The Night Sparknotes

The chapter is aimed to explore that The Armies of the Night (1968) is not only as a record of the protest to Vietnam War but also as a righteous book of the movement taught a lesson. It is the descriptive record of history that pictures what really happened in the point leading up to and through the course of the protest to Vietnam War. Mailer recorded the event happened during the protest to Vietnam War and also included the “other journalistic reports in it so that readers can compare texts and inter-texts and make their own judgments about reliability” (Smith194). Mailer expected the American public's support in protest to the war and had a belief that novels distinctively “exacerbate the moral consciousness of people” (Mailer, Advertisements

Mailer uses the nonfiction novel to capture history more evocatively and provocatively than traditional journalism or literature alone. One way he does so is by placing himself in the story. Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before protesters in the form of a biased media and corrupt government officials, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the

Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America” (MacFarlane 133). Armies was a new window onto the anti-war movement. We will discuss how the mainstream media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middleclass moral funds, their innocence, their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste” (Armies 34). Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture. But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience as a fellow marcher, we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and patriotism. Most importantly, our narrator/protagonist was able to give Americans outside the march a sense of what it was to be a