The American dream has many different definitions for each person within our land of freedom. The dream is the joie de vivre for each American to believe in themselves with unlimited possibilities. In Norman Mailer’s “An American Dream” Rojack had what seemed to be the American dream but turned out to be just an illusion. Mailer’s analysis of the annoyances and desires that lay underneath hidden within society are intensely depicted through the life of Rojack.
Rojack first seems like the perfect man living the perfect American dream that everyone wishes upon himself or herself. His American dream represented as a prominent man in society, decorated war hero, having many connections with famous politicians, Congressman and even married a woman from a wealthy family. However, what seemed to be the picture perfect life Rojack expressed “I had come to the end of a very long street. Call it an avenue. For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer 15). “An American Dream, whose central character (Stephen Richards Rojack) transcends his disgust for American life, its persistent manhandling of him, by developing heightened sensuous and muscular powers” (Weber). Rojack’s acrimonious relationship with his wife, Deborah, he begins to develop a deep seeded hatred towards her.
They separate after several long years of marriage. Even through the separation, Deborah still has control over Rojack’s life, which he finally grasps. “So I hated her, yes indeed I did, but my hatred was a cage which wired my love, and I did not know if I had the force to find my way free. Marriage to her was the armature of my ego; remove the armature and I might topple like clay” (Mailer 23) “Like the typical romantic hero, Rojack seeks to free himself from society and its stultifications; he has been tainted by society, however, and his spirit is also corrupt by virtue of his humanity” (Weber). Feeling alone and bitter Rojack heads over to Deborah’s place with the afterthoughts of suicide swarming through his head. With insults and tempers flaring it is at this moment that Rojack becomes a vile callous murderer.
Directly after murdering his wife Rojack makes love to his wife’s butler, Ruta. Then he concocts a story about how his wife committed suicide that he tries to pawn of to Ruta and the detectives. Guilt begins to seep in when Rojack thinks, "I had a reverie of my own death then, and my soul was trying to lift and loose itself of the body which has died. I felt guilty for the first time. It was a crime to have pushed Deborah to the morgue" (Mailer 76). Now Rojack is free from the suffocation of his marriage and ultimately his life that suppressed him for so many years with a false sense of happiness. “The official American dream, that hyper-conglomerate of success, salesmanship, health, and wealth which produces row on row of mannequins. Scratch the glossy surface of a contented mannequin and it bleeds a different kind of American dream, "a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation” (Weber).
After the interrogation from the detectives ends, Rojack meets a woman named Cherry. Rojack instantly is drawn to her as he has never felt before and does not comprehend why. A connection immediately forms. Through the safety he felt with her he confesses to the murder of his wife and Cherry still shows Rojack that she still loves him. After leaving Cherry, Rojack has to face his father-in-law, Kelly. Kelly advised that he has stopped the investigation of his daughter’s death to Rojack because of her involvement with foreign spies. Directly asked whether he had anything to do with her death, Rojack confesses to the murder to Kelly. Kelly informs him that he will not turn him in but he had to walk around the edge of the hotel in order to survive.
With each step that Rojack takes he become conscious of everything he has done. Kelly attempts to force him down but Rojack prevails and escapes unscathed and free. “Such, Mailer wants us to believe, is the real if unacknowledged "American dream" (Kimball). Rojack was able to perpetrate the ideal crime and still gain exoneration. Through Mailer’s novel, it can be believed that Rojack achieved in the end the true American dream. "Mailer has written a disturbing existential novel; it is by no means accidental that the "existential psychology" of his hero revolves around "the thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death [are] the roots of motivation" (Weber).
Weber, Brom. “A Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer’s An American Dream.” The Hollins Critic 2. (1965):
Kimball, Roger. "Norman Mailer's American dream." New Criterion 16.3 (1997): 4. Academic Search Premier. 7 April 2007. http://search.ebscohost.com.
Mailer, Norman. An American Dream.
2 comments:
You seem to be missing your blog entry.
Ah, there it is. It is late, but well worth waiting for. An string analysis of a difficult novel. Be sure to incorporate quotations into your sentences, and only summarize the plot when necessary.
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