The style of An American Dream seemed to grow organically from Mailer's "Big Bite" columns for Esquire. His voice, explains Rollyson, is a "supple first-person" persona "punctuated with feisty asides and comic exaggerations".[10] An American Dream is narrated by Stephen Richards Rojack, the novel's protagonist, in "an edgy, rococo style" that shows Mailer at the height of his narrative powers.[7] Andrew Gordon points out that the events of the novel unfold at a quick pace, compared to Mailer's prior works, writing "before we are five pages into the novel, Rojack has killed four Germans in a grotesque and graphically violent scene. By the end of thirty pages, Rojack has murdered his wife".[11] Gordon finds that Mailer tempers the shock of An American Dream's violence by using a combination of flashback sequences, playful, heavily stylized language, and an abundance of mythical, fairy tale imagery to evoke an exaggerated, dreamlike psychological fantasy.[12]
While Kaufmann likens Mailer's narrative to a medieval allegory in its emphasis on magic and metaphysics, Rollyson suggests it embodies an Elizabethan baroqueness and shows Mailer at his best as a novelist.[13][10] Kaufmann avers that Mailer borrowed his guiding principle from Marx: "quantity changes quality".[13] Mailer blends modern America with Rojack's dream visions, making his narrative akin to the magician's stage show in writing a "novelist as magician who writes a book filled with effects without any causes".[14] Even though Mailer himself said he had the intention of writing a realistic novel, his style suggests otherwise. An American Dream is like something out of Chaucer or Dante, or out of American romance, or that the events created by Rojack do not represent literal occurrences that readers come to expect in a novel.[15] Still, argues Merrill, one cannot dismiss Mailer's serious intentions.[15]
Barry H. Leeds, in his Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer, suggests two primary structural patterns: one is Rojack's pilgrimage from "damnation and madness to salvation and sanity" and the other is the geometrical sexual connections shared by the characters.[16]
