Confronting the Chaos Theory of History in DeLillo's Libra

Abstract

Radford critiques Don DeLillo's Libra. Far from a narrative that salvages recent American history from its randomness and terrible confusions, it delineates the assassination as infinitely explicable since no reliable plot structure exists within which it can be placed. The seemingly random pattern of coincidence in DeLillo's paranoid fiction produces an event that is at once ungraspable and also replete with multiple meanings. Furthermore, DeLillo does not fully address coincidence as the driving force behind the unraveling of myriad historical happenings to negate individual agency and smother any hope of accessing an enabling locus of political protest.