Norman Mailer's WWII novel, The Naked and the Dead, is a polarizing book. It is entrenched in the warfare of the soldiers minds, and highlights the individual: their strengths and fallibility's. Briefly, the novel is centered around a recon squad in the Pacific towards the end of the U.S. campaign against the Japanese in WWII and their part in taking the island Anopopei. The recon squad the book focuses on is tired from a previous campaign and the veterans of the squad are beginning to show signs of wear and exhaustion and post traumatic shock. Mailer's real genius in the novel is the way he dissects the personalities of the individuals as they try to function as a collective. It is very much a class novel and the struggle and mistrust between the enlisted men and the officers is a constant theme and is very interesting on the heals of the great depression. We tend not to think of the U.S. as being a country that is embroiled in class struggles, but Mailer's novel, intentionally or not, pits the proletariat under the thumb of the bourgeoisie and the bitter, painful resentment surfaces in subtle and harmful ways. But I don't believe that class struggle is the crux of The Naked and the Dead. The heart of the novel is in the reactions of the soldiers to war, the army, and the collective objective: survive.
The Naked and the Dead polarized me as I read. I have never wanted to believe in the cowardice or fears of the historical American soldier. As a strict backlash to the nature of humanity I have always put them on a pedestal and idealized the role of those who fought so long in WWII as liberating hero's, never once stopping to put together the racial and political tensions that were so powerful in this country as the war consumed the globe. See, I wanted the soldiers in my mind to be the brave squad from Saving Private Ryan and if there was to be extreme cowardice by one soldier it was juxtaposed by absolute bravery by another. Mailer's novel drops bravery from a 12 story building to watch it shatter on the streets below. There is no bravery in The Naked and the Dead, there is only the personality of man as they fight for their lives, cling to their loves, and writhe painfully as the world they remembered slowly vanishes from sight. It was said of Larry McMurtry that he wasn't afraid to kill his darlings. It could be said of The Naked and the Dead that there are no darlings and as a reader i developed a near perfect disdain for nearly every character in the book, they are so elementary flawed and despicable. But I think Mailer buries their humanity deep within their flaws. It is within the constant worrying and fear that elements of their family and children and childhood appears and it is the way they cope, in the company of fearful men, that they become despicable. In this way, perhaps, it becomes the story of why soldiers react the way they do, the pressure of the collective upon their shoulders, driving them to heinous and violent acts.
The novel is littered with minor faults and many of the social commentaries are half cocked and incomplete and nothing is solved within the novel. In the end the ultimate sacrifices, pains, and toils are committed in vain, the outcome decided long before the troops landed an Anopopei. But then, perhaps the point of the novel all along.
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