Genre and Dialogical Theory

Bakhtin and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song

Abstract

There are significant connections between Bakhtin’s theories and the contextual, psychological, and stylistic dimensions of Norman Mailer’s fiction. Bakhtin clarifies many of the particular aspects of Mailer’s fiction: his narrative experiments, his use of complex turns of plot, his careful attention to creating sometimes grotesque and often psychologically damaged characters. Mailer’s rhetorical experiments with voice in novels such as The Armies of the Night provide clear connections to the play of voices prominent in the novel tradition. Often the defining factor in a Mailer novel is the particular perspective he takes on connections between text and context. The Naked and the Dead, arguably his most traditionally narrated novel, defines the reader’s perspective through multiple points of view synthesized within a traditional third person narration. These multiple points of view become the reader’s way of seeing the military culture contrasted with the perspectives of individual soldiers.