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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Wise Blood of Norman Mailer: An Interpretation and Defense of Why Are We in Vietnam?: Difference between revisions

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As he is telling the story, we are bombarded by a curious, often annoying, adolescent style and a series of naive boasts. (This may be the one most disturbing aspect of an otherwise well-conceived satire.) In certain ways he does resemble his father: sneering boastfulness, shallow sexuality, arrogance, domineering stance. But he differs in a drastic way that forever separates the two from each other. D.J. knows the anxiety of self-awareness. As he puts it, he is a victim of “Herr Dread.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=122}}{{efn|Though Mailer refers to his personal concept of dread, he apparently obtained his basic idea of “Herr Dread” from [[w:Søren Kierkegaard|Søren Kierkegaard]]’s dark philosophical classic, ''The Concept of Dread''. It is this awareness of spiritual emptiness which separates D.J. from his father.}} His intimacy with his own rationality produces a free-floating fear which plagues him constantly, nibbling at his confidence like a rat trapped within his chest. In his own words, D.J. “sees through to the stinking root of things” and “can watch his own ass being created. . . . ”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=35}}
As he is telling the story, we are bombarded by a curious, often annoying, adolescent style and a series of naive boasts. (This may be the one most disturbing aspect of an otherwise well-conceived satire.) In certain ways he does resemble his father: sneering boastfulness, shallow sexuality, arrogance, domineering stance. But he differs in a drastic way that forever separates the two from each other. D.J. knows the anxiety of self-awareness. As he puts it, he is a victim of “Herr Dread.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=122}}{{efn|Though Mailer refers to his personal concept of dread, he apparently obtained his basic idea of “Herr Dread” from [[w:Søren Kierkegaard|Søren Kierkegaard]]’s dark philosophical classic, ''The Concept of Dread''. It is this awareness of spiritual emptiness which separates D.J. from his father.}} His intimacy with his own rationality produces a free-floating fear which plagues him constantly, nibbling at his confidence like a rat trapped within his chest. In his own words, D.J. “sees through to the stinking root of things” and “can watch his own ass being created. . . . ”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=35}}


. . .
He neither admires nor loves his father, feeling instead a horror when he looks into Rusty’s eyes. There he sees “voids, man, and gleams of yellow fire....” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=37}}. Students of Mailer will quickly recognize D.J. as the personification of “The White Negro.” He is a hipster, a sensitive psychopath who operates only in the present, with no precedents, no preconceptions.
 
Mailer had used this theme before. Virtually all of his fiction up till and including ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' is centered on this one fixed idea: If the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=304}}
 
D.J. is so different from his father primarily because he grew up in a super-accelerated society where no sooner is one standard established than it is destroyed and superseded by another. No value system lasts for more than a few months before it must be dismantled and replaced. To infinitely compound matters, he must exist in a society that is literally held hostage by its own government, with the subsequent threat of impending annihilation.
 
 
 


===Notes===
===Notes===
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