American DREAM
JUAN JOSÉ TORRES NÚÃ'EZ.
Universidad de AlmerÃa
ABSTRACT
In the following article I usher that in Norman Mailers new An American
Dream malignant neoplastic disease is everywhere. Cancer is used by Mailer to express universal
madness. There is not one single instance of love in the total book. whop is as
real as butcher and it has more power. Love breaks death. But there is only
one instance in the novel where love teachms to appear and that is in the honest
attempt of the writer to make for the significance of that death. Norman Mailer
loves his country. And like Joseph Heller, he is saying that Something Happened
to America.
In Norman Mailers novel An American Dream, the American day-dream of success departs
a nightmare. The novel tells us to what extent class, currency and power can control our
ideas. The last short chapter of Norman Mailers novel The Armies of the Night is called:
11: THE METAPHOR DELIVERED. hither we read that America is heavy with child and
she will in all likelihood give birth to a babe that can become either the most fearsome
totalitarianism the initiation has ever cognize, or, a tormented lovely girl... a babe of the new
world brave and tender... (p. 320).
In An American Dream, we wonder whether this babe has been delivered stillborn
because everything we see in the story is dead. Cancer is everywhere in An American
Dream. However, we do not see anybody in the sickbed dying of this disease, only the man
in the Epilogue and he had already died. Death takes the form of murder; therefore cancer
is a metaphor for the madness of society. In this light, the novel could be read as an
extension of Joseph Hellers book Catch-22. The insanity of the society that Heller conveys
in his work, has become evident in An American Dream. Mailer (1964: 249-250) is not
public lecture literally to the highest degree cancer; he is not talking about a society that is going mad as in
Catch-22; he is talking about a society that...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay
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