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 Closely connected to the mood of cosmic significance permeating every development in the plot of ''An American Dream'' is the manner in which Rojack is conceived as a character in contrast to Mailer’s previous protagonists. In ''Barbary Shore'', Lovett is planning to write “a large ambitious work about an immense institution... and about the people who wandered through it. The book had a hero and a heroine, but they never met while they were in the institution. It was only when they escaped... that they were able to love and so discover each other.”{{sfn|Mailer|1951|p=58}} Lovett, of course, is the hero of this story, clamped down under a set of circumstances that defer any possibility of personal transformation into the future. Indeed, we learn that this deferral is to be indefinitely and probably perpetually postponed for Lovett himself. In the final chapter, Lovett perceives, “If I fled down the alley which led from that rooming house, it was only to enter another, then another.”{{sfn|Mailer|1951|p=311}} There is no escape from the institution, and therefore Lovett’s character is condemned to a state of suspended animation, incapable of the kind of potentiality that gives meaning to agency. Likewise, O’Shaugnessy spends most of ''The Deer Park'' wandering without direction in a fog of self alienation: “I didn’t know what was right, and I didn’t know if I cared, and I didn’t even care if I knew what I wanted or what was going on in me.”{{sfn|Mailer|1955|p=224}} O’Shaugnessy’s final scenes are charged with an urgency and a will toward self-transformative encounters that echoes Mailer’s own experience of existential rebirth. In O’Shaugnessy’s closing thoughts on the kind of writer he will aspire to be, we hear Mailer’s distinctive new voice: “I know that finally one must do, simply do, for we act in total ignorance and yet in honest ignorance we must act, or we can never learn, for we can hardly believe what we are told, we can only measure what has happened inside ourselves.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1955|p=326}}
+This closing sentiment in The Deer Park becomes the starting point for Mailer’s writing on hipsterism. Rather than hopelessly wiling away a Beckettian endgame, Mailer’s hipsters are charged with the imperatives “to set out into that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self”
+(''Advertisements'' 339) and “to create a new nervous system for themselves” (345). As a character, the hipster is committed to not only the possibility but the necessity of permanent mutability. In this sense, he faithfully reflects the Sartrean premise that “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists
+only insofar as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is” ~Existentialism 300!. Although Sartre’s philosophy points toward a radical new understanding of the manner in which human beings exist, it has often been said that Sartre’s own fictional technique relies too heavily on naturalistic conventions that conceive of people as “characters.” 2 In conventional novelistic practice, the very idea of a “character” implies an essentialist kernel of inherent traits; a fictional character coheres through the perceived unity of the character’s “soul. ”Challenging this essentialist conception of human identity has become one of the central projects of existential and postmodern fiction, from William S. Burroughs to Don DeLillo. In his characterization of Rojack as a man capable of just about anything, Mailer presents his first major contribution to the literature of open-ended subjectivity. The identity of the hipster is a perpetual upsurge of something out of nothing. The hipster of Mailer’s essays and interviews has come to narrative life as a raw existence flooding up into the world in the form of action, danger, and self-invention.
+What identity Rojack has is established in exclusively negative terms. In the first sentence of the novel, Rojack identifies himself as the shadowdouble of Jack Kennedy. If JFK represents the solar, public image of the American daydream, Rojack’s awareness of “the abyss” (2) has torn him out of this daylight world of war heroes, professors, congressmen, and television personalities. While Rojack continues to “be” a public figure, most pressingly in his identity as Deborah’s husband, his personal experience is reflected in observations such as “My personality was built on a void” (7) and “I had opened a void—I was now without center” (27). The war memory which Rojack reports in the opening paragraphs of the book serves less to
+ground Rojack’s identity in a specific history than it does to present the suggestion that what identity Rojack can be said to have is grounded only in the emptiness he perceived in the eyes of the German soldiers he killed. We are introduced to Rojack as he hovers over a balcony struggling with the question of whether or not to fling himself over the balcony.
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