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The Executioner's Song Study Guide & Plot Synopsis

This Study Guide consists of approximately 115 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Executioner's Song.
This section contains 1,486 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our The Executioner's Song Study Guide

The Executioner's Song Summary & Study Guide Description

The Executioner's Song Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:

This detailed literature summary also contains Literary Precedents and a Free Quiz on The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer.

The Executioner's Song Plot Summary

Preview of The Executioner's Song Summary:

Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song is many things, and its status between the realms of fiction and non-fiction makes it difficult to define. It is not non-fiction, notwithstanding the author's claim in his Afterword. The Pulitzer Prize Committee recognized Mailer's work as a "...thoroughly imagined work of fiction." This novel is not a work of non-fiction, but it is also not wholly a work of fiction. The book's form causes us to examine the line between reality and perception. What is the truth? How is truth colored by the telling of it, whether through a novel or through the rules of a trial? Are the points of view about Gilmore that Mailer describes "truth" in any way?

Executioner's Song is the novelized story of the life and death of Gary Mark Gilmore, the first person to be legally executed in the United States following a ten-year hiatus on executions imposed by...
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This section contains 1,486 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our The Executioner's Song Study Guide
Copyrights
The Executioner's Song from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
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