Monday, May 12, 2014

People that pump up Lee


In Libra, Bobby Dupard and David Ferrie are similar in that they both point out coincidences to Lee in order to get Lee to assassinate famous people. Lee, who is trying to get in the history books and is probably seeing himself as the main character of a novel, thrives off of this feeling of coincidence, that the events around him revolve around him.
On page 275, Dupard points out that Walker is coming to live in Dallas. "'You think it's some coincidence this Walker come to live in Dallas? Get off, man. He is here because the fury and the hate is here. This is the city he made up in his mind.'" While Dupard is saying it's not a coincidence, this line will certainly make Lee think that it is a coincidence.

We can see this mentality take hold in Lee's mind after Lee and his family moved to Neely Street. Here, he has already purchased a 6.5-millimeter Italian rifle under the name of Hidell and is preparing to assassinate General Walker: "What a sense of destiny he had, locked in the miniature room, creating a design, a network of connections. It was a second existence, the private world floating out to three dimensions"(p. 277). Lee can sense the connections that he's making and he sees his private world expanding into the real world, which is testament to the fact that Lee constantly observes himself from the outside from a historical perspective.

David Ferrie points out these coincidences to Lee even more blatantly: "You spend most of your day on the sixth floor, don't you? His car is coming along Houston right straight at you. Then dipping away down Elm. Moving slowly and grandly past. The one place in the world where Lee Oswald works. The one time of day when he sits alone in a window and eats his lunch. There's no such thing as coincidence. We don't know what to call it, so we say coincidence. It happens because you make it happen."

In this passage, Ferrie says there is no such thing as coincidence, which is really saying that Lee is a part of some greater planned narrative that he will follow, that there's nothing left to chance.  He is also saying that such opportunities arise solely because of Lee's own actions. This puts Lee into the same frame of mind that he'll be making history pretty soon, which is something that Lee has dreamed about for a very long time.

1 comment:

  1. I think it's pretty easy to see how this perception of coincidence that's "more than coincidence" (which is what Dupard is saying--there's *more to it*, it *means something*, while we see "coincidence" as mere chance) would indeed "pump Lee up." There's already this sense that there are people watching him, assessing him, and carrying out their plans for him (Ferrie stokes this perception as well), and this gives him the sense that his actions are meaningful and have consequences beyond his narrow life. It's not such a big jump to go from "them" having their "eyes on" Lee to thinking the "universe" wants him to do a certain thing. It's an alternative to the emptiness and meaninglessness and failure he feels, returning from Mexico after being spurned by the Cuban embassy (which has been arranged by the plotters). Lee starts to see himself as part of a vast web that he only partially understands.

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