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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Secret Agency: American Individualism in Oswald's Tale and Libra: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Secret Agency: American Individualism in Oswald's Tale and Libra (view source)
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death suggests a kind of zero-sum game in which celebrity status confirms | death suggests a kind of zero-sum game in which celebrity status confirms | ||
personhood. | personhood. | ||
As the depictions of Mailer and DeLillo make clear, the existence of such | |||
a figure as Oswald, or more accurately, such a peculiarly unmoored Oswald, | |||
has broader and more ominous ramifications than Poirier may have supposed. These biographical narratives are unsettling not merely in what they | |||
allege about Oswald, but in what Oswald suggests about the nature and formation of American identity. As Marita Sturken points out, “Within the | |||
national discourse, the stakes of biography are high; the meaning of certain | |||
life stories helps to shape the way the nation and its history are defined” (''45''). | |||
Mailer and DeLillo’s Oswald embodies American ideals surrounding individual freedom and personal agency. As a result he is ''both'' villain and hero, | |||
and his life story functions as a kind of case study. | |||