The Contingency of History: Pragmatism and Approaching Historical Truth in Don DeLillo’s Libra

“Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel Libra is a work with an unavoidable kinesis, the characters and the reader alike drawing towards the Kennedy assassination through the centrifugal forces of history. What DeLillo regards as the “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” (181) is an event that has permeated and saturated the American cultural consciousness for the past half-century. While Libra falls into the category of speculative fiction, the conspiratorial plotting that drives the action of the novel is secondary to the historical construction and reconstruction that DeLillo undertakes. DeLillo invites us to plot with him and urges us to be swept up by the impetus of history that creates the superstructure of Libra.”