The Home Front: Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the novel The Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer, as a record of a march on the Pentagon held on October 1967 in a great protest against the Vietnam War. But, before approaching the novel itself, it is important to present some social and historical data in order to contextualize Mailer’s narrative within the historical frame. It is relevant to stress that some facts quoted in the beginning of this paper are cited in the novel.