Review: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948, when Norman Mailer was just 25 years old. It became a best seller, winning great acclaim as one of the earliest and best personal accounts to come out of World War II. It established Mailer’s reputation, as well as various themes that he would pursue throughout his writing career.

The book is a naturalistic account of a platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the Japanese held island of Anopopei. The battle scenes are vivid, but the deeper drama of the novel derives from the wars swirling between characters, personal histories and worldviews and within the psyches of the men themselves. Mahler recalls through flashbacks the civilian lives of thirteen of the men and shows how they are burdened by their respective pasts as much as by the heavy packs and military equipment they bear. The more ambitious of the men struggle with how to impose their will on their comrades and the great events swirling around them. The more passive struggle to accept their position as followers and scapegoats. In the end, however, all are pawns of the indifferent unfolding of Events, wherein the best laid plans can be “balked” (a favorite Mailer word) by nature or chance. Finally, the campaign is successful without the benefit of either General Cumming’s cunning strategy or the heroism of the platoon.

Mailer’s cynicism about postwar American society, which would come to fuller flower in his later writings, is already in view. His General Cummings is contemptuous of the democratic spirit and determined to mold his subordinates into automatons. He struggles with Lieutenant Hearn, a rich, educated and confused Midwesterner, whose hopefulness about liberal democratic values ultimately proves impotent against both the General’s proto-fascism and the deviousness and determination of Sergeant Croft, the grasping common man. The problems of pluralistic American society are mirrored in the gritty, contentious life together of this small group of mismatched men: Jews and anti-Semites, intellectuals and illiterates, womanizers and family men.

At 721 pages, the novel is long—perhaps too long. Mailer himself, in an introduction to the 50th anniversary edition that I read, muses that “the words came too quickly and too easily” in many parts and that his writing suffers from “over-certified adjectives.” I enjoyed the vigor of Mailer’s language, however, and the audacity of his accomplishment. At 25!