[3] Armies of the Night deals with the March on the Pentagon (the October 1967 anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington, D.C.) The book emerged on the heels of two works—An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam?—whose mixed receptions had disappointed Mailer.

[4] While Mailer dips into familiar territory, his fiction—self-portrait—the outlandish, third person account of himself along with self-descriptions such as a novelist/historian, anti-star/hero are made far more complex by the narrative's overall generic identification as a nonfiction novel.

Two years before Armies was published, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, who had just been called by George Plimpton (among others) the "inventor" of the nonfiction novel, argued that the genre should exclude any mention of its subjectivity and refrain from the first person.

While to some extent satirizing Capote's model, Mailer's role in center stage is hardly self-glamorizing, as the narrative recounts the events leading up to the March as well as his subsequent arrest and night in jail.

The first section, "History as a Novel", begins: "From the outset, let us bring you news of your protagonist", with an account made by Time: "Washington's scruffy Ambassador Theater, normally a pad for psychedelic frolics, was the scene of an unscheduled scatological solo last week in support of the peace demonstrations.

What creates the difference between Mailer's example and Capote's is not only the autobiography of Armies, but the irony which guides the narrator towards the same objective of empiricism as that of In Cold Blood.

At this event Mailer drinks too much, embarrasses himself and has Time write that "mumbling and spewing obscenities as he staggered about the stage—which he had commandeered by threatening to beat up the previous M.C.

Finally, that the war's real damage took place in the United States, in which it contributed to the deterioration of civil rights and led to the exposure of students to drugs and nihilism.

The struggle of America to export its technology and culture to Vietnam, regardless of the tremendous amount of money spent, highlighted that the Soviet Union would also be unable to unite all of Asia.

[13] Finally Mailer turns to what he holds is the "saddest conclusion" of the Vietnam War, namely it highlighted the country's deep state of schizophrenia.

The war presented the corporate ethic with the opportunity to expand its influence and technology, while it gave the American Christian outlets for their emotional urges such as pity.

Mailer's recounting, though quite different in terms of his self-portrait, takes on a comparable rhetorical approach to evoking what he saw as historical underpinnings.

[18] Neil Gordon takes a different approach to his analysis of The Armies of the Night as he searches for an insight into his own political consciousness.

Being a 10-year-old child in 1968 when the book was published, Gordon analyzes the historical aspects for a further understanding of the sixties, the politics, and the novelistic side of Mailer.

[20] Carl Rollyson recounts how many witnesses to the march noted the accuracy, specificity and level of granular detail in Mailer's retelling.

The author praises Mailer for a remarkable achievement in essentially marrying poetry to prose- the scrupulous fact-checking and reporting of a historian with the cogent, penetrating analysis of human nature and overarching context that only a novelist so gifted could provide.

[24] Adam Gopnik states that the real subject in The Armies of the Night is the generational clash between men in the 1950s who were brought up with different ideologies.

In the climax of the novel when protestors confronts a group of military policemen outside of the Pentagon, Gopnik notes that it showcases the two Americas, divided in "class and the rural and urban lines that is still relevant today.

"[25] New York Times critic Paul Berman has hailed The Armies of the Night as a "masterpiece," the first part of a two-volume participant-observer-journalistic portrait of the antiwar movement of the late 1960s—bookended by Miami and the Siege of Chicago (on the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in the summer of 1968.

[26] Warner Berthoff states that the plot Armies of the Night is strictly about the "world of totalitarian civil power that in our lifetime has clamped down on every natural life agency, every human usage, and custom of existence".

Though the plot of this novel seems quite serious, Berthoff mentions that the novel has some moments of comic exaggerations and "a broad yet dead serious social mockery" due to Mailer's self projection image which some critics call an egotistical rant.

[27] This egotism is an essential element because it becomes a theme of discourse which is the field of force that is made up of the totalitarianism's grip on the technocratic capitalist order.

[34] In his article "Confessions of the Last American", Conor Cruise O'Brien claimed AON as an important resource for historians "concerned with the moral and emotional climate of America in the late Sixties".

Praised for his scholarly analysis in AON, O'Brien credits Mailer for lending an important breathe of life into the history surrounding the march on the Pentagon through his "honest" re-telling of events.

Pressed by Noah on this revelation, Burton elaborated (through broken laughter) that the book was forced upon him in school as a reading assignment and he just had to "fake my way through it, because I couldn't do it.