that illustrates the quest for an American identity inherent in the self-destructive attitudes that precipitated the hostilities in Vietnam. Eliot Fremont-Smith suggests that WWVN shows that "violence is as American as cherry pie": the novel explores a misplaced and misshaped American masculinity while exposing the county's darkest urges, replacing any potential of tender connections with outward aggression and violence. Poirer suggests that D.J.'s internal conversations show "two opposed notions of himself at the same time" and posits a minority within. It is the presence of the minority within that binds all human beings on a more cosmic level: "We are all of one another". D.J. explains that "the real author of his autobiographical . . . may be a black man in Harlem"; they are still connected even though they are "dissimilar". D.J.'s narrative is played back through a "psychic tape recorder" which translates the narrative into "distracting elements": "obscene and scientific language". The characters of M.A. Pete and M.A. Bill are meant to be "reincarnations of 'Big Oil' and 'Big Greed' in the guise of yahoo Texan hunters" according to Donald Kaufmann, the man who showed Mailer the Alaskan wilderness on the trip that inspired Why Are We in Vietnam'''s setting. Reception The critical reception of WWVN was mostly positive with many critics, like John Aldridge in Harpers, calling the novel a masterpiece and comparing it to Joyce. Mailer's obscene language was criticized by critics like Granville Hicks writing in the Saturday Review and the anonymous reviewer in Time. Eliot Fremont-Smith calls WWVN "the most original, courageous and provocative novel so far this year" that's likely to be "mistakenly reviled". Other critics, like Denis Donoghue from the New York Review of Books praised Mailer for his verisimilitude "for the sensory event". Donoghue recalls Josephine Miles' study of the American Sublime, reasoning WWVN's voice and style as the drive behind Mailer's impact. In 1972, Joyce Carol Oates called Vietnam "Mailer's most important work"; it's "an outrageous little masterpiece" that "contains some of Mailer's finest writing" and thematically echoes Milton's Paradise Lost. In a 1967 review of Why Are We in Vietnam for The Village Voice, Eugene Glenn praises WWVN, calling it "a triumph, powerful, original, brilliant in substance and in formal means." He views D.J. as an exemplary and constructive character, one who "sees right through shit" in order to get to the root of the moral decay in the