View source for The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} <!-- EDIT BELOW THIS LINE -->

{{dc|dc=I|N'' WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM? NORMAN MAILER ALLUDES''}} to James Joyce twice (126, 149), and certainly his 1967 anti-war novel has a Joycean feel. It incorporates the same sort of monologic stream-of-consciousness narrative and
language play as we saw in ''Ulysses'', all tinged with the “color” that put "Ulysses" on trial in America for obscenity. But Mailer’s novel is also richly evocative of that other great modernist writer, Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway was conspicuously singled-out with a few adjectives when
Mailer told an interviewer six years earlier that if he has “one ambition above
all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud;
Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering
Hemingway might come to read” (''Conversations'' 76).A close reading reveals
that Why Are We in Vietnam? may actually be that novel, but I’ll leave it to
future critics to explore how it would have appealed to the sensibilities of
the other writers mentioned. I’m going to focus on Hemingway, because
apart from echoes of Joyce’s style, his influence here seems most prevalent.
As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on
Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the in�tersection of the two” (). Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s
death made him feel “a little weaker” (Conversations ), no doubt because
he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he
wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends,
he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated
feminists, he was suspicious of governmental structures, and he seemed to