User talk:MGray96/sandbox

Ned Polsky sees that Mailer is well aware of the drawbacks in the life of a hipster, but because of his fascination with them, he romanticizes away some of the other drawbacks. Polsky argues that the hipster isn't as sexually liberated as Mailer would make them seem. Because of the hipster being crippled psychologically, this also means that they are crippled sexually as well. Since they are not so sexually free, their orgasms they have are puny and premature. Mailer argues this statement because Polsky doesn't have the required personal experience himself.

Stanley Edgar Hyman focuses on the writing style in Norman Mailer's An American Dream. Hyman first mentions that the book is full of mystiques. One of the mystiques that Hyman thought to be the most peculiar is the spirit odors that each of the characters exude. In the book, Rojack smells "like the rotten carious shudder of a decayed tooth"(107). Deborah's smell a mix of "sweet rot, burning rubber, and a bank"(107). Hyman finds that Mailers use of the similes and phrases as a way for Mailer to fell like a fancy writer such as Thomas Wolfe. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MGray96 (talk • contribs) 23:08, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

Leo Bersani starts his review of Norman Mailer's An American Dream by stating that many people who went in reading it may have thought it to be a political novel because of how the beginning of the story starts out but will soon find out that it is not the case as you keep reading. He goes on to compare Mailer in An American Dream to Balzac. These two are similar in their way of thinking when it comes to social maneuvering and power. They share similar notions of what it goes on at the top and their extreme obsession with political power. They are both restless when it comes to getting power and being able to keep that power. These notions about the obsession of power is shown through characters such as Barney Kelly by way of having the power of telepathy to possess the stock market and also his longing to having a threesome with Rojack and Ruta: "pitch and tear and squat and kick, swill and grovel on the Lucchese bed, fuck until our eyes were out, bury the ghost of Deborah by gorging on her corpse"(122). Rojack is so engulfed in Barney Kelly's energy that he starts to feel these "unfamiliar desires"(122).

Robert Begiebing first describes WWVN as Mailer's most economic narrative that is told through narrative consciousness of a complexity that is unlike any of his other fictional work. He mentions that this is Mailer's first fictional story that has a defeated hero,which in this case is DJ,"The narrator-hero's defeat expresses in turn the triumph of death over life"(pg.89). Begiebing goes on to talk about the main misunderstandings of the novel. He says that the most obvious misunderstanding of the novel is its use of profane language but mainly people didn't recognize the significance of the setting in the novel and "the nature of the hero's guilt"(pg.89). The significance of the setting being Alaska is that it is being portrayed in the novel as a force field by using the fact of electromagnetic force of the earth's poles. This makes Alaska become "A heightened battleground for God and Devil, a place of extreme possibilities of contagion and beatitude"(pg.90). The last misunderstanding the Begiebing mentions in his article is the narrator-hero's guilt. DJ feels this guilt of being a failure of being his father's son during the safari experience. This guilt and waste that DJ feels is mirrored by his obscene language as he see's his waste as "shit","he is marooned in the shit or on the 'balmy tropical isle of Anal Referent Metaphor'(p.150)"(pg.91).

John Hellmann says in his review that the plot of the novel drives towards answering the question of the novel "by addressing what a contemporary frontier means for a society that has given itself over to corporation and machine"(pg.79). The combination of characters, the plot, and the setting help create "a clearly perverse activity to the mythic imagery of the American frontier myth and to the disturbing contemporary images of Vietnam"(pg.80). The hunting trip that transforms into a slaughter by the use of helicopters and several high viscosity machine weapons is an example of this imagery of the disturbing images of the Vietnam War. DJ finding the exposed organs of a dying bear draws the imagery of the myth of America,"embodying its deepest values and heroic concept"(pg.80). — Preceding unsigned comment added by MGray96 (talk • contribs) 08:33, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Kate Millet's view of The White Negro criticizes Mailer's virtues on violence. In her book Sexual Politics,she makes the claim that Mailer finds that violence is something that he has fallen in love with as a personal and sexual style .She states that to Mailer, "A rapist is only rapist to a square" and that "rape is a part of life". Millet goes on the criticize Mailer of developing the aesthetic of Hip with harmful masculine pride.

According to Tracy Dahlby, Mailer's views were a hot topic in 1957 and many of his critics accused him of accepting violence as a "form of existential expression".