ConfusingLEE Confused Lee

Throughout this book we’ve seen Lee shift his goal to fit with whatever circumstance he’s given-- ultimately to try to benefit himself the most. We’ve seen this with the Russian defector business but mostly recently and consequently with the Kennedy assassination. Although he goes for what benefits him the most, it’s interesting to think about what role Marina and the children have in his decision to shoot JFK.

At the beginning, Lee definitely wasn’t on board with shooting Kennedy when Ferrie proposed it to him. It didn’t match up with his plans for Cuba, so it didn’t matter to him. Ferrie trying to get into his brain with his monologue saying, “Think of two parallel lines. One is the life of Lee Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them?” This didn’t have an effect on him even though it seemed pretty manipulative (339). Even after that conversation Lee is still planning to go to Mexico City. He only seems to agree to shoot Kennedy after all his other options run out that would make his Cuba plan run smoothly. Once Ferrie offers him all he wanted with Cuba in exchange for shooting the president, Lee finally decides to go along with it.

Before he finally commits, he seems generally focused on trying to give Marina a better life.

    “They’d get their own furniture, modern pieces, and a washing machine for Marina.” (382).

When Ferrie goes to pick him up, he says he doesn’t want to be late to work because he is still devoted to the thought of giving Marina a better life. I feel like Lee is more hesitant about going through with killing JFK at this point because he knows that would end everything that he and Marina has (I guess which is partly why he leaves everything of value he has with her the day he was going to assassinate JFK). One thing that puzzled me was that he even asked Marina to come live with him even after he committed to shooting the president. Do you think he still would have gone through with shooting JFK if she had agreed to go with him? Do you see Lee struggling here with an inner battle between his want to support his family and his want to go down in history?

In the end, Lee ultimately chooses historical fame over his family. From reading the sections about him, I got the impression that he was constantly switching back and forth between which of those two things he wanted more and was just overall deeply conflicted. Did anyone else get that impression?

Brief thoughts on the Frontline Oswald Video

The frontline video gave a really interesting picture of Lee. It made Lee come to life more than the book usually does by giving pictures and sound bites of him. When the film talked about how Lee cut his wrists to try to get the KGB to let him stay in the Soviet Union, that reminded me of in the book when he shot himself in order to stay in Japan. Linking those two things makes the historical aspect of Libra all that more real.

I feel like the book is doing a better job at describing Lee's transformation into this person who shot JFK better than the film. The film sorta glosses over his childhood and goes straight into his days of being in the military. Without those details on his childhood, it sorta frames him as a monster and doesn't give us the side of seeing that he's a product of his environment. It's very removed from Lee and his thoughts, which without reading the book at the same time would lead me to believe that he was always a horrible person.

I guess if you want to respond to this blog post, do you think the film tries to sway us toward Oswald being a bad person or not?

You better beLEEve it

While I was reading the life of Lee as a child, his personality just creeped me out. Within “In the Bronx” he seemed fairly normal to me. It seemed like just a weird quirk a small child could have to be fascinated with the sounds of trains and the feeling of riding them. But, as he started to grow older I started to get a weird creepy feeling from him. The way that Robert Sproul describes him after seeing him with blood on himself from one of his usual fights is what really started the feeling for me.

“He seemed to be grinning. It was just like Lee to grin when it made no sense, assuming it was a grin and not some squint-eyed tic or something. You couldn’t always tell with him.” (33)

This sorta begins to paints Lee as a person who likes having control of things like how people think. We get more of this controlling nature as we progress through “In New Orleans.” Once he buys the gun, we get a very weird insight into the thoughts of his mind.

“The reverie of stillness, perfection of desire, perfection of control, her pale legs slightly parted, arms at her sides, eyes closed. He makes the picture of her come and go. It is what he knows about her, how he controls her, alone at night, watching her motionless on the bed, above the rain-slick streets.” (47)

He feels like he has power over this girl. The way he describes her also feels very eerie to me. All of the details are more innocent, but there is just so much attention to her appearance that it feels odd. This isn’t the only time he’s described a girl like this. He also described Robert Sproul’s sister in the same creepy fashion.

“She was just the right height. Not to tall. Her liked her air of restraint, the way she moved the pieces on the board, almost bashfully, giving no hint of the winning or losing involved. It made him feel animated and rash, a chess genius with dirty fingernails.” (39)

He likes her because she makes him feel like he’s a genius with power. This power aspect seems to be one of the main things forming within Lee. I’m curious to see how it develops within the book.

