An American Dream by Norman Mailer
"An American Dream" is a novel by Norman Mailer that tells the story of Stephen Rojack, a complex character who grapples with identity and morality following his tumultuous experiences as a World War II veteran. After murdering his wife, Deborah, in a fit of passion, Rojack attempts to conceal his crime and seek a new life with Cherry, a nightclub singer. The narrative explores Rojack's psychological turmoil and his struggle to reclaim a sense of heroism in a post-war society fraught with violence and alienation.
Throughout the novel, Mailer delves into Rojack's interactions with various characters, including a German maid and Deborah's powerful father, as he confronts themes of power, guilt, and self-definition. While the story is marked by instances of brutality and exploitation, these elements serve as metaphors for Rojack's quest for integrity within a corrupt world. The novel critiques the darker aspects of the American Dream, suggesting that the pursuit of self-fulfillment is often intertwined with isolation and moral decay. Mailer's work challenges readers to reflect on the complexities of human nature and the consequences of one's actions in the search for meaning amidst chaos.
On this Page
An American Dream by Norman Mailer
First published: 1965
The Work
In An American Dream, Stephen Rojack, World War II veteran, former congressman, psychiatrist, and television personality, murders his wife Deborah. He tries to make the murder look like a suicide by throwing her lifeless body out of her apartment window. Much of the novel then details Rojack’s effort to escape from police suspicion and begin a new life with a new woman, Cherry, a nightclub singer he meets shortly after the murder. Rojack is not a cold-blooded killer. He strangled Deborah in a fit of passion after she taunted him and belittled his manhood. Norman Mailer makes no particular apologies for his antihero. Rojack is battling to recover a heroic sense of himself that has slowly attenuated since his service in World War II.
The novel is structured as a series of confrontations with warring identities. After murdering Deborah, he attacks and sodomizes her German maid, Ruta, simultaneously reliving his World War II encounter with a German soldier and the sense of violation that the war provoked in him. To secure his love for Cherry, Rojack must do battle with her former boyfriend, an African American, whom Rojack ends up kicking down the steps of Cherry’s apartment building. Then there is his confrontation with Barney Oswald Kelly, Deborah’s father and a powerful, sinister, rich man, whom Rojack fears but resists. Ironically, the police interrogation of Rojack seems to relieve him of any sense of guilt, forcing him to concentrate on his own survival.
The gruesome details of Mailer’s plot, especially when baldly stated, do not do justice to the novel’s style and mood, which convey the intensity of Rojack’s search for self-definition in a violent, conspiratorial world in which independent people rarely survive. It seems in the nature of things that Rojack should lose Cherry—she is murdered before he can return to her apartment to defend her.
Certain critics have made moral objections to An American Dream, treating the novel as they would an event in life. The novel, a work of fiction, uses violence and sexual exploitation as metaphors for the male’s quest for integrity, a quest that is inescapably brutal, in Mailer’s view, even if it is capable of being redeemed in the nobler love Rojack feels for Cherry. The dark side of the American Dream, Mailer’s novel implies, is the awareness of the self’s isolation and the potential for antisocial behavior. If the American Dream holds out the promise of self-fulfillment, that same dream seems inescapably linked to self-indulgence and corruption as well.
Bibliography
Cafagna, Dianne. “Mailer’s Moon over An American Dream.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 22 (November, 1992): 3-4. An illuminating discussion of Mailer’s use of moon imagery in the novel.
Gordon, Andrew. An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980. Gordon examines Mailer’s novels from the perspective of psychoanalytic criticism.
Leigh, Nigel. Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. An analysis of the political and social themes in Mailer’s novels.
Lennon, Michael, ed. Conversations with Norman Mailer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. A collection of interviews with Mailer in which the novelist reflects on the craft of writing and his approaches to fiction.
Mailer, Adele. The Last Party: My Life with Norman Mailer. New York: Barricade Books, 1997. A revealing autobiography by Mailer’s former wife. Offers insights into their troubled marriage and his turbulent personality.
Merrill, Robert. Norman Mailer Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992. Merrill provides a critical and interpretive study of Mailer with a close reading of his major works, a solid bibliography, and complete notes and references.
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970.
Rollyson, Carl E. The Lives of Norman Mailer: A Biography. New York: Paragon House, 1991. Rollyson presents a detailed overview of Mailer’s life and career.