Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?: The Ritual of Regeneration

Since The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer has written “allegorical” books that are also symbolic. Since Naked, Mailer needs to be read with a metaphorical and mythic eye. Why Are We in Vietnam) may serve as a guide to such qualities of mind and vision.

The novel deals with the narrator D. J.'s remembrance of a hunting expedition in Alaska with his father, two of his father's business underlings, and D. J.'s best friend “Tex” Hyde. As he sits “grassed out” at a dinner party held in his honor at his parents' Texas “Manse,” D. J. recalls actions that took place two years ago. D. J. and Tex, eighteen and nineteen years old, are about to leave for the war in Vietnam. Below the ostensible action, however, is a complicated tale of a young man's inner journey. D. J.'s particular journey illustrates that despite the hero's successive acts of regeneration, he can be defeated. D. J. is Mailer's first defeated hero and his last fictional hero to date. The narrator-hero's defeat expresses in turn the triumph of Death over Life.

The misreadings of this novel stem not only from the usual misunderstandings of allegory, but also from the failure to recognize the significance of the setting and the nature of the hero's guilt. The setting, Alaska, becomes an intense force-field. Beginning with the “fact” of the electromagnetic force of the earth's poles, Mailer makes Alaska above the Arctic Circle a collector of impulses from the “psycho-magnetic” field of southern civilizations. Rusty's safari is the physical presence of these fragmenting forces from the south that cause a “fission” of the electromagnetic field (the e. m. f.) and the psycho-magnetic “mood” (the collective “magnetic-electro fief” of the dream, or M. E. F.): “Cop Turds are exploding psychic ecology all over the place, and this is above the Circle, man, every mind, human, animal, even vegetable, certainly mineral