Illeism (the third-person self)
Illeism — referring to oneself in the third person — is the narrative technique that defines Mailer’s great sequence of nonfiction narratives. Beginning with The Armies of the Night (1968), where the protagonist is “Mailer,” he wrote eight consecutive books in which he appears as a named third-person character: “Mailer,” then Aquarius (Of a Fire on the Moon, St. George and the Godfather), “the Prisoner” (The Prisoner of Sex), and finally the unnamed “our Man of wisdom” of The Fight (1975), the last of the eight.
The device let Mailer make his own subjectivity an instrument of reportage — registering “not only … the events he saw, but his own small effect on events” (75.12) — while holding it at an ironic, examinable distance. Critics read it variously as egotism and as a sophisticated solution to the problem of the observer in the new nonfiction; Mailer treated the third-person self as the only honest way to include the reporter in the report. The Fight closes the run; from The Executioner’s Song (1979) onward Mailer largely withdrew himself from his nonfiction.