September 17, 2021
“The Dead Gook” covid-19: day 553 | US: GA | info | act
Today, I read Mailer’s short story “The Dead Gook” as part of my research into the late short stories. It’s one of a handful of stories he wrote during the winter of 1951–52 when he was struggling to make progress on his third novel The Deer Park. This group of stories all seem to be colored by Norman Mailer’s mood at the time: since his second novel Barbary Shore had been panned by critics and he could not get his third novel going, he felt increasingly that “I had nothing important left to write about, that maybe I was not really a writer.”[1] While I would say these stories are damn good—they are “The Dead Gook,” “The Paper House,” “The Language of Men,” “The Notebook,” and “The Man Who Studies Yoga”—each does seem to have a malaise—an oppression that the characters never seem to escape from. In other words, each protagonist is ultimately unsuccessful in overcoming the external forces that work against him as an individual, resulting in what I would characterize as a failed Mailerian protagonist. In each, there is an existential moment that tests the resolve of the protagonist, and he is unable to rise to the occasion—instead retreating more into himself and the protection of the status quo.
The protagonist of “The Dead Gook” is Private Brody—a man oppressed by the reality of the war, but more so by a Dear-John letter he received from his fiancée. The narrator states that it wasn’t the content of the letter that bothered Brody, but that it reminded “him of how he lived, and that was unbearable.”[2] Brody’s existential moment “destroyed his armor” and “made Brody wonder who he was, and what it would mean if he would die.”[3]
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Citations
- ↑ Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam. p. 108.
- ↑ Mailer, Norman (1967). The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer. New York, N.Y.: Dell. p. 169.
- ↑ Mailer 1967, p. 169.
