The character Nicholas Branch, tasked with writing the secret official CIA history of the assassination, concludes that the effort will be never-ending and the whole truth ultimately unknowable. For DeLillo, the Kennedy assassination was a turning point in American history that shattered the country's sense in the postwar era of a common reality and purpose. The medium of fiction allows the reader to reclaim some of the balance and coherence that history lacks.[4]
The novel refers to the report of the Warren Commission as the novel that "James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred," as it comprises an almost encyclopedic picture of American life in the 1950s and 1960s comparable to the detailed depiction of Dublin in Joyce's novels.[4]
The book's title comes from Oswald's astrological sign, and, as a picture of a scale, symbolizes for Branch the outside forces of history weighing in on Oswald's fate as well as the fate of the entire assassination plot. According to DeLillo, the scale also hints at how "a man could tip either way" with regard to committing the ultimate crime,[1] and suggests a man torn between conflicting ideas and impulses, exemplified by the tension between his service in the United States military and his communist beliefs.[4]
