Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1980.
The first study to read Mailer as an allegorist. Begiebing argues that the consciousness Mailer and his heroes seek, which he names heroic consciousness, integrates conscious and unconscious life, awakens metaphorical vision, and regenerates the resources of divine energy; that Mailer’s principal theme is the struggle of Life against Death in the contemporary world; and that he expresses it through the allegorical mode and embodies acts of regeneration in the universal patterns of the quest for rebirth. The chapters follow the novels from Barbary Shore to Why Are We in Vietnam?, define the heroic consciousness that joins the fiction to the nonfiction, read The Armies of the Night, and close with the nonfiction of the seventies, the feminist critique, and the promise of the work to come.