Autobiographical Trope In The Armies

Nevertheless, literary journalists, usually, omit the explicit projection of the authorial subjectivity through the use of fictional point of view to ensure a sense of historical objectivity. They overcome the borderlines between public events and their intersubjective experiences by approaching “public fact through a frank, obtrusive, liberated assertion of their private consciousness” (Hellmann, “Postmodern Journalism” 52). In other words, literary journalists indulge themselves in an intersubjective experience of narrating public historical facts from an individual perspective that problematizes the dichotomy between the public and private, between the historical and the personal, and consequently between the journalistic and the literary.

The autobiographical trope can be traced in The Armies as the narrative opens a window of intersection between a highly intersubjective experience and reporting a historical event. Through the formal division of the book into two parts, Mailer seeks to establish an inquiry about the status of genres traditionally polarized as fiction and history, literature and journalism, novel and history. In this sense, if the first part of the work appears to be a novel about the March, Mailer says, because of the fictional techniques employed, on the other hand it also approaches the biography, a kind of autobiographical document that reflects "the author’s memory scrupulous to facts"; according to him, that approach would be history, true story.