Sam and his situation seem to reflect what Mailer viewed as the malaise of middle-class America in the 1950s, created and maintained by the language of psychoanalysis and the privileging of the rational mind over lived experience.

"Yoga" is also a story about the creation of art and finding one's voice, perhaps part of Mailer's attempt to exorcise his own literary demons after the success of The Naked and the Dead.

[8][9][10] Mailer credits his sister Barbara, his soon-to-be second wife Adele, Lillian Ross, and Dan Wolf (then editor of The Village Voice) for encouraging him to write it.

[13] It illustrates the disparity between individual desires and the homogenizing powers of, as Morris Dickstein puts it, a "soft totalitarianism of conformity, McCarthyism, middle-aged timidity, and intellectual compromise".

Dickstein continues: The enlightened liberal individual "with its faith in rationality, progress, and bureaucratic forms of organization, had blinded itself to the irrational forces now exposed in the psyche and set loose in the world".

[14] Kevin Schultz outlines one of the bulwarks of the Liberal Establishment that Mailer had such an antipathy for: the perfection of American life brought about by a faith in reason, progress, and technology.

[15] The mid-century liberals had put their confidence in the "cool workings of the bureaucrats"[16] and eschewed the irrational making life more comfortable, but less pleasurable — what Gordon reads as a "regressive solution, a yearning to retreat into the deathlike security of the womb".

Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.

[24] Indeed, as Solotaroff notes, "Yoga" represents the type of story that might have secured Mailer's critical reputation had he chosen to focus on more conventional, sympathetic characters in the fifties "instead of trying to create a fictional world of real possibility".

While he remains unnamed, the narrator seems to be a close acquaintance of Sam's and has access to his and the other characters' minds — a sort of overarching intelligence that is privy to and comments on all of their innermost thoughts.

[34] Philip Bufithis suggests that Mailer employs this strategy to focus on this singular sensibility: "a self-conscious, second-rate man who knows and admires what distinction is but cannot attain it".

[35] Mailer writes that "Yoga" was originally to be the prologue of a larger, eight-part work featuring "the adventures of a mythical hero, Sergius O'Shaugnessy, who would travel through many worlds" and have "many of the characters reappear in different books, but with their ages altered".

[40] In her biography of Mailer, Hilary Mills sums up the central conflict of "Yoga": it's a "poignant depiction of the Slavodas and their civic-minded friends, locked in conformity and resorting to Freudian psychology for their answers when they truly ache for sexual satisfaction".

[11] Sam Slovoda is a product and practitioner of the Liberal Establishment that Mailer saw as numbing American life — what Gordon calls "the anguished response of an artist to the oppressive historical realities of the 1950s in America".

[44] Gordon argues that "Yoga" is replete with images of constipation, thwarted powers, helpless rage, and "an overwhelming sense of being stifled, suffocated, and strangled".

[46] The narrator criticizes Sam throughout, showing him talking a good game, but always opting to remain passive: "without the courage to live, to defy—especially to defy his smug psychoanalyst—Sam will never quite be a man".

[43] Similarly, Philip H. Bufithis argues that the main conflict in "Yoga" lies in the distinction between thought and action: "reflection upon experience is antipodal to its enjoyment".

[48] Cassius O'Shaugnessy, Alan's college friend and the actual man who studied yoga, is a sort of most-interesting-man type that seems to be the quintessence of individuality in the novella.

Marvin calls Cassius a "psychopath", presaging Mailer's Hipster in "The White Negro", and explicitly illustrating how Sam and his friends are polar opposites: law-abiding and rational, but lifeless.

[49] Castronovo compares Sam to Joyce's Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead": he has unrealized literary ambitions; he is petty, spiteful, and envious; he wants to be closer to his wife, but is haunted by a ghost from the past; he takes a frank assessment of himself and realizes he is a middle-aged man, unheroic and unremarkable, and "spiritually impotent".

In his advertisement for "The Man Who Studied Yoga", Mailer states that it had originally been conceived as a novel that is "a descendent of Moby Dick",[b][36] and taking that cue, Frederick Busch argues that it has a direct connection.

[57] Adamowski states that Mailer regarded the Cold-War liberal American as sexually unhealthy—who had sex too much with their heads filtered through psychoanalysis, pornography, and rational theories from therapy and the academy.

Later, Sam recalls Elenor's friend in a mental institution, alluding to the crazy Pip in Moby-Dick and back to Cassius the "psychopath": perhaps these are characters who have penetrated that veneer of conformity and can speak the truth.

[65] Morris Dickstein credits Mailer, along with other New York novelists and intellectuals, of defining the zeitgeist after World War II and casting "a long shadow over the second half of the twentieth century".