Dumb Lee

In the early chapters of Libra, I couldn’t help but to think of Lee as an idiot. I still have this problem, but now I understand him a little better. Anyways, in the early chapters of the novel, I was shocked by his inflated sense of self and his inability to think things through. He’d think he’d have a well thought out plan, and then end up acting with almost no contemplation. For example, he shot himself. He didn’t accomplish anything. He was called a fool, that’s pretty much it. He acts with no thought. He studies books about communism in his youth, but he seems not to absorb any of the information in them but rather reads them because he thinks it makes him fit an archetype. He reads these books because it makes him look like he’s special, like he’s a revolutionary. He travels to communist Russia, seemingly having thought it out, but steps off of the plane to find out he’s not wanted. He tries to exchange American secrets for favor, but it is said that almost nothing he says is of value. If the man who interrogated him didn’t pity him, he would’ve gotten nothing. If not for the man’s pity, Lee would’ve been royally screwed. He could’ve ended up dead in a foreign country. The man is an idiot. And this stupidity and narcissism only grows with time. In Libra, Lee Harvey Oswald comes off as nothing more than a dumb, easily manipulated child.