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 Over and above what Mailer has done with his manipulation of plot, character, and tone in ''An American Dream'' is the unmistakable voice that Mailer seems to have unleashed in his telling of the story. The narration of the two sophomore novels is cautious and conventional. Even though the rewrite of ''The Deer Park'' captures a hipper, more colloquial style, the style pays homage to the tenets of “good writing,” particularly to the values of economy, precision, and narrative pacing. It might be said of the style of ''An American Dream'' that Mailer has done away with the imperatives of such refinement and simply let loose. Mailer has attempted to live up to his remark that “What makes a novelist great is that he illumines each line of his work with the greatest intensity of experience.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=379}} In the spirit of a plot that is always surfing along a point of ultimate crisis, a character who is always being broken down and rebuilt as a result of his actions, and an atmosphere awash in magical influences, Mailer has Rojack tell the story in a voice that strives to find “the greatest intensity” in every sentence and phrase. If Mailer stylistically emulates Hemingway in certain ways, stylistically he has become the anti-Hemingway, notorious for his Byzantine effusiveness. In the same manner that Rojack trusted to his intuitions as the only authority on what he should do, Mailer the writer has liberated himself from writerly formulas of craft. In an interview, Mailer describes writerly craft as a variety of bad faith. The cultivation of craft gets between the writer and his real subject and offers an escape from “the terror of confronting a reality which might open into more and more anxiety and so present a deeper and deeper view of the abyss. Craft protects one from facing those endless expanding realities of deterioration and responsibility.”{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=216}} Throughout An American Dream, when Mailer’s prose gets a whiff of something, it pursues relentlessly. His over-the-top description of Rojack’s sexual encounter with Ruta, the elaborate game of psychic warfare in the after-hours club, and Kelly’s epic monologue in his penthouse; all of these moments suggest that Mailer has thrown off any concern for balance or subtlety in favor of extreme effects and exhaustive treatment of ideas. More than any of the other innovations in Mailer’s fictional technique, this matter of his intuitional, ecstatic prose style is the one that will become most commonly associated with his writing. Indeed, he ratchets the frenzy up several notches for his next work of fiction, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'', and his most recent novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', has received all the usual criticism for its flights of digression and bombast.
-Certainly, there are many influences that inform Mailer’s self-invention as a vessel for rhetorical excess. Writing articles for the ''Village Voice'' and other periodicals gave him practice composing under the urgency of the deadline, and Mailer himself has attributed much of his hipster style to the influence of marijuana, alcohol, Benzedrine, and Seconal.{{efn|See “Fourth Advertisement for Myself: The Last Draft of ''The Deer Park'',” in {{harvtxt|Mailer|1959|pp=205–224}}.}} But clearly Mailer the writer is captivated with the possibilities of translating the imperatives of Hip existentialism from the realm of experience into the realm of expression. The tone of Mailer’s prose is intended to be contiguous with the tone of Mailer’s consciousness. The original appearance of ''An American Dream'' in monthly installments combined the art of the novelist and the art of the journalist in ways which Mailer would famously go on to explore. The self-parodic correspondences between Rojack’s character and Mailer’s public persona represent a further fusion of artist and artwork. In this stance, Mailer makes a definitive break with Sartre, who disdains passion as a poise of bad faith and insists on the modernist conception of a necessary “aesthetic withdrawal”{{sfn|Sartre|1972|p=49}} of the artist and the work. For Sartre, the writer’s freedom is dependent upon a detachment from any commitment to a state of mind or an overriding emotion. The writer’s decision to write “supposes that he withdraws somewhat from his feelings, in short, that he has transformed his emotions into free emotions as I do mine while reading him.”{{sfn|Sartre|1972|p=55}} Mailer, of course, would site such a remark as evidence that French philosophers are “alienated beyond alienation from their unconscious,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=341}} and his hip existentialism is more authentically grounded in the corporeal and libidinal experience of living. Mailer has said, “I edit on a spectrum which runs from the high clear manic impressions of a drunk which has made one electrically alert all the way down to the soberest reaches of depression where I can hardly bear my words. By the time I’m done with writing I care about I usually have worked on it through the full gamut of my consciousness.”{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=218}} Writing, for Mailer, is a transubstantiation of his flesh and spirit into his words, an act that comprises elements of confession and excretion. He aspires to compose sentences that will reek of his sweat and dread. In this sense, Rojack and Mailer are both committed to the Sartrean necessity of inventing themselves ex nihilo. Rojack has to create himself through action in his dreamlike world of magical possibilities just as Mailer pushes himself into being through the unfathomable possibilities of language.
+Certainly, there are many influences that inform Mailer’s self-invention as a vessel for rhetorical excess. Writing articles for the ''Village Voice'' and other periodicals gave him practice composing under the urgency of the deadline, and Mailer himself has attributed much of his hipster style to the influence of marijuana, alcohol, Benzedrine, and Seconal.{{efn|See “Fourth Advertisement for Myself: The Last Draft of ''The Deer Park'',” in {{harvtxt|Mailer|1959|pp=205–224}}.}} But clearly Mailer the writer is captivated with the possibilities of translating the imperatives of Hip existentialism from the realm of experience into the realm of expression. The tone of Mailer’s prose is intended to be contiguous with the tone of Mailer’s consciousness. The original appearance of ''An American Dream'' in monthly installments combined the art of the novelist and the art of the journalist in ways which Mailer would famously go on to explore. The self-parodic correspondences between Rojack’s character and Mailer’s public persona represent a further fusion of artist and artwork. In this stance, Mailer makes a definitive break with Sartre, who disdains passion as a poise of bad faith and insists on the modernist conception of a necessary “aesthetic withdrawal”{{sfn|Sartre|1972|p=49}} of the artist and the work. For Sartre, the writer’s freedom is dependent upon a detachment from any commitment to a state of mind or an overriding emotion. The writer’s decision to write “supposes that he withdraws somewhat from his feelings, in short, that he has transformed his emotions into free emotions as I do mine while reading him.”{{sfn|Sartre|1972|p=55}} Mailer, of course, would site such a remark as evidence that French philosophers are “alienated beyond alienation from their unconscious,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=341}} and his hip existentialism is more authentically grounded in the corporeal and libidinal experience of living. Mailer has said, “I edit on a spectrum which runs from the high clear manic impressions of a drunk which has made one electrically alert all the way down to the soberest reaches of depression where I can hardly bear my words. By the time I’m done with writing I care about I usually have worked on it through the full gamut of my consciousness.”{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=218}} Writing, for Mailer, is a transubstantiation of his flesh and spirit into his words, an act that comprises elements of confession and excretion. He aspires to compose sentences that will reek of his sweat and dread. In this sense, Rojack and Mailer are both committed to the Sartrean necessity of inventing themselves ''[[w:Creatio ex nihilo|ex nihilo]]''. Rojack has to create himself through action in his dreamlike world of magical possibilities just as Mailer pushes himself into being through the unfathomable possibilities of language.
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