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

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 {{quote|The world is going shazam, hahray harout, fart in my toot, air we breathe is the prez, present dent, and god has always wanted more from man than man has wished to give him. Zig a zig a zig. That is why we live in dread of god.}}
+Even the seminal concept of Dread is translated into the pop language of rock-and-roll. A vast chasm of culture and sensibility separates the tone of Rojack’s agonized monologues from the narrative voice of the present novel.
+{{quote|. . . Mr. Sender, who sends out that Awe and Dread is up on their back . . . because they ''alone'', man, you dig? They all ''alone'', it’s a fright wig, man, that Upper silence alone is enough to bugger you, whoo-ee.}}
+Indeed, the very claim to a prophetic stance in ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' is established in a similarly (and intentionally) ambiguous tone.
+{{quote|This is your own wandering troubadour brought right up to date, here to sell America its new handbook on how to live . . . . We’re going to tell you what it’s all about.}}
+Although there is a bare minimum of dramatic tension or external conflict, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' has several “characters,” each significant primarily on a symbolic plane. D.J. (Disc Jockey, Dr. Jekyll), the adolescent hero narrator of patrician Texas blood, is sometimes convinced that he is really a “Harlem Nigger,” and since “there is no such thing as a totally false perception,” perhaps he is. Not literally, of course, but rather in the same way that Mailer recognized Sonny Liston in himself and in the same way that the white hipster of “The White Negro” is, in his psychic makeup, black. If D.J. is the hipster, Rusty, his father, is the square, a corporation tycoon in Dallas—coarse, selfish, and, at heart, a coward. Tex (the Mr. Hyde to D.J.’s Dr. Jekyll) is part Indian, manly, bisexual, and the son of an undertaker.
+The three go bear hunting in Alaska, but the most important action takes place in D.J.’s mind. At one point he has an urge to turn his gun on his father and “blast a shot, thump in his skull.” Although he resists, he soon commits the act symbolically by contradicting his father’s warning and courageously approaching a wounded bear, putting his life on the line, while his father lies hidden, waiting for the bear to become helpless before firing the fatal shot. Thus liberated from paternal authority, D.J. finds his instincts for love and battle shifted to Tex, D.J. encounters nakedly for the first time his other self. And through a mutual awareness of their mutual desire for both intercourse and fratricide, D.J. and Tex finally achieve a sense of purification and personal integration.
 === Notes ===
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