I wanted to quickly clarify one of the comments I made in class yesterday, this having mainly to do with my feeling that the actual scene where Lee shoots Kennedy is anticlimactic. It wasn't that it was different than the climax I was expecting, it was just that at the end of the section, I wasn't actually sure whether or not the President had been shot.

While I was having my difficulties articulating this fact to the class during discussion, I tried to figure out exactly what it was that made me unsure about the scene. I think I finally found it. This scene occurs on page 396, and it is the top section where Lee actually pulls the trigger. My problem, and perhaps this was just unobservantness on my part, but DeLillo never actually says, "Lee shot the president."

Granted, this might be a little too obvious to be at all literary, but he could have at least said something along the lines of "Lee fired," or "the president was hit." As the scene is, the only references to the gun going off are vague to me because I know nothing about guns. To me, I'm not really sure what "Lee turned up the handle, drew the bolt back," and "Lee drove the bolt forward, jerking the handle down," actually mean. Does that mean he shot the gun? Does it mean he was preparing the gun to be fired? I don't know. I guess I took it as being his preparation for the shot, loading the gun and things like that.

I suppose I should have taken the president's reaction as a hint, but that could have been a reaction to many things, and I guess I just didn't put two and two together. So, in the end, it wasn't that the scene wasn't exciting enough for me or anything like that, it was just that when I came to the page break, I was thinking, "wait, did he just shoot Kennedy?!?" which I feel like shouldn't have been a question I should ask in a book that is entirely about this event.