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

quagmire at the center of a conspiracy that he is aware of but does not fully understand.
DeLillo examined an underside to American society, in which malignant forces are loose
in society and willing to kill the nation’s leader to advance their cause. This is the larger
truth he sought to convey in the novel: the specifics may not be right but he is sure of the
ultimate culprits and their motivation. DeLillo used historical figures and made-up
people to offer his explanation for who killed Kennedy and why – out-of-control
intelligence operatives, gangsters, and anti-Castro Cubans who want to spark a crusade
against Cuba and to avenge the disaster of the Bay of Pigs.
Noted author Norman Mailer wrote an in-depth “novelistic” non-fiction narrative
of Oswald's life, Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery, published in 1995, that analyzed
his character to determine whether he had the make-up of a presidential assassin. 358
Mailer ended up largely validating the Warren Commission’s finding of Oswald’s guilt,
but his portrait of Oswald was more sympathetic to the accused assassin, playing up some
of his positive attributes. Mailer explained that he was trying to answer certain questions:
"What kind of man was Oswald? Can we feel compassion for his troubles, or will we
end by seeing him as a disgorgement from the errors of the cosmos, a monster?" 359 The
author's purpose was to decide whether Oswald's character fits the crime and, if so, what
is the philosophical meaning of the assassination. Mailer wrote that the "crux" of his
inquiry was that the assassination of a man as "large in his possibilities as John Fitzgerald
358
Norman Mailer, Oswald’s Tale: an American Mystery, (New York: Ballantine Books,
1996 (1995)), 682.
359
Mailer, 197.
160