[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

iases. The black marketer, Mike Cervata, offers a possible reason to a captain
investigating the matter: “Since he was born, Johnny Shellburn lived in the hymn and
history of the Corps…So what happened when he found himself in a hap-hazard, half-
assed air wing outfit?” The answer: “’He was demoralized.’” 340 The conclusion of
Thornley’s novel is not wholly satisfactory, but his fictionalized portrait of Oswald shows
that the alleged assassin was a much more complicated figure than the non-entity of the
Warren Commission portrayal – unless one accepts Garrison’s thesis that Thornley was
attempting to frame his former Marine buddy.
Novelist Don DeLillo painted a vivid picture of Oswald in Libra, which he
explained was “a work of imagination” that sought to “fill some of the blank spaces in the
known record.” 341 DeLillo follows Oswald from his stay in New York City with
Marguerite through his years in the Marine Corps and his defection to his return to the
United States with Marina and events leading up to the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo’s
Oswald resembles the portrait of the Warren Commission: he is a committed leftist, true
defector to the Soviet Union, and a supporter of Fidel Castro. However, he becomes
enmeshed in a plot involving right-wing Central Intelligence Agency operatives, anti-
Castro Cubans, and mobsters. By choosing the artistic form of the novel, DeLillo was
less bound by the historical record and could openly speculate about what form a
340
Warriors, 200.
341
Don DeLillo, Libra, (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 458.
152