Although Lee does give me these creepy vibes, I also think that the narrator is not trying to shape him towards being exclusively creepy. There’s lots of evidence that he’s a product of his environment. With his childhood in the book, we can humanize Lee a bit more and start to consider that his family background along with getting bullied for little things having an yankee accent (33) could have steered him towards the path of assassinating JFK like he did. However, with how all this information is presented in a straightforward manner, I think we’re left to piece together how we feel about Lee. What do you all think? Is our opinion of Lee being shaped by the narrator or are we being left to decide what we think for ourselves?

Parallels of the 1800's and 1976 in Kindred

The other day in class we started talking about the parallels of certain coincidences within Dana and Rufus’s world. There are a few scenes that seem oddly familiar to me. We learn that Kevin is always nagging Dana to type his manuscripts for him and gets angry when she refuses and admits she doesn’t like typing. Dana mentions that, “He said if I couldn’t do him a little favor when he asked, I could leave (109).” It seems weird that he’d get angry at her refusing to help him even after she tells him she doesn’t want to. And, it even reduces their relationship down to Dana being obligated to do things for Kevin like he has that sort of authority over her.  

In a way, this is like Rufus’s relationship with Alice. Rufus doesn’t seem to understand that Alice doesn’t like him, and doesn’t want to have sex with him. And, he gets mad at her for refusing him, in a way that was deemed okay in his time since Alice is black, and eventually his slave.  Although Kevin doesn’t force Dana to type his manuscripts in the end, the way he gets angry at rejection before trying to consider her feelings is the same type of anger Rufus exhibits.

In both scenarios, Dana is part of them, and is guilt tripped for not doing what the men want. Kevin makes her feel like she’s not being a good girlfriend with the “couldn’t do him a little favor” bit, and Rufus makes her feel like she’s not being a good friend to Alice with “all I want you to do is fix it so I don’t have to beat her. You’re no friend of hers if you won’t do that much” (164).

Another thing that seemed really familiar to me was all of Dana’s thoughts about Kevin’s views about race changing while he was in the 1800’s. She doesn’t think anything will happen to his views (and in the end she was mainly right) because of how different 1976 is from the 1800’s. However, we learn about Kevin’s sister, Carol, whose views changed even though she is living in 1976.

She didn’t even believe the garbage she was handing me-- or didn’t used to. It’s as though she was quoting someone else. Her husband, probably (109).

Carol, whose best friend was a black woman, seemed to go through a lot together with her before she married her husband and they drifted apart. In manner, Butler says that although Kevin doesn’t change, people in 1976 can still change for the worst.

In a way, it seems that Butler is trying to subtly fit in a message about how in ways Dana’s world is still like Rufus’s, except usually more mild. Do you think that she’s trying to present that there are still bad remnants from Rufus’s time that go undetected in our time-- sorta like like how the planter oppressors didn’t think slavery was bad then?

The Confusing Narrator

Over the course of the book I’ve been thinking about the narration as well as how the “so it goes” plays into the book. We were talking a bit about it in class on Thursday but that discussion just made me a bit more confused. So, this is being narrated by Vonnegut, but it’s the story of Billy. And, we were trying to think about if it made sense that Billy has schizophrenia or PTSD from the war and that’s why the story is laid out the way it is. I feel like that would make sense if Billy was the narrator, but Vonnegut makes himself sort of a fictional character and then narrates, so he wouldn’t have to follow all the time jumps that Billy went through if he didn’t want to. I also wonder how the narrator would have gotten all this knowledge about Billy. It makes sense that he probably heard a lot of it second hand and is just retelling the story. At first, that was one of my initial impressions of the “so it goes”. It just seemed like someone was trying to tell a story as secondary source and they were trying to say that they weren’t the primary source by saying, “at least that’s how I heard it went.” But, the discussion yesterday gave me a new thought that maybe Vonnegut is somehow also with Billy through all of this. It seems like he’s been doing this warping with Billy for a long time and the “so it goes” sorta is just like a “here we go again”. He’s tired and knows how everything is going to go except he doesn’t know about when the time warps are. He seems sorta worn out by reliving all these experiences. I started writing my blog post before my class’ panel presentation that talked a little bit about this and Vonnegut having these time travels and imaging Billy makes sense.Vonnegut doesn’t want to think about the passage of time and death. The panel presentation made a good point that Vonnegut really distances himself from the story of Dresden by making himself a character and then creating Billy and then Billy sorta “creating” tralfamadore.

Jes Grew

I was thinking about all the Jes Grew epidemics throughout the world’s history when I thought about a form of Jes Grew in the 70’s. Disco. The date at the end of the epilogue is right at the emergence of disco, with 1971 being the first time Disco reaches television with Soul Train.

