David Ferries talks about this a lot. "You see what this means," he says to Lee when he's trying to convince him to shoot the JFK. "How it shows what you've got to do. We didn't arrange your job in that building or set up the motorcade route. We don't have that kind of reach or power. There's something else that's generating this event. A pattern outside experience."
I think this kind of thinking is appealing -- maybe Lee has the potential to assassinate the president but it's not really his decision... this has a lot of parallels with the Tralfamadorian philosophy -- the moment is structured that way and we are all merely bugs in amber.
It's interesting, then, what Lee thinks in the jail cell later -- he finally comes to terms with his fate and begins to kind of emabrace it. Before, he wanted to tell everyone that he was only a pawn in a much larger game, but then he decides to kind of relent and buy into the story, even embellishing it further. This is like the character in Everitt's script coming to life.
And yet even at the end, in DeLillo's portrayal, there's a palpable distance between Lee and the subject ("Lee Harvey Oswald") that he anticipates "studying." We don't get here a guy who is thinking, "Now I can write my memoirs and tell the world how I feel!" but rather a quasi-historian or psychologist or political theorist who will take Lee's "story" as a subject to "study." We imagine him as wanting to explore the same questions his mother is asking at the end of the novel--we can see her as carrying on the role he imagines for himself.
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