The Libra in Libra

        Often times when people read a book, the title becomes apparent as we read it. As we read a novel in the Harry Potter series we know it’s called Harry Potter because the book’s protagonist is named “Harry Potter.” Sometimes it’s harder to tell why the title of a book is the way it is. When reading The Scarlet Letter, we find out later in the book that the title refers to the punishment the main character receives for practicing adultery. The title isn’t immediately apparent when we read the first page, but by reading the novel we figure out the meaning behind the title.

       This system doesn’t apply to Libra I feel. You enter the book not knowing why Don DeLillo chose that certain title. After reading a good way through the book however you still don’t know why. It’s annoying. Why couldn’t he just title it The Slightly Real Story Behind the Assassin of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Known as Lee Harvey Oswald and the Secret Plots he may have been Involved in! That would have been much easier to understand.

      But more often than not, the mystery of a phrase makes it a lot more fun to speculate on. Citizen Kane would have been a much less interesting movie if they told you what the phrase “Rosebud” meant in the first line. So I’m going to speculate on the meaning of the title of Libra, because that’s fun.

      The only other context that I have seen the word “Libra” used is in astrological signs. I only know that because my Father is a Libra. So maybe that has something to do with it. Within a quick google search I can see that Oswald’s birthday (October 18, 1939) falls within the range of dates that makes one a Libra.

    But why would Delillo make Oswald’s astrological sign, a thing that most people don’t pay attention to anyway, the title for this conspiracy laden book? I start to look up personality traits for Librans (as they are supposedly called) but half of them are about their romantic capabilities and the other half contradict each other. One source might say that a Libra is always an outcast, depressed, and very prone to acts of violence (sounds a bit like Oswald, doesn’t it?) while another says that a Libra will try to see all perspectives on an argument and will try to remain a pacifist in any confrontation (Not characteristics of Oswald.) This information is kind of useless, random, and doesn’t come to any meaningful conclusion.

       Right as I was about to abandon this venture, I see that the symbol of the sign Libra is the scales. The same symbol that appears on the front of my copy of Libra. To be more specific, my cover shows the scales and a bullet in front of them. This makes me form a hypothesis that instead of the astrological sign, and all of its horoscopes and predictions, being the important part, the symbol of the scales matters the most. The imagery of the bullet and the scales seems to suggest that we are judging a man based wholly on the bullets he fired at the president. All of our judgement is on these three bullets.

       That’s when it hit me. The purpose of the book is to provide a logical but fictional telling of the factors leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Don Delillo is trying to instead take our judgment off of those three bullets and instead judge the people involved in the assassination by their entire story. By the end of this book we will not see Lee Harvey Oswald as the three bullets fired at the president, but as a man with a story of his own. Then, when we see the whole story, the scales will be even. Only then we can pass judgment on Oswald and his actions.