The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer/Introduction: Difference between revisions

eight issues (January through August) of ''Esquire'' in 1964. Since it is my intention to be as precise as possible in tracing the often rapid development of Mailer’s ideas, and since the novel was presented to a large reading audience in substantially final form in 1964, this is the date I use in referring to the novel in my text. ''An American Dream'' was subsequently published in hardcover by Dial Press in 1 965, and in paperback by Dell in 1966. Subsequent footnotes make this clear.</ref> receive greatest attention because it is my contention that they represent the two significant poles in the development of Mailer’s fictional art at the time of this writing.

Two major themes loom large in all of Mailer’s fiction: that of social ills and that of the plight of the individual in contemporary society. Each of the novels proceeds simultaneously on two levels, social and individual. It will be shown that Mailer’s earliest work grows out of the tradition of social criticism of the thirties: that he is most clearly influenced in ''The Naked and the Dead'' (in both subject matter and mechanics) by Dos Passos, Farrell, and Steinbeck, with the significant distinction that Mailer invests less hope in the individual common man than do these writers.

By the time he wrote ''An American Dream'', Mailer had shifted from a position of total despair at the plight of the individual, to one of very carefully qualified hope. The problem of individual alienation as presented in ''An American Dream'' is integrally connected to Mailer’s personal conception of American existentialism, as it is most clearly set forth in the essay “The White Negro” (1957).<ref>Mailer, in ''Advertisements for Myself'', gives 1957 as tile year in which “The White Negro” was written, and it is therefore the date I use in my text. The essay was first published in 1958 by City Lights Book Shop in San Francisco. Since the most readily available text of “The White Negro” is in ''Advertisements for Myself'', all references to the essay will be to that edition.</ref> It should be emphasized that this study deals with existentialism only as Mailer sees it. No attempt has been made to study or define the existentialism of other writers, European or American. Positions intermediate between those of despair and mitigated hope in regard to the human condition are evident in ''Barbary Shore'' (1951) and ''The Deer Park'' (1955). A comparison of the latter novel to the stage version of ''The Deer Park'' (produced 1967) provides a clearer view of the shift in the author’s developing vision.