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In a study of the romantic involvements in Mailer's fiction, one pattern begins to emerge more clearly than others. It is the “triangular” relationship in which two or more men are interested in the same woman. Repeatedly, the pattern centers in a small group of people, all of whom are experiencing or have experienced emotional entanglements with each other. What distinguishes all of these inter-relationships is the sense that love and romance in Mailer's world is essentially a “family affair.” Because they have not broken the circle of their connections with childhood, many of Mailer's characters seek involvements with women who are representative of the mother figure. Basically, Mailer's characters have not solved their oedipal conflicts; their recurring need to form a closed circuit of relationships is a way of representing incestuous drives.
Barbary Shore, Mailer's second novel, illustrates this pattern. Here are the author's own remarks about the novel in Advertisements for Myself:
… but Barbary Shore was really a book to emerge from the bombarded cellars of my unconscious, an agonized eye of a novel which tried to find some amalgam of my new experience and the larger horror of that world which might be preparing to destroy itself. I was obviously trying for something which was at the very end of my reach, and then beyond it….1
By noting the influence of his own unconscious on the novel, Mailer tries to account for the vagueness that pervades the book. In other words, although the work is political in its statement, Mailer's unconscious was operating on another level, often antithetical to the explicit action.
Mikey Lovett, the narrator of Barbary Shore, is in his