Should We Be Sympathetic Towards Lee?

There’s been a lot of discussion in class recently about Lee’s character. Today we ended our class with the question to ponder: Are we sympathetic to Lee? Some people were saying that they feel bad for Lee because he can’t do anything right. Throughout the story he always seems sort of like a failure and this brings some humor to the plot but also makes Lee more of a three-dimensional person. One could argue that we should be sympathetic to Lee because he is left in the dark for the assassination plot and is being used by the other conspirators. He seems almost harmless in his personality because he screws up most things he tries to do. Also some bad things happen to Lee to make the reader feel empathy towards him. We see that Lee was bullied as a child and later was sexually assaulted by David Ferrie. Lee also lacks a strong role model and all of the father figures he looks up to end up manipulating, betraying, or hurting him.
It is also possible to feel bad for Lee because he expects people to like him and remember him as a revolutionary in history, but that doesn’t really end up happening for him. He is remembered, but not for what he wants. Everywhere he goes he expects to be greeted with fanfare and affection as a hero, both when he defects to the Soviet Union and then defects back to the U.S.. The huge difference between how he wants to be seen and how he is actually seen is almost pitiful and could make the reader feel sympathy for him.

Despite all of these aspects of Lee’s character, I don’t feel sympathy for him. At first in the story he seemed like he might just be a screw-up kid that was coerced into killing the president but wasn’t in himself morally a terrible person. Then we start to see more insight into his personal life and see that he abuses his wife. Learning this made me immediately lose any sympathy for Lee. DeLillo also makes us feel that we could almost excuse Lee for shooting JFK because he was tricked in the plot and didn’t know there would be a second shooter to set him up. But after Lee shoots at the president and he is on the run, he brutally murders a cop with excessive, cold-blooded violence. This action shows us that Lee isn’t always some ignorant, easily-tricked character but rather someone with his own motives for carrying out acts of violence. His personality is complicated because in some moments he seems like the victim, or is actually a victim, but I don’t think those instances excuse his terrible actions.

Comments

  1. Xanthe BrownMay 15, 2018 at 2:26 PM

    Nice post. Even though I can't feel sympathy for him for the same reasons you've described, I think DeLillo purposefully writes him to be ambiguous. I think also Lee really wants to be seen as sympathetic, shown with the dramatic narration of his suicide attempt and his need to be seen as a struggling revolutionary. Yet, he is not seen as a revolutionary in the end - no one is sympathetic to him. I think this speaks to the ambiguity of history and the many different narratives we can adopt, like whether we decide Oswald is sympathetic or not.

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  2. SolomiaMay 15, 2018 at 2:54 PM

    Like you, I feel that although there may be cause to feel sympathy for Lee, I just don’t. All of the things that may make him sympathetic to me just read as kinda pathetic. What kind of military guy can’t even hit a target a few hundred feet in front of him, on a clear day, with easy aim (I’m talking mostly about General Walker here), that’s just sad. In addition, I think the fact that Lee was a domestic abuser is too often forgotten. His repression of Marina and consistent violence towards her was completely unjustified. That alone, to me, makes him seem more evil than just a goofy screw-up.

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  3. Nora BenmamounMay 15, 2018 at 9:05 PM

    I definitely agree that all my sympathy for Lee stopped when he abused Marina. One could say that his violence towards the end of the book is due to him being manipulated and him desiring to feel like he's in a community. However, there's really no justification for him beating his wife.

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  4. RaineMay 16, 2018 at 8:15 AM

    As soon as the domestic abuse started, I lost all sympathy for Lee. The shooting of the police officer further solidified my opinion about him. There's no justification for the domestic abuse and the killing of the police officer was unnecessarily horrific. Even if those events didn't happen, I feel like I still would not have liked Lee by the end of the novel. The decisions he makes and his responses to them frustrated me, particularly when he decides who to trust.

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