I brought this point up in class the other day; this idea that the whole Nicholas Branch part of Libra is a really unnecessary aspect of the book. Now, maybe this idea stems from the fact that even after having finished the novel, I STILL don't understand what Branch was up to and in fact found all of his parts extremely confusing, but from what I do understand about Branch and his story, they don't seem to be an integral part of the novel.
That sentence was long. Let me try again.
What I'm trying to say is that I think Libra could've succeeded as a story without Branch and his parts. Like, to me it seemed Branch was put in to give the novel that "meta" aspect we've talked about so much in class. But I feel like Libra itself already had that aspect to it. I mean, just looking at the JFK assassination from a different perspective and under different circumstances causes us to rethink and reshape our thoughts on what really happened and why and the consequences of that. We don't need a character in the book to help channel those thoughts because just by simply reading, we are having them. (Hope that made more sense.)
The thing is, Branch didn't really add anything to the story, at least not for me. He was more of an annoyance than anything else. I'd be smack dab in the middle of Lee's story, and then all of a sudden I'm reading about Branch, and I'm like, "Hold up. What's this? What's going on?" It'd get so confusing, simply because I was so wrapped up in the Lee story that I had forgotten about the Branch part of it. And I think that's when you can tell if a character or if a part of a story is unnecessary.
I encountered the same thing with my short story project. I had used a frame narrative couple for meta purposes and to ease my way into my main story. The frame narrative couple basically stood as bookmarks for the main novel couple. But that didn't work. As my peer edit told me, "I had completely forgotten about your other couple, and so when they came in I was like 'Whoa, who are these people?' and had to go searching to find where they had been before." (Or, well, he said something like that.) The point is, there was no use for my frame narrative couple. What I wanted to use them for worked out fine without them. My story stood without them, and the messages I wanted conveyed were conveyed. And that's why I feel like Nicholas Branch and his story is unnecessary,
But hey. It's ok, Branch. You can go hang with my frame narrative couple.
I can see where you're coming from, in terms of narrative momentum--Branch is "outside" the story (although we do actually get all kinds of important and bizarre/ephemeral bits of information from his sections, and his historically grounded mound of data also includes DeLillo's fictional characters, like Parmenter and Everett, so this gives a kind of intra-fictional "reality" status to them). But his sections always come in during the dated/CIA-plotter chapters and not the Lee ones (until they merge at the end). I wish we'd talked about his sections further, actually--maybe the various insights he makes about the nature of evidence and the temptation to read plot and interconnection into proximate facts are just old hat to someone who's been in this course for three months, but in some ways his sections articulate the main themes of the course. It was reading this novel, and the Branch sections in particular, when I first had the idea for the course. So in a quite literal way, the whole ride we've been on comes from these sections.
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