The Executioner’s Song

A Life Beneath our Conscience

Authors

  • Philip Bufithis Shepherd University Author

Keywords:

Gary Gilmore, capital punishment, conscience, modernism, plain style, spirituality and violence, American culture

Abstract

Philip Bufithis offers a sustained critical analysis of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, challenging both early critical skepticism and later assumptions about the novel’s stylistic transparency. Bufithis argues that Mailer’s much-praised “plain style” is not an abdication of authorial presence but a strategic withdrawal that allows the reader’s consciousness to inhabit the moral and psychological world of Gary Gilmore. Situating the novel within a modernist tradition that transforms culturally repellent material into ethical inquiry, Bufithis contends that Mailer presents Gilmore not as a sensationalized psychopath but as a figure whose spiritual intensity exposes the limits of American moral absolutism. The essay explores themes of capital punishment, conscience, spiritual valor, and national blindness, ultimately framing The Executioner’s Song as Mailer’s most immersive and ethically demanding work, one that compels readers to confront the desires and fears that underlie their own social conscience.

Author Biography

  • Philip Bufithis, Shepherd University

    Philip Bufithis, author of the critical study Norman Mailer (1978, Japanese edition 1981), is former executive editor of the literary magazine Antietam Review. His articles on twentieth-century American literature and his stories have appeared in numerous publications. He is Professor of English Emeritus at Shepherd University and a member of the graduate creative writing faculty at Wilkes University.

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Published

2026-01-25

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2007): Inaugural Issue

Section

Articles