A Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer's An American Dream: Difference between revisions

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A Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer's An American Dream (view source)

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 Rojack is a failure because he is heavily in debt, his marriage of eight years has been ruined by mutual betrayal and cruelty, he has interviewed and written about people who have acted decisively but has been unable to do so himself, and he has permitted himself to be hidden behind a make-believe identity in order to advance in politics. The looming symptom of his failure is the tortured relationship he persists in enduring with his wife, from whom he has been separated for a year. Alternately attracted and repelled by her, admiring her strength and resenting her subjugation of his masculine ego, hoping that she will loan him money for a senatorial campaign and hating her because she recklessly incurs debts charged to him, he yet is unable to cut himself away decisively and finally. For the past year they have quarreled and been intimate, tormented each other with accounts of lovers and affairs.
-Rojack’s worldly success is incapable of preserving him from a despair so vast that he is brought to the verge of suicide. The idea of death has haunted him since he killed four German soldiers on the battlefield. A fear of dying mingled with a yearning for release from the agony of terror coursed through him then beneath a cold, bright moon before he executed the enemy. Now, years later, the moon again kindles his awareness of death: “‘Yes,’ said the moon, ’you haven’t done your work, but you’ve lived your life, and you are dead with it!’” But Rojack, despite his wish for annihilation, refuses to destroy himself, cries: “ “Let me be not all dead.’” And in fright turns for sustenance to the love of his wife: “When she loved me . . . her strength seemed then to pass to mine and I was alive with wit, I had vitality, I could depend on stamina, I possessed my style...I had to see her. I had a physical need to see her as direct as an addict’s panic waiting for his drug.”
+Rojack’s worldly success is incapable of preserving him from a despair so vast that he is brought to the verge of suicide. The idea of death has haunted him since he killed four German soldiers on the battlefield. A fear of dying mingled with a yearning for release from the agony of terror coursed through him then beneath a cold, bright moon before he executed the enemy. Now, years later, the moon again kindles his awareness of death: “‘Yes,’ said the moon, ’you haven’t done your work, but you’ve lived your life, and you are dead with it!{{' "}} But Rojack, despite his wish for annihilation, refuses to destroy himself, cries: “ “Let me be not all dead.{{' "}} And in fright turns for sustenance to the love of his wife: “When she loved me . . . her strength seemed then to pass to mine and I was alive with wit, I had vitality, I could depend on stamina, I possessed my style...I had to see her. I had a physical need to see her as direct as an addict’s panic waiting for his drug.”
 At his wife’s apartment, her contemptuous rejection of his love deprives him of reason. An intended slap becomes a blow which enrages her; they have fought before, she had once half-bitten through one of his ears, but this time she uses her great strength in an effort to maim his genitalia. Equally enraged, he begins choking her; she appeals for release, but the act of violence has become a symbol of his striving for freedom from failure, despair, and hatred so that he inexorably strangles his wife to death.