As the last blog post of the year, I come back to the classic idea of postmodernism expressed throughout the book we’re currently reading in class. Libra is perhaps one of four books I’ve read in this semester that really accentuates the concept of postmodernism in literature and what it means to write historical fiction. Don Delillo has written such a fascinating novel on his own depiction of the JFK assassination and conspiracy, and it’s quite a wild ride and experience not only reading the novel, but discussing it in class and analyzing the writing itself. Libra contains postmodernist elements of metafiction and employing multiple perspectives in a nonlinear, fragmented narrative.
A very notable postmodernist characteristic of Libra is the writing structure and style itself. Instead of many modernist books that lay out a singular, linear storyline, Don DeLillo employs multiple perspectives and fragments of the plot the reader has to try to piece together to understand the full story. What I find most interesting about Libra in this case is how complicated the plot becomes, in which each perspective often does not provide the full narrative of the plot because the people in the plot simply don’t know the bigger picture. Lee Harvey Oswald himself doesn’t understand to what extent he’s being manipulated while the CIA agents plotting their plan don’t know all the elements of the assassination, even the man who came up with the idea himself!
Another postmodernist element of Libra, and my favorite part, is Nicholas Branch’s role in the story as a play on metafiction and essentially a self-insert of the author. Metafiction is the concept where a work of fiction is self-aware of its status as a constructed narrative, and Nicholas Branch is a key example of this notion. As the readers read a pieced together conspiracy plot on JFK’s assassination, at the same time, so is Nicholas Branch. Nicholas Branch’s goal in the novel and as a character is to uncover the “secret” truth of the JFK assassination, which is also the main objective of the novel itself. Branch often provides an introspective on the author’s own process in writing Libra and his thoughts on uncovering the “truth” of a conspiracy as well: Branch often laments on the overwhelmingly display of evidence provided to him and his struggle to uncover the “actual proof”. His character serves not only as an interesting way of breaking the 4th wall but also as a tool for Don DeLillo to explore the tension between a fictional narrative of history and the ambiguity of a singular historical grand narrative.
