On The Armies of the Night

Abstract

To treat The Armies of the Night as simply an explanation of an historical period is a simplification, and it is especially relevant that the heart of this book is a meditation on the competing claims of three forms of knowing the past—the journalistic, the historical, and the novelistic. That Mailer comes down so clearly on the side of the novelistic is in no doubt. The finest writing of this book comes not in the first half of the book in which Mailer describes his actual experience, nor in the historical or journalistic analysis but, precisely, in Mailer’s descriptions of those parts of the March on the Pentagon which he did not experience.