As disco emerged it was met with backlash from rock fans because it didn’t carry the same subject matter that rock did, yet was becoming just as popular. Also, part of that reason was because disco embraced themes that weren’t exclusively white and heterosexual. According to Wikipedia, “[disco’s] initial audiences were club-goers from the gay, African American, Italian American, Latino, and psychedelic communities in Philadelphia and then later New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s.” Papa Labas is giving his speech in New York around this time, so evidently he must know about the rise of disco in America. Perhaps this particular lecture is focused on because it is the dawn of a new Jes Grew movement and Papa Labas wants to try to educate everyone to know that eventually Jes Grew will win and whatever that particular strain of Jes Grew is will be let into the culture of the atonists. What do you all think?

With disco there was a dancing everywhere, as characteristic of Jes Grew. With television it spread rapidly and by the mid 70’s there were movies coming out that were focused around disco dancing such as Saturday Night Fever -- which you all probably have heard about.

It seems that with disco, it was tolerated and embraced far quicker by the “atonists” than Jes Grew was. Within a few short years it’s transfer onto television makes everyone familiar with it and many people are overtaken by how groovy it is. However, the age of disco is quite short, ending in the early 1980’s. Its ending is very abrupt, just like Jes Grew in the book.

Those are some parallels that I saw, do you all see anything else?

Little Boy Narrator in Ragtime

When I was researching for my panel presentation the article I was using stated, “The memory of the young boy, the principal narrator, reaches backward to 1902, when the house in New Rochelle was built, and forward to the marriage of Tateh and Mother in 1917 “ (Ostendorf 579).

While I was reading ragtime, I never thought that the Little Boy could be the narrator. However, now that I think about it, I think it could fit. That makes sense why the mother and father of the family are called Mother and Father throughout the book.  It also makes sense why the information on Coalhouse came from other sources and the narration didn’t get in his mind. He’s not directly connected to the little boy, so everything he can gather either must have come from his father, uncle, or newspapers. Having access to Mother’s Younger Brother’s diary also seems more probable. For people not close to him and not seeming to have any major contact with any of the family members (such as Ford, Morgan, or Houdini) I’m not sure how the little boy would get that information. He does seem to have supernatural powers (like making Houdini’s car stop in front of his house and predicting his father would take him to the baseball game) but there is still a lot of information the little boy would have to read out of Morgan or Ford’s mind. And, if he could read their mind, why wouldn’t he read Coalhouse’s? Perhaps the narrator changes at certain points?

I sifted through google to see if Doctorow confirmed that the little boy was the narrator at any point, and I found the answer in an interview of Doctorow done by Michael Wutz in 1994.

Doctorow: The hidden narrator of Ragtime is probably the little boy in later times

Wutz: Excuse me for interrupting here. Why do you say "probably"? Of late, that's a question that has received quite some attention within the critical community-whether or not the little boy is, indeed, the narrator.

Doctorow: Because he was hidden to me for so much of that book. At a certain point quite near the end he betrays a personal relationship to everything he has narrated and appears to be the son of Mother and Father, namely the little boy. I'm pretty sure that's who it is, but I'm not sure that that is essential for reading the book to know that.

Even Doctorow isn’t totally positive about the little boy being the narrator. I guess it’s even still open to interpretation. What do you all think?

For more of the interview:

https://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20B%20Vol.%2011-16.1/Vol.%2011.1/11.1Wutz.htm

Ragtime's Plot

In class the other day we talked a little about how the plot starts halfway through the book. I was thinking about it a bit, and it makes sense to me why the book was laid out in this way. We get a chance to see all the characters’ backgrounds and how each person functions independently. All this background is the basis for which all the plot is set upon so that Doctorow doesn’t have to spend the type trying to develop each character and taking away from the huge plot that he’s trying to present.

There was a lot of talk though the first few days of reading this book about how Doctorow’s irony and sarcasm was more prevalent in the first half and then gets more serious as the main plot starts unfolding. Since most of the background chapters on the characters are small tidbits of “normal” life, irony makes them a lot more fun to read while still getting across the information. It also helps make sure that we’re thinking about the characters and developing opinions about them so that when the plot starts, we already know everything we need to know about the character’s motives.  Once the plot starts with regular characters appearing and building on happenings, the story is interesting enough without tons of irony added in. Perhaps Doctorow thought that making the main plot ironic would be overkill. With such drastic change from lots of irony to minimal irony, he’s letting us see that he’s serious and that the content is very serious at this point, making us focus more.

Do you have any thoughts on why Doctorow decided to make the layout of the book this way? Do you think the book would have a different feeling if the layout was different (with the background inside the plot, no background, etc.)?