ABSTRACT
When Norman Mailer, in The Prisoner of Sex, writes that 'a man can hardly ever assume he has become a man' he is expressing a predicament typical of his time. In the Mailer novel, Rusty Jethroe's executive vanity demands that he brings back a grizzly from his Alaskan hunting trip; and this obsessiveness is accelerated into something like desperation after an embarrassingly botched attempt in the style of Francis Macomber. The boy Quentin is brought up with guns, and shoots his share of squirrels and rabbits. In Robert F. Jones's novel, as in Mailer's, a father and son go on a hunting expedition together; and here too Oedipal tensions erupt. Robert F. Jones's Blood Sport is also about realizing and relinquishing an archetypal manhood. Two kinds of fantasy have been dealt here: fantasy as a literary genre, and fantasy as an activity of the psyche.
