Lee in Jail

By now, we’ve read about Lee’s formative years in Libra. Lee has gone from a kid on the streets to a marine in Japan. Lee is thrown into prison for “wrongful use of provoking words to a staff noncommissioned officer,” a relatively minor charge when he could be arrested for treason or use of an unauthorized weapon (DeLillo 97).

Lee believes that prison is an incredibly formative experience for great minds and thinks that his stay will be similar. His studies of communism and his idealization(?) of its leaders made him think that being imprisoned or isolated is crucial in his development as a communist. Lee describes Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin (I’m assuming the description is influenced by his perspective and not purely factual):

“These were men who lived in isolation for long periods, lived close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls, taking them with it. History was a force to these men, a presence in the room.  They felt it and waited.” (DeLillo 34).

Once Lee is actually imprisoned, he attempts to make his short stay into something like the lives of Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky. “He tried to feel history in the cell,” implying that his quest to find the force of history is unsuccessful (DeLillo 100). He is disappointed in Dupard for not being the wise cellmate that he read about. His entire jail stay doesn’t seem particularly successful (if what he was going for was important thought, epiphanies, etc. But then I have no idea how one measures how successful jail time was). I don’t know how critical his jail time was to his development as a communist thinker.

However, “he could see how he’d been headed here since the day he was born,” so he still feels somewhat in place (DeLillo 100). He doesn’t act particularly different when he is in jail (I’m mainly thinking of how he tries to antagonize people). Lee realizes that the jail “was just another name for the stunted rooms where he’d spent his life” (DeLillo 100). This made me think about the other “stunted rooms” he lived in: the Bronx and New Orleans.

This ties in with something else I’ve been noticing: DeLillo uses repetition of phrases, sort of similar to what Kurt Vonnegut does in Slaughterhouse-Five. The one that jumped out to me the most was the phrase “spent serious time…”, firstly because I thought it was odd that a phrase that reminds me distinctly of prison would be used in Lee’s case (because he spent such a short time in jail before getting killed) and secondly because it’s only used with important aspects of his life. A list of all the places where I’ve spotted it:

·       - “Learn the alleys, use the dark. He rode the subways. He spent serious time at the zoo” (DeLillo 6)

·       - “He spent serious time at the library” (studying communist works) (DeLillo 33)

·     -  “Or he sat in an unused office in a far corner of the third floor, where he spent serious time reading the Marine Corps manual” (DeLillo 42)

·     -  “Back in Atsugi he went on a movie binge. He saw every movie twice, kept to himself, spent serious time at the base library, learning Russian verbs.” (DeLillo 112).

Lee’s experiences in all these places and times seem very important and formative. I’m wondering how influential his prison stay actually is to his opinions and development, because he doesn’t really change throughout his prison stay, but communist works and the Marine Corps manual are very influential for him. I’m also excited to see where DeLillo takes Lee’s idea of and experiences in prisons, particularly at the end of the story.

Thoughts?

Dana's Morality

In Kindred, Dana is repeatedly forced to visit the Antebellum South and adapt to her surroundings. By using this unpredictable mode of time travel and the relatable way in which Dana’s story is told, Octavia Butler forces us to reckon with what we would do if we were in Dana’s place.

Dana’s first trip to the 1800s seems like the most straightforward version of the time travel. She is sent back without warning, but upon arrival, she knows exactly what she has to do: “Before me was a wide tranquil river, and near the middle of that river was a child splashing, screaming…Drowning! I reacted to the child in trouble. Later I could ask questions, try to find out where I was, what had happened. Now I went to help the child.” (Butler 13). Dana is the hero in this situation. She saves Rufus using 1970s technology, despite not totally knowing artificial respiration. Margaret beats Dana and Tom threatens to kill Dana, but nonetheless, she saves Rufus. She is then transported back to the 1970s. This is probably the most cut-and-dry situation Dana faces:  A toddler needs her help in a life-or-death crisis. Dana is immediately sympathetic. As readers, we would like to think that we attempt to do the same. This creates a precedent for a reader’s perception of Dana: she is a reliable narrator and moral person by our contemporary standards.

The reader’s initial identification with Dana makes her subsequent choices more understandable.  In her second encounter with Rufus, Dana learns more context about the time period of her travels. She puzzles out the real reason she keeps travelling back in time is “to insure my family’s survival, my own birth” (Butler 28). Therefore, a sense of preservation prevents her from harming Rufus or Alice because doing so could jeopardize her own life.

Throughout the rest of the novel, Dana makes incredibly difficult moral decisions about what to do in the 1800s.  Rufus is a slave owner.  Dana must struggle with the immorality of his position and his actions with the need to preserve her own life. As readers, we recognize and identify with her contemporary morality.  Thus, we are forced to go along with her choices.

Butler makes it very hard for readers to question Dana’s decisions. By painting Dana as a morally responsible character who is trying her hardest in unpredictable situations, Butler makes Dana sympathetic to the reader.  Through Dana, we must confront the difficult and uncertain options of what it means to behave morally.