The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today: Difference between revisions

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 {{quote|Some blackbiled lust, some desire to go ahead (and kill her) not unlike the instant one comes in a woman against her cry that she is without protection came bursting with rage from out of me and . . . crack I choked her harder . . . and ''crack'' I gave her payment.}}
+With Deborah’s death begins the arduous process of Rojack’s rebirth; he realizes that if murder is sometimes necessary, it is never simple. The gods, like furies, haunt him; he is acutely conscious of everything he thinks or says or does, for now cowardice or weakness or smallness will bring swift retribution—Dread, insanity, and the abyss. To strengthen himself, and to find, once again, something he can honestly call love are the ends of Rojack’s quest, but fulfillment of it and freedom from these new furies can be attained only through heroism, through seeking danger and daring death.
+{{quote|. . . I believed that God was not love but courage. Love can come only as a reward . . . . A voice said in my mind: “That which you fear most is what you must do.”}}
+The very phrasing of the passage is related to the nature of the punishment that will accrue if the command goes unheeded. Rojack’s mental life is split into a “voice” and “mind,” a separation dangerously close to the empty panic of schizophrenia.
+But if madness looms as the penalty for prudence and cowardice (Mailer uses the two as almost indistinguishable), it is also possible that Dread will overwhelm even the bold Promethean. Rojack knows that “if man wished to steal the secret of the gods . . . they would defend themselves and destroy whichever man came too close.” With so narrow a chance of escape from insanity and an eternity in the abyss, suicide quite naturally presents itself as an alternative. What is to hold one back?
 === Notes ===
 {{notelist}}