Dangling Man:Schizophrenic Euphoria In Libra

Don DeLillo ranks among the most prominent and influential postmodern writers in contemporary America. As one of his significant masterpieces, Libra is honored as the typical representative of postmodern novels, which sketches the contours of the situation of that time in America through the protagonist's life experiences, based on the assassination of Kennedy. The thesis attempts to probe into the protagonist's psychological changes through his predicament, contradictory and morbid psychology as well as his euphoria of being liberated from the perspective of Fredric Jameson's postmodern theory, with the intention of exploring and rethinking the cause of the historical character's tragic destiny.The thesis firstly explores Oswald's predicament of living circumstances which mainly reflects from three aspects: arduous living circumstances, internal and external social forces, dangling Libran disposition, thus it reveals that the personal predicament of the dangling man exerts great influence on Oswald's paranoia, isolation and alienation. Subsequently, it proceeds through Oswald's contradictory psychology while he is confronted with the cruel gap between ideal and reality, the conflict between individual identity and social ideology as well as the struggle between the two antithetical systems of the United States and the Soviet Union, with the purpose of indicating that Oswald's schizophrenia in a sense results from the external forces besides his Libran disposition of being easily influenced. Eventually, it elaborates Oswald's collapse and disengagement as well as the euphoria of his emotional release by means of extremely radical behavior whereby to reveal Oswald's tragic predestination of running into fall and destruction. Thus, Oswald can be rendered as the victim of power politics, the scapegoat of the well-planned conspiracy, and the product of the political system during the given period.