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

conspiracy may have taken. He invented a plot around Oswald that mixed fact with
fantasy to explore a dark side of the United States in the middle of the Cold War.
Oswald, in this rendering, is set up to be the fall guy for the assassination
precisely because he is who he is. David Ferrie, a real-life figure who is at the center of
the assassination plot in Libra, explains to Oswald that he is “a quirk of history,” “a
coincidence,” because his real life “matches the cardboard cutout [the plotters have] been
shaping all along.” 342 Oswald is a shooter in the assassination, but his main role “was to
provide artifacts of historical interest, a traceable weapon, all the cuttings and hoardings
of his Cuban career.” 343 The right-wing activists want Cuba to be blamed for the
assassination and having Oswald fingered as the assassin would leave a trail that shows
his connections to Cuba, and evidence of Castro’s alleged motive to kill Kennedy: the
CIA attempts on his life and sabotage operations against his communist regime.
The novel begins with a teenage Oswald hurtling through the subway tunnels of
New York: “He was riding just to ride.” 344 This imagery suggests the trajectory of
Oswald’s life as he is moved along by a conspiracy he does not fully understand to his
fate as the man blamed for Kennedy’s assassination. Many of the events recounted in the
Warren Commission are included and embellished in Libra, but they are interspersed
with parallel accounts of the fictional plot to kill Kennedy, as well as flash forwards to a
CIA historian trying to put together a comprehensive history of the “Dallas labyrinth,”
perhaps expressing the desire of Americans to have a full accounting of assassination,
342 DeLillo, 330.
343 DeLillo, 386.
344 DeLillo, 3.
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