The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night: Difference between revisions

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.