Part III, Chapters 4-6 Summary and Analysis

Chapter 4 begins with suspense. It has been a long wait, but the March is finally about to begin. Mailer, writing in the third person, calls Macdonald, Lowell, and himself the Critic, the Poet, and the Novelist, respectively. The television crews are in place, and the people start to form ranks. They push and compress into a mass of people and individuals grow irritable. They've been waiting through hours of boring speeches, and now that they believe the March is finally going to begin, they push each other impatiently.

One young black man gets terribly impatient and starts yelling and wanting everyone to move. A professor by the name of Donald Kalish tells the young man to go talk to one of the monitors. It probably doesn't solve the young man's problem, but it gets the...