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Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt against conventional society. It is very different from past liter- ary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both from established conventions and ideological complications. Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the “marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure re- bellion.

In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic au- tobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Ad- vertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his per- sonality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his sec- ond and third novels”.Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally” I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack- Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.

I am also reminded of Burwell’s poignant description, quoted earlier, of the late Hemingway wrestling with the four narratives that he could not complete:

In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen- year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of  as he wrote in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have lim- ited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.

Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phe- nomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an ex- ample of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to partici- pate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” . That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.