DeLillo tackles the project of humanizing Harvey Lee Oswald in a number of subtle ways that push his readers to second-guess their original presumptions, but something I've noticed to be particularly effective is the parallels he repeatedly draws between Oswald and the other characters in the book. These other characters we find it easier to like, and so by juxtaposing similar personality traits, we're startled into see a little bit of Oswald in all of us.
The first character I really noticed this with was Win Everett. He has this fervor, this need to make a difference in the world and be somebody despite the world betraying him. All of these characteristics could just as well be describing Oswald. "There was a burning faith in this man, a sense of cause," DeLillo writes in describing Everett. And yet with Everett, we're not as put off by this desire to be somebody. It seems right. Doesn't everyone want to know that their life means something?
There are also parallels with Castro. Even if not everyone wants to identify with Castro, it's clear that he's more appealing than Oswald. He's a leader, a great public speaker, and someone who can rile people up for his cause, all traits that are the exact opposite of Oswald. And yet DeLillo drops that Castro was constantly rewriting history even as he was living it. A kind of self-narration almost. This is something we see all the time with Oswald, whether it's the Historic Diary where he consciously self-edits or him losing his virginity and recounting the events in his head while he lives them.
There's even a connection between Nicholas Branch and Oswald. Branch realizes that he has become one of the "men in small rooms," studying insignificant details in order to come up with unlikely conspiracies. It's just like Oswald who took note of unimportant details such as the floor plan of the radio factory he worked in while in Russia, as if this would one day be of some grand importance.
All of these men share an exaggerated estimate of their own importance, revealing how this one little detail about Oswald that seems so bizarre is really rather commonplace. Walking the long walk home a couple days ago, I found myself narrating my life in a way that made me think of DeLillo's Oswald character. There was nothing particularly special about walking through Urbana and yet I found myself slipping into DeLillo's voice, slipping outside my body and visualizing myself from an aerial view. Of course this was partly intentional, a sort of experiment, but it also wasn't hard to do. The experience made DeLillo's Oswald character just a little bit more relatable, at least in that particular aspect.
