Gloria's Blog

Recently I asked my parents what they thought about the government report on the JFK assassination. Neither of them think that it tells the whole story and I was interested to hear that my dad’s speculations lined up pretty well with what seems to be the current plan in Libra to try to kill JFK. My dad thinks a couple things could be possible including that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t work alone, was probably supposed to die before being taken into custody, and that Jack Ruby was sent by whatever group planned the assassination in order to kill Lee Harvey Oswald before he talked. Hearing him say what many other Americans believe, that the government report isn’t the whole story, and some of these pretty common conspiracy theories was interesting because they aren’t far from the conspiracies that DeLillo is putting forth. The difference is that when most people say these things they just are speculating and don’t put forth any facts but DeLillo frames the situation with what seems lik...

In our discussions in class we’ve touched a lot on the parallels between Alice and Dana and Rufus and Kevin. Not just how Alice and Dana are similar to each other and Rufus and Kevin are similar to each other, but how Alice and Rufus’s relationship is like a 19 th century version of Kevin and Dana’s relationship. Alice and Dana are quite similar in how they look and wear their hair, which is pointed out several times in the book, but also in the fact that they were both born free and then pushed into a life of slavery. They also both felt the need to escape from this new life they were pushed into, Dana by harming herself to return to the 20 th century and Alice by eventually hanging herself. Throughout Dana’s stay in the 1800s, she beings to see similarities between the Weylins and Kevin, the way that they talk or the color of their eyes, these similarities hint to her larger concern that Kevin will become like them if he stays on the plantation for too long. For Rufus, the onl...