Psychotic Dreams

Reading this story it becomes clear that Rojack is psychotic and misunderstands his hallucinations as a force of evil outside himself. The people he surrounds himself with are all psychopaths “living rationally in the world, but motivated by an antisocial attitude” (Leeds 192). Rojack is surrounded by each characters psychopathic behavior, yet he perceives their behaviors as evilness. Throughout the thirty-two hour span of the story, what is clear is that insanity would have been a great defense, had he been formally charged with the murder of his wife.

Stephen Rojack is a deeply troubled man who has accomplished much in ways of dreams despite his oddities. He excels in matters of accomplishments yet he seems to lack the ability to hold any form of a relationship together. Rojack steps to the edge many times yet never does he have the courage to jump. He fights with the darkness because he knows to give in would swallow him whole never to return. The average person can tell right from wrong. Rojack understands and feels the fear associated with “the terms of death and darkness” and lives with them as “immediate personal dangers” (Weinburg 261).

The relationship with the moon is a clear indication that something is amiss in Rojack. The moon perhaps a metaphor for what he views as crossing to the dark side. He notices the moon on several monumental occasions in his life yet does not connect the simple fact that it just might be night. To him, he and the moon have a connection. The moon in moments of despair calls him to be free of the world. Maybe the moon will not let him down as Deborah has. He feels with suicide “the part of me, which spoke and thought and had its glimpses of the landscape of my Being, would soar, would rise, would leap the miles of darkness to that moon” (Mailer 19).

The thoughts of suicide lead him to Deborah. Misery after all needs more misery to truly be happy. It is then the thought occurs to him that maybe Deborah is the cause of his misery. Rojack must kill his wife in an attempt to save himself. To kill her would offer relief of his suicidal thoughts. As he remembers from his time spent in Vietnam that, “murder offers the promise of vast relief” (Mailer 15). Remorse is not found within him after the murder of his wife because; he can now begin to live again.

Another indication of his troubled mind are the constant voices inside his head leading and suggesting actions for him to take. At moments after her death he somehow feels Deborah is the source of the voices. That she somehow has placed a curse on him. At one point he asks the voices “Let me be free of you” as if he were talking to someone that could set him free (Mailer 196). His own mind is the only one that can set him free, not some curse he wanted to believe in. Curses can be removed, insanity cannot. He was not free of the voice, as he stood on the parapet at Kelly’s the voice was again telling him, “Look at the moon, look up at the moon” (Mailer 242). For his mind knew if he looked the moon would have its way with him and now he did not want to die.

Through banter of unimaginable thoughts, he avoids jumping from start to finish to be one with the moon. However he still stands on the edge of reality. Possibly once he comes to terms with the fact that no matter how many times he calls Cherry he won’t reach her, as he could never reach Deborah. His curse is that soon he will again be obsessed with suicidal thoughts and fascination with the moon.

With such life changing events in the story “one expects the modern activist hero to learn, change grow” yet he does not (Weinberg 261). This furthers my point that Rojack is psychotic. Anyone faced with the events in this story would surely be changed forever, unless they lack the ability through some mental disorder.


Mailer, Norman. An American Dream. New York: Dell, 1966

Leeds, Barry H. “The Structured Vision of Norman.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Carolyn Riley. 92vols. Detroit: Gale, 1973. 191-192.

Weinberg, Helen. “The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary.” Contemporary Literary Criticism.
Ed. Carolyn Riley. 92vols.Detroit: Gale, 1974. 261.