As far as we, the students of history, know, Bobby Dupard is a fictional character of Don Delillo. I was tossing around the idea in my head though, what if Bobby Dupard is fictional in the world of Nicholas Branch. What if he's in Lee's head like a childhood imaginary friend? I believe this idea isn't as far fetched as it initially may seem. Bobby is first introduced as Lee's cellmate in Atsugi. This I believe is the 'real' Bobby Dupard. I can't see anyway that an image of Lee's mind could some how end up as fact on the report that Branch is compiling. It is after that that I believe it veers away Bobby. Lee has created a new identity for Bobby. He is now a figment of Lee's imagination, his actions are a construction of Lee's mind.
Let's take when they reconnect at the laundromat. Lee is in a tumultuous state, he's not thinking clearly. I would argue it is him projecting Dupard as the anonymous worker. He then visits nightly Dupard, only he's really just having a conversation with himself. The discussion he has with Dupard about Walker then is him guessing what an African-American veteran forced into the ghetto would say about his experiences. When Dupard is talking about not wanting to miss class to shoot Walker, I think it's part of Lee's mind challenging his planned assassination. His argument about going in close for the kill or taking the distance shot then is also an internal, not external one.
I admit, the fact that Lee gets a vehicle from Dupard is a bit tricky in my new understanding of Dupard. The case could be made that Lee has a mental break when he goes to steal the car and by the time he wakes up the next morning is back to himself, the car showing up without explanation equaling Dupard got it. It's possible but it is sort of a stretch. Lee does have a propensity for making up stories and people, alternate identities and personalities. He does expect his cellmate to have wisdom for him like the great revolutionaries, but Dupard doesn't. He is lonely and consistently abandoned so it would make sense for him to make up someone he expected so much from. In his mind, history has put Dupard at the laundromat to push him over the edge to take action. Really, I see it more as the two sides of his mind struggling with what he feels he must do to accomplish his goal of being a part of history.
Even if we can't fully integrate this idea into the fictional frame of the novel--that Bobby definitively IS an imaginary figment of Lee's consciousness--I agree that his role in the novel sort of FEELS this way. This could be seen as an effect of what DeLillo is doing by "projecting" him into one of the "blank spaces" in the official record--presumably there are people who would have been peripheral to Lee's life that history would not have recorded (he did have a cellmate when he was in the brig in Atsugi--what did they talk about? did he influence Oswald at all? who knows?). And we know nothing at all about how Lee went about the Walker shooting--he wasn't even linked to it until after he was dead--so there could have been someone else involved. And he could have been the same guy from the brig--or not. In a sense, it doesn't really matter: DeLillo treats Dupard's significance less as a co-conspirator and more as someone who influences Lee's sense of politics and equality. As we discussed in class, his involvement in the plot to kill Walker gives it some political cred, aligning Lee with the increasingly militant civil rights movement (like Younger Brother latching onto Coalhouse's cause--the plight of the white would-be radical whose political dissatisfaction needs legitimation to be more than a pose).
ReplyDeleteWe can say this: Dupard's presence in Lee's life is not independently verified by anyone else in the novel (except, strangely, Branch--and Branch himself wonders how the CIA ever found out about Dupard, and concludes, somewhat improbably, that Dupard himself must have come forward).