The Naked and the Dead

Plot

The story takes place on Anopopei, a fictional island in the South Pacific. American forces are faced with a campaign to drive out the Japanese so that Americans can advance into the Philippines. The novel focuses on one platoon.

Staff Sergeant Sam Croft, Woodrow Wilson, and Roy Gallagher are playing cards the night before a scheduled attack. They are members of a recon platoon fighting in the Asian theater of World War II on Anopopei. The next morning, as the platoon takes boats to the island, they are nervous. The assault begins, and as the platoon waits to come to the island, they nervously joke amongst themselves. Once the squad reaches the beach, they begin digging foxholes. Stanley picks a fight with Oscar Ridges and Red Valsen, but ultimately Red backs down. Croft leaves to find his commanding officer. Once they have begun to settle on the beach, the Japanese attack. The platoon splits up. Corporal Toglio, Hennessey, and Ridges have completed their foxholes, so they stay on the beach. Brown, Gallagher, Wilson, Red, Stanley, and Sergeant Julio Martinez run after Croft. As the beach is shelled, Hennessey is killed by shrapnel.

Later, Croft pleads with officers to give him more men to replace those lost. He ultimately earns a replacement, bringing the depleted platoon up to fourteen men out of an intended twenty. Roth and Goldstein, two of the new men in the platoon, bond over their Jewish heritage.

Lieutenant Robert Hearn snaps at other officers, and Major General Edward Cummings steps in. Hearn and Cummings form an odd friendship. The two talk in Cummings's tent at night. They discuss philosophy and Cummings analyzes Hearn’s personality. Cummings tells Hearn that, as an officer, he must develop resentment for enlisted men.

Roth and Minetta are separated from the rest of the squad, and when they hear gunfire, they assume recon must be in a firefight. As Roth keeps watch, he falls asleep at his post and wakes up Stanley a half-hour late. The next day, the other half of the platoon moves anti-tank guns, slowed down by the mud. Wyman drops his leg of the gun, and it rolls down a hill. When he tries to take responsibility, Croft thinks he is covering for Goldstein, whom he blames instead. Ironically, Goldstein comes to believe that he himself was responsible for the failure.

Main characters

Hennessey is a newer member of the platoon. He is very cautious with all of his gear and movements so as to not get killed. When they arrive at the beach of Anopopei, he defecates in his pants out of fear during the opening action scene. He has a mental breakdown and runs down the beach in hopes of getting new pants. He is killed soon after by shrapnel from an exploding mortar shell.

Woodrow Wilson is a large, impoverished white Southerner. He has a happy-go-lucky and generous nature. In his "Time Machine" we learn Wilson wakes up married to a woman named Alice after a drunken night at the bar. Their marriage consists of love affairs and money troubles. Later, Wilson suffers a long, agonizing death after being shot in the stomach by the Japanese; Brown, Goldstein, Ridges, and Stanley try to carry him back to the beach to be saved but he dies on the way there. He is named after the 28th President of the United States.

Julio Martinez is a Mexican-American from Texas. He is nicknamed Japbait by Croft and made sergeant in General Cummings's infantry division. Martinez was terrified, constantly on edge and an introvert throughout the beginning of the novel. He however, gains bravery through battle and is an excellent soldier, especially in terms of getting a scope for the land. He is well trusted by the other men in the platoon. Croft convinces Martinez to lie about a Japanese platoon he saw on a solo scouting mission, which leads to the death of Hearn and to the men hiking to Mount Anaka under Croft's command.

Sam Croft has a large ego and is coldblooded throughout the novel. At one point, he immorally kills a Japanese POW. Later, he squeezes Roth’s baby bird to death as if he is crushing all innocence. He loves war and is Mailer’s version of a psychopath within the novel. He is seen as one of the best soldiers in the platoon and the other men both fear and respect him as a leader. In his time capsule, we learned he was cheated on by the women he loved which led to him being cold and developing a love for war. At the conclusion of the book, Croft refuses to look forward to his homecoming, believing that the war will continue for much longer. After all, he enjoys the war because he finds a thrill in killing.

Red Valsen claims he does not want to rise in the ranks. He appears numb to death and the war itself. As a child, he grew up in a mining town in Montana. Later, he runs away from home, losing contact with his entire family. After holding many jobs, Red moves in with his girlfriend Lois and her son. Afraid of commitment, Red joins the Army and runs away from Lois. While in the Army, Red loses contact with Lois just like he did with his own family.

Themes

Throughout the novel, Mailer dwells on many themes. These themes are recurring throughout his works and reappear in several of his later essays and novels.

Dehumanization of soldiers

Commenting on the dehumanization of soldiers in The Naked and the Dead, Mailer said, "The book finds man corrupted, confused to the point of helplessness, but it also find that there are limits beyond which he cannot be pushed."

The narrator illustrates the exhaustion and humiliation of the soldiers' life: “When a man was harnessed into a pack and web belt and carried a rifle and two bandoliers and several grenades, a bayonet and a helmet, he felt as if he had a tourniquet over both shoulders and across his chest. It was hard to breathe and his limbs kept falling asleep.” Dehumanization of the soldier is also seen in Chapter 5 when the platoon had to carry antitank guns between 1st Battalion and A Company, which was about a mile of muddy trail. The men became numb and only went through the motions of carrying the guns and the generals disregarded the soldiers' exhaustion. The soldiers generally believed the army didn't see them as people and that "they don't care if you live or die here [the infirmary]. All they want is to get you back where you can stop a bullet".

Mailer described The Naked and the Dead as "'an odyssey of fear, exhaustion, and death,'" and presents the natural world as "uncaring, unyielding, implacable, and occasionally, beautiful." He adds insights into soldiers, like Martinez, in this context. Mailer writes that on his scouting mission, "Martinez was functioning more like an animal than a human." Mailer also distils how dehumanizing the enemy was an essential aspect to the structure of war. Mailer writes, "Martinez had a sense of unreality . . . They were men. The entire structure of war wavered in his brain for a moment."

Mailer concludes the platoon's climb of Mount Anaka, reinforcing the loss of the individual within war, writing that "[the soldiers] did not think of themselves as individual men any longer. They were merely envelopes of suffering. They had forgotten about the patrol, about the war, their past, they had even forgotten the earth they had just climbed."

Loneliness

Loneliness acted as an equalizer among soldiers and officers during the Second World War. Despite divisions of rank, economic, political, sexuality, or class, loneliness was a universal phenomenon among soldiers and officers during the Second World War. Furthermore, this factored into the construction of brotherhood in wartime. In The Naked and the Dead, Goldstein feels a connection and a sort of alliance with Roth in their Jewish heritage. Although the men in the platoon do have a sense of brotherhood with one another, they still feel alone during their deployment.

Throughout the novel, the men long for women and deeper friendships. Roth, for example, wishes to have someone whom he “could talk to seriously.” He realizes that he doesn’t know his own comrades very well, since everyone he met when he initially entered the Army was either killed or reassigned. The men degrade women through the narrative; however, the absence of women factors into their reaction to disparage women, whose presence on the front lines was limited.

Death

The men are faced with unexpected deaths, such as Hennessey's, Wilson, Hearn, Roth, and Gallagher’s wife who dies during childbirth. It is clear death surrounds them and their lives could be taken away in any moment. Cummings, having been surrounded by Army deaths the majority of his career, still never warms to the smell of rotting corpses. Red, like the other soldiers, realizes he or one of his comrades could be killed any minute. Even when they grew used to death and saw it as "large and devastating and meaningless. Men who were killed were nearly men no longer around", a comrade's death would cause "the idea of death [to be] fresh and terrifying again". This fear of death also had a negative impact on the mental health and sanity of the men. For instance, Red states, "Goddam Army gets you so you're afraid to turn around". The men began to have a pessimistic view of life believing "All dead things... everything lives to die". This was especially so since "that's all [soldiers] can ever do in the Army, sit and think" which caused the thoughts and fears of death to be constant and prevalent.

The first death in the novel introduces this theme into the narrative. Red observes Hennessey's death. The narrator reveals "[u]ntil Hennessy had been killed, Red had accepted all the deaths of the men he knew as something large and devastating and meaningless . . . Hennessey's death had opened a secret fear." Croft is also surprisingly moved by Hennessey's death. The narrator declares "Hennessey's death had opened to Croft vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly. All day the fact hovered about his head, tantalizing him with odd dreams and portents of power." Gallagher's wife, Mary dies in childbirth in America. When Gallagher learns of her death, he continues to receive letters she sent before her death. Because of the disparity of time and space between men and women and their families during wartime, Gallagher considers that Mary "lived for him only at the exact time when he read her letters."

On the mission across Mount Anaka, Roth discovers a baby bird, and the platoon, with the exception of Croft, are fascinated by the bird. The bird symbolