Lee as a character

It feels very strange to like someone who is going to be accused of first degree murder. 

DeLillo treats Lee as a character in a very interesting way, making him a troublemaker, flirty, nauseating, mysterious, and it makes him so intriguing that I find myself trying to blaze through the dated chapters just so I can get back to learning about Lee.

He is painted as a very sympathetic character, growing up in a society built against him, trying to rebel. His home situation is so sad, summed up by the repeated "they watched each other eat." I find myself wanting him to have a better life, to succeed. Not in the way that he seems to though. 

The portrayal of huge people like Oswald, similarly to any other famous person who has been blown up in our minds to inhuman levels, seems weird at first. Too personal almost. 

I am really enjoying DeLillo's take on Lee because it is so personal. The more personal the story, the more real it actually feels. The liberty DeLillo takes by filling in gaps, detailing parts of Lee's days that may or may not have happened, makes the facts come to life. 

I wait in anticipation of the November 22 chapter, where we see his actual thought process, or lack thereof. The journey from little Lee to Lee Harvey Oswald will be quite an epic bildungsroman. 

Narrative Kennedy: Obsessing over the Obsession

I distinctly remember an easy-reader book I used to like that told brief histories of the most recent First Kids. Inexplicably, Caroline and Jack were my favorite above all else. Although maybe not so inexplicable. Caroline’s peacoat made me stare, the portrait of the family kept my attention with the fashion and the good looks. That book failed to mention that the perfect family I had chosen as my favorites would be blasted open within a few years of the ages those kids were depicted as.

I grew up not being very aware of globally significant deaths. This was intentional on my mother’s part, not seeing the need in telling me all about these horrors before I was old enough to deal with it. But learning about the Kennedy assassination was never structured for me. It certainly will in the future, but it apparently hadn’t made it into my history books yet, and teachers left that part out when talking about our fine white selection of past presidents. I have to admit that this past week has given me more information about Kennedy than I have encountered in the last seventeen years of my life.

The fascination with this incident is conversely fascinating to me. It almost has become obsession over the obsession, turning Kennedy into a mysterious and godlike figure, and talking about it in heated online debates.

It seems to my quickly-learning brain that the real draw of the assassination is that it has become such a story. Some people see the most obvious story. Others see a second one deep below the surface. Still more probably come up with their own stories just to stir the pot a little. The obscure narrative makes our brains go haywire with emotions of excitement and sorrow and dread. It is the absolute novelty of the event that we have created that has given it the draw it has attained.

Box It Up and Put a Bow On It

Concluding the novel Kindred, I have re-read the sections regarding Dana’s arm loss and subsequent events as a result of that. There are many things to be said about the symbolism of this passage, but what caught my eye was how the police interact with this situation.

I see a lot of connection to how the loss of Dana’s arm is Octavia Butler explaining to the reader the gravity an experience like Dana had would have on her. Looking back at the trauma of slavery doesn’t leave us feeling particularly awesome, which is exemplified in the ripping apart of Dana’s arm.

Looking at the interactions of other’s to the loss of Dana’s arm shows a lot about what Butler interprets the interactions of people over slavery and other traumas. People are uncomfortable with trauma. Especially trauma that they have not felt or encountered before. The police assigned to figure out what happened to Dana really want Dana to just admit that Kevin was being violent towards her. They don’t know how to rationalize the situation any other way.

I feel this relates directly to the vast majority of us dealing with someone else’s trauma. If we can’t pinpoint it, rationalize it, we get extraordinarily uncomfortable or overwhelmed. I feel that this is a really unattractive quality of people, seeing as we would be a whole lot more peaceful if we could just try to conceptualize someone else’s pain.

So often does Dana encounter someone wanting to box her pain into neat boxes. Kevin also does this when he is trying to wrap his brain around the relationship Dana has toward Rufus. Instead of allowing it to be complicated and messy, Kevin gets frustrated and explains it in the easiest way he can: accuse her of infidelity. This has me thinking quite a bit about how Butler may be using these events to describe how white people try to box up the trauma of slavery felt by African Americans, not wanting to put in the effort to understand the complexities.