The Sentence Is the Story

Abstract

This chapter takes up Norman Mailer’s 1979 novel The Executioner’s Song as chronicle of the “modern death penalty” era post-Gregg v. Georgia. Two questions or issues frame my analysis: the relation between narrative structure in general and the death penalty plot; the distinction between execution and suicide. The first issue is explored with the help of narratologists, but especially Walter Benjamin. The second reviews Kant’s argument that “no one can will [capital] punishment” and Derrida’s remarks, contra Kant, on the undecidability of execution and suicide. The chapter concludes with a brief reading of Mailer’s 1964 poem of the same title as his novel and speculates on how these two texts read the recent history of the U.S. death penalty.