The Executioner’s Song
Mailer’s Sad Comedy
Keywords:
true-crime narrative, tragicomedy, narrative form, documentary fiction, Gary Gilmore, violence, genre theory, Truman Capote, mid-twentieth-century American literatureAbstract
In “The Executioner’s Song: Mailer’s Sad Comedy,” Robert Merrill offers a sustained critical analysis of Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning work, arguing that the book is best understood as a tragicomic exploration of American violence, spectacle, and moral ambiguity. Engaging questions of genre, narrative strategy, and ethical representation, Merrill examines Mailer’s fusion of documentary detail and novelistic form, situating The Executioner’s Song within the tradition of the “true-life novel” while distinguishing it from comparable works by Truman Capote. Through close reading of the book’s structure, characterization of Gary Gilmore, and handling of voice and perspective, the essay contends that Mailer achieves a complex tonal balance in which irony, restraint, and sympathy coexist with skepticism toward American mythologies of freedom, rebellion, and celebrity. Merrill ultimately positions The Executioner’s Song as a decisive turning point in Mailer’s career, marking a maturation of style and moral vision that confronts the limits of narrative authority in representing real violence.
