Commentary on Libra's shooting scene

Libra is a novel written by Don Delillo and published in 1988. It deals with the life of Lee Harvey Oswald in parallel with the plotters of the conspiracy which led him to be charged with John Fitzgerald Kennedy's murder. This extract is the climax of the novel, the scene where the President is shot in the head. How does this passage embody the complexity of the whole book? This is what we will try to analyze first focusing on the chaotic atmosphere of the scene, then on Bobby Hargis's point of view and to finish we will examine the media aspect.In this shooting scene, people are overwhelmed by panic. There is a man "already deep in chaos" (line 6), "a girl in a pretty coat running across the lawn toward the President'scar" (line 17-18) and in the end "People were down on the grass" (line 23). Hence the protection attempts like "a man [who] threw his kid to the ground and fell on him" (line13-14) but also "the Governor, Connally, kind of sliding down in the jump seat and his wife taking him in, gathering the man in" (line 15-16) The same way a child was protected by his father, the Governor was protected by his wife. Whatever the family link, sex or hierarchical position, they go through the same ordeal and have the same human reaction. On the other hand, the narrator refers to a "man [who] stood applauding" (line 5-6), which is ironical considering that the President was at the same moment wounded in the throat from the first shot. There is also an exception already obvious in its italics type "Put me on, Bill. Put me on" (line 8).

[...] The sentence "the sleet of bone and blood and tissue [who] struck [Hargis] in the face" (line 20-21) can be taken literally and as a metaphor, in the sense that this shooting was out of the blue for the cop. "Bobby W. Hargis [was] riding escort, left rear" (line his job is to protect the President from potential danger. That is the reason why he is the subject of action verbs like "turned right" (line "He turned his body right, keeping the motorcycle headed west" (line 18-19) and "kept" (line which means that he is in control, and confident as the other verbs "had time to think" (line 14-15) and "knew" (line 9 and 13) tend to show. [...]

[...] In the writing style, chaos is depicted on several levels of structure. First of all thanks to the figures of speech in the passage, for example with the enumeration "and then the blood and matter, the unforgettable thing, the sleet of bone and blood and tissue struck him in the face" (line 19 to 21) and its ellipses which speed up the rhythm. Then because of the alternative points of view of both the people within the cortege and the people around, presented by one sentence each. [...]