbol within some incomplete proletariat rebellion, where Oswald’s
identity has the best opportunity to continue its development.
Yet, we are still tempted to posit the figure DeLillo provides as something meaningfully
different from the bulk of the non-dimensional product that has been released bearing Oswald’s
name or likeness. We might be tempted to call what DeLillo delivers a transcendence of the
established media image and its common functions, but would that be inaccurate or misleading?

12. Though Oswald the icon has transcended strict associations with the assassination and other
aspects of the life of the man, historicity does not then simply become irrelevant; there is nothing
to prevent further discourse on his identity, the question of his role in the assassination, or his
subjective truth. If any guess at the man’s motivations is necessarily removed from “the truth”,
and there seems no reliable way to assess the respective differences of each fiction or
assumption, it might also be argued that no substantial investigation is necessarily any further
from that singular subjective understanding than any other. And if there are any objective truths
of the subject, an important one is that Oswald was himself a media consumer, that he was set at
a distance from Marx, Stalin, and all the rest of the ideological heroes he read about, just we are
set at a distance from all Oswalds, real and imagined, in our own reading. Might we thus posit
Oswald as DeLillo’s instrument in the developing of a better understanding of the processes by
which media claims the historical as its own content? But, if so, what are the values inherent in
this process? Even if Oswald is being used as an example, might DeLillo’s ultimate goal be,
again, some sort of vindication, a valuing of the “real thing” over the image? But, of course, the
image must be used to represent both the real thing (remember, we use the linguistic maneuver
of “the man himself” to refer to the man himself) and itself as the image, and the only thing that
is potentially harder to legitimately convey in language than the truth of a subject is the totality
of that subject’s media gravity and functionality. Just as we are not directly connected to
Oswald, we are never completely connected to all of his representations and their individual,
varied functions—such a feat only becomes less possible as the body of media continues to
develop and grow—and the pre-eminence of DeLillo’s text, it’s comparative positioning in the
linguistic structure, is likewise reliant on the discourses that surround it and inform its reading.
This is, of course, the primary difference between the text and the individual, but it is an

13. important one, as we can possess the text in ways that no one but Oswald13
could ever possess
himself. And if the difference lies in the graspability of the object, whether that grasping be
literal or figurative, we at least have a better chance of examining a static body of observable
content14
.
But by now we know that it cannot be so easy. We have revealed the impossibility of
“true connection” with the subject, found no essential center of meaning in the body of media
existence, and shifted our attentions to all that seems left, the physical book, with a beginning
and end linked by print content, readable on every page (or, at least, that’s the case here). But,
even after we have shrunken the scope of our examinations to, perhaps, nothing more than an
assessment of what’s actually there, what is present in the text itself, there is the ever-present
Derridean reminder that it can’t just be turtles all the way down. For, while the text might
overtly be about the man himself, even this examination is metacognitive, recursive, for it
concerns, on many levels, the relationship between its subject (or subjectivity in general) and the
media into which that subject hopes to insert himself, the text itself being an affirmation of that
goal. We might choose to focus our attentions just on the book alone, but its very subject matter
invokes a demand for some level of pop culture knowledge, and thus, that the reader be a
consumer of pop culture—not a particularly outstanding requirement, as it is effectively the same
as demanding that the reader have access to the same language they are using to consume the
text in the first place. Is it reasonable to assume that the average Libra reader is coming to the
text with no idea of its historical placement? Again, though, even this assumption is subject to
13
Or, perhaps, just no one.
14
Though I meant the text here, a more extreme approach would be to assess the truths of the physical body—
Oswald’s corpse, though still not simply Oswald. The differentiation between the personality and its biologically-
constructed representative, rather than the social-constructed representation of text, has more to do with what’s
missing than what’s been added, why the body is not the man anymore rather than why the text is not now what
the man was then.

14. change, given our ever-increasing temporal distance from the man himself. But we’ll make the
assumption, for the moment at least, and pursue the question further; if we come to Oswald’s
“biography” with knowledge of his historical and cultural placement, what can we be coming for
but an answer to that single question of guilt? Even if we would claim a desire for a better
understanding of the man, no media understanding, however insufficient, would exist were it not
for the ambiguity of his mediation at a key historical moment; if we truly wish to know the man
better, the benefit of being able to assess his guilt more thoroughly for our own edification must
be accounted for. And if we continue to worry over this increasingly-irrelevant mystery with its
ever diminishing chance for answer, are we, even in the act of reading, not fetishizing Oswald
just the same as the kids at the Hot Topic? Or are we not so comfortable ascribing the noble act
of reading as such, or at least doing so outside of a more sympathetic genre, like porn or self-help
manuals? Though we may try to extract Oswald from his enculturation, the very valuing of the
figure that would lead to a novel about him is, itself, the guiding cultural agenda in the act of
seeking out and reading the text.
And there, in the text, we find not a separation from context but a further reflection upon
it in the form of AJ Hidell. It would be accurate to call Hidell Oswald’s chief pseudonym, but
his position, both within and beyond the text, complicates his full relevance, as does the fact that
Oswald sometimes speaks through Hidell in various ways. Even in his earliest manifestations,
Hidell is not created solely from inside Oswald’s mind. Instead, he is culled from the
surroundings15
, from a man in his marine unit who Oswald sees one night, walking alone along
the streets of Atsugi (89). Yet, DeLillo describes the man in such a way that, once the reader
becomes aware of the Hidell pseudonym, and indeed personality, one has to wonder whether this
15
Originally, this had been “Oswald’s surroundings” but such phrasing is problematic in that, if we assume Hidell to
be at all validated as a personality in himself, the surroundings become less and less Oswald’s own, or at least not
completely Oswald’s own, the more and more substantive Hidell becomes.

15. “oddball loner caught sneaking out of a swishy bar” is not in fact Oswald himself even then. We
could turn to the historical record, which would verify the existence of John Heindel, a friend of
Oswald’s in the marines, but this turn to outside sources, back to historical context for
verification of the truth of the text is both inconclusive and reinforces the conclusion that the text
simply cannot be removed from the linguistic structure that engendered its creation. Hidell then
becomes representative of not only identity politics within the text, nor even within Oswald’s
own life, but how those separate sets of negotiations, historical and fictional, must ultimately
interrelate. Further, we are called on by those same social expectations that earlier served as our
means of orientation within the text to make a judgment on how engagingly the text fulfills or
overturns our expectations of its approach to the guilt question.
Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept
along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. History
means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He
knew what Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of
the isolated self. We live forever in history, outside ego and id. (101)
Oswald, DeLillo’s Oswald, the third Lee, would have us choose endless recession into history,
but such philosophical masochism is counter to our own intentions here; assent to an essential
lack of meaning may be our own viable conclusion, but we must forge on at least until this last
hope for truth, the text itself, is fully extinguished.
If we are to treat a text as a viable subject16
, we can then find a value in DeLillo’s
identification of ego and id as something we are meant to live “outside” of. But who exactly is
‘we’ in this assertion? If it is the reader, DeLillo is only partially correct, as the subject of the
book possesses both historicity and a vestige of human psychological structures, as per the
psychoanalytic criticism that has oft been presented in response to this author’s work. Indeed,
16
It does, after all, consist of language and possesses intentionality, abstraction, and potentially the entire host of
human linguistic expression. For a literal view on the potential boundaries of textuality, see Borges’ “The Library of
Babel”.

16. Hidell stands as a core vestige of psychological ambiguity, perhaps that same ambiguity that is
manifested in the guilt question. If so, our queries on identity might need to be again revised: if
Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy, is AJ Hidell precluded from having done so? This would seem to
be an issue of schizophrenia, but remember that the subject in question is no longer Oswald the
man, but the character, and therefore the text itself. Though the unknowability of the man’s guilt
may or may not be a fault of historic record, the culpability of DeLillo’s Oswald in the
assassination of the fictionalized Kennedy is something constructed specifically to be
ambiguous, to meaningfully reflect the frustration of a public who has still not been delivered a
unanimously-palatable, singular truth. If there is a single, objective truth of the text—and the
existence of such extensive literary criticism regarding the event would itself indicate not—it can
then only be that, for this character in this context, the fabric of the narrative is woven such
around the moment of the shooting that the true assassin is intentionally left unclear, and so
therefore there is no true assassin. Who killed Kennedy? The author. All that must be
accounted for now is the particular definition of that author, whether he acts as the voice of an
ideology concerned with Oswald and what he stands for within itself, or as a fully-differentiated
self with sovereignty over his own material. Of all our hurdles, this is perhaps the easiest to
rectify since, no matter the answer, both author and text are products of the language system, and
therefore connected indelibly to it. This understanding, reclaimed from our earlier
considerations of the media profile of the Oswald icon, opens up a Lacanian view from which we
can consider the text linguistically in the same way we might have considered a more direct
psychological inspection of the man. The Freudian unconscious shares its structure with
language, so that the two entities become metaphorical for one another at the same time they are
metonymical for one another, in that the psychology of the individual is subject to and part of the

17. larger linguistic structure. And it is through that linguistic structure (again and always) that the
individual is recognized within his culture. This recognition is not merely existential, but deep
and qualitative, touching or intentionally maintaining distance from all the different aspects of
the individual’s identity; all that constitutes the self is all that constitutes the self in society. It
might be thought that we can only find a psychological structure underneath the text in the
person of the author, DeLillo, but the individual is only individuated in contrast to his social
environment, so that the social environment—the media environment, to be clear—might be said
to invent the author. In which case, a movement away from the individual text is simply a
movement into the culture of texts, and thus all meaningful proportionality, all chance of
manageable outcome, is lost.
Interestingly, the text itself offers an opinion on the identity issue, one that does not help
us gain any ground in the endemic guilt question, but which does vindicate the text itself as the
viable subject of psychoanalytic scrutiny.
7:00 p.m. I decide to end it. Soak rist in cold water to numb the pain.
He stood at the sink, left shirtsleeve rolled up. He stopped freezing his
wrist long enough to prop a clean blade against the razor case. Warm water was
running in the tub.
Hidell prepares to make his maker, ha ha. (151)
The irony of Oswald “making his maker” lies in how the differences between text, the man
himself, and his media presence must be negotiated17
. Whether we label the Oswald character’s
“maker” as G-d, author, or something else, one of the essential identifiable elements is the pre-
existence of Oswald’s media figuration, that the character consists not simply of so much text,
but that the textual character’s textual actions are descendant from an act that first occurred in
physical (but still linguistic) reality, was recorded and thus inscribed, and which constitutes some
detail of the overall social impetus that drove DeLillo to write that very line. If anything, the
17
To say nothing of the ambiguity between narrator and subject in the passage.

18. scene of the assassination would be a better placement of the line, but again, that is a site of
ambiguity, while we might interpret this scene as more foundational to the character DeLillo is
constructing; for whatever reason, DeLillo might have thought this the point at which Oswald the
man was made ready to begin his conversion into the discourses he has become, a subsumation
by the same language which allowed him to exist as himself in the first place. By such
reckoning, what we come to is a metacognitive text that, while focused on its own story, knows
something already, even before its own end, of its social placement—a reassurance that the
Oswald character, even the man himself perhaps, is ever concerned for. “Every process contains
its own outcome,” says David Ferrie (172), but how can we know where to call the beginning
and ending of any process of mediation, especially considering that it is only in the human
lifetime that a subject is definitively referred to as itself, or as a self at all? Indeed, the text, any
text, all texts pertaining to an individual are said to constitute at least some part of that subject’s
overall mediation, so should we count DeLillo’s life of Oswald as some kind of experiential
overlap, a point at which DeLillo, the living man, became simply a media vessel for the Oswald
icon, itself borne of the life of the man which can be likewise perceived as entirely independent
of DeLillo’s own?
But ever the convolutions develop so that the fiction of the text can never be separated,
either in its nature or within its own structure, from the particular media manifestation of the cult
figure who lies at the center (or not) of a cultural myth. For, even though the assassination itself
is substantial, known, its resolution—the end of the story—is in all cases fictitious, if for no
other reason than, in discussing it still, the story subsumes its own discourse, and we continue
still to give it life.

19. Works Cited
Applen, John David. “Chapter Two: The Social Construction of Lee Harvey Oswald in 'Libra'”
The Play of Texts in Don Delillo's "Libra", "Ratner's Star", and "White Noise" Diss.
University of Arizona, 1994. UMI. Web. 11 Sept. 2012.
<http://arizona.openrepository.com>.
DeLillo, Don. Libra. New York: Viking, 1988. Print.