Dearborn calls Rojack the "quintessential Mailer hero" as he exemplifies many of the traits and accomplishments Mailer himself as a war hero, a successful politician, a television personality, and a professor of "existential psychology".[17] Mailer commented in a later New York Post interview: "I wanted a man who was very much of my generation and generally of my type".[18] Rojack feels that his reality is created by the public and that he has become just a shell, a mere actor, which creates a crisis of identity and precipitates his actions.[19] Like Mailer's Hipster, Rojack does not live until he has experienced death — so his murder of Deborah frees him from his hollow public life and initiates his transformation.[20] It's only through the lowest and most severe forms of physical transgression that Rojack, like Mailer's Hipster is able to begin his journey toward psychic redemption.[21] Rojack's journey reflects a seminal theme for Mailer in the importance of growth by confronting serious existential situations with courage.[22] In a 1963 letter, Mailer defines what he means by "existentialism" as "that character can dissolve in one stricken event and re-form in startling new fashion".[23]
Likewise, states Dearborn, Rojack believes that in killing Deborah, he has cured himself of cancer,[24] a theme that becomes explicit in the novel's epilogue where "Cancer is the growth of madness denied".[25] In a later interview with High Times, Mailer elaborates further noting "A lot of people get cancer because they were too responsible with their lives. They led lives that were more responsible then they wanted to be. They lived their lives for others more than for themselves. Denied themselves certain fundamental things, whatever they were. . . . Cancer is a revolution of the cells".[26] Leeds adds that, for Mailer, cancer represents moral failure and is a significant theme in much of Mailer's work.[27]
It is not easy to accept or to excuse Rojack's ability to escape punishment for his transgression of murder. Often characters cannot so easily get away with murder unless it stems from revenge.[28] Murderer's gambit, whose success requires the approval of the reader, can be applied as a way for the "novelist to gamble with the reader's empathy in the hopes of either winning greater sympathy or . . . greater interest in the character's situation".[29] Yet, there must contain more strategical tactics in order to win over the jury. For example, when Rojack murders his wife, he compares it to the killing of the Germans. The juxtaposition poses the question of what is the difference between killing a person in wartime and killing a person in society?[30] Mailer also hints that the narrative is "framed" by a dream cloud through the use of the novel's name An American Dream and the allusion of F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz".[31]
An American Dream was controversial for its portrayal and treatment of women, and was critiqued by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics.[32][33] Millett sees Rojack as another incarnation of a Mailer protagonist who becomes heroic through the linking of sex and violence.[34] Mailer, she argues, attempts to use existentialism to excuse Rojack's misogynistic exploration as his "sexistentialist project".[35] Rojack's victims are women and a black man, appropriate objects of the white male's "dominant wrath".[36] Millett chastises Rojack, and by proxy Mailer, for what she assesses as the feigned pretense of radically progressive beliefs that belie his defiant sense of white male privilege, likening him to an old southern Confederate, pretending nobility while lashing out at the encroachment of true progress. Millett notes that "Rojack belongs to the oldest ruling class in the world, and like one of Faulkner's ancient retainers of a lost cause, he is making his stand on the preservation of a social hierarchy that sees itself as threatened with extinction. His partial Jewish ancestry and his 'liberal' views to the contrary, Rojack is the last surviving white man as conquering hero".[37]
Millett criticizes Mailer for being almost wholly unique among prominent authors in championing a character who is a murderer, while allowing the offender to escape any accountability for his crimes:
The humanist convictions which underlie Crime and Punishment (the original and still the greatest study in what it is like to commit murder), may all go by the board. Both Dostoyevsky and Dreiser, in An American Tragedy gradually created in their murderers an acceptance of responsibility for the violation of life which their actions constituted, and both transcend their crimes through atonement. Rojack has some singularity in being one of the first literary characters to get away with murder; he is surely the first hero as homicide to rejoice in his crime and never really lose his creator's support.[38]
Likewise, Judith Fetterley criticizes Mailer's treatment of women by his male characters in pointing out that each female character must meet a violent death in order for Mailer's hero to be "free".[39] Although power might lay in the masculine hands of those in government and big business, women have a mystical power over men.[40] This power enacts a control over Rojack and only when Rojack rids himself of Deborah does he feel in possession of himself.[41]
American culture, Justin Shaw states, has a tradition in which society expects men to achieve the "self-made mode of masculinity".[42] Betty Friedan writes in The Feminine Mystique that men, in other words, were not enemies but "fellow victims" of society's expected and assigned gender roles.[43] His wife's recognition of Rojack in the existing world is shown to have been the link to his masculinity which left him "a void where his sense of masculinity resided" when she tells him that she no longer loves him.[44] Rojack then begins his search for an active subject role in a masculine role.
Maggie McKinley argues that Mailer uses "violence as a literary device that facilitates an analysis of his philosophies surrounding existential freedoms, social oppression, and gendered relationships".[45] Rojack's violence is not just a result of his masculinity, but from chasing the "sexual freedom that is often denied by a repressive or 'cancerous' society".[46] Violence provides a centre for Rojack's "construction of a liberated masculinity":[47] "Rojack seems able to discuss manhood only through the language of violence", specifically addressing his view that masculinity revolves around either the repression or embrace of violence.[48]
Robert Merrill posits that An American Dream seems to suggest violence "is not an intolerable aberration but an extreme example of life's essential irrationality".[49]
