From
the beginning of Libra, when Lee is
just a child, to the end, after Lee dies, we see that Lee goes through many
different stages in his life. First, he is just a kid living with his mother,
then he joins the marines, goes to Russia, comes back, and so on. DeLillo makes
these stages clear by giving Lee a different identity in each one – he goes by
Lee, Ozzie the Rabbit, Alek, Lee Harvey Oswald, etc. There are two characteristics
of his identity, however, that stay constant throughout the entire book. First,
he studies and supports Communism, and he is fascinated with visiting communist
countries like Russia and Cuba. Second, he always either tries to distance
himself from others or ends up in a situation where he is alone. The irony here
is that these two things conflict with each other. Communism is all about unity,
communal well-being, and sharing with one’s comrades. Distancing oneself from
others is therefore discouraged, and acting on one’s own is in fact a much more
capitalist notion than a communist one.
These
two conflicting characteristics of Lee are established concretely at the
beginning of the book when Lee is perusing the catalog at the library. The
books that jump out at him are Das
Kapital and The Communist Manifesto
by Marx and Engels. He learns about “the workers, the class struggle, the
exploitation of wage labor” (34). He reads about Trotsky, and learns that he
lived in exile in the Bronx. He seems to almost worship Lenin and Stalin as communist
leaders, saying that “these were men who lived in isolation for long periods,
lived close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history
in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls, taking
them with it” (34). Despite his obvious devotion, though, he explains that the
only reason he reads these books is that “the tougher the books, the more
firmly he fixed a distance between himself and others” (34). I find it
extremely surprising that Lee, reading about the unification of the working
class and other such major communist principles doesn’t even consider the fact
that the reason for his interest in Communism is the least communist thing at
all – he supports it solely because he wants to be special, different from his
friends and colleagues. Indeed, when he finally goes to Moscow, he is not
treated with the hero’s welcome he expects. Everyone is communist there, so he
is not special at all, and this disappoints him quite a bit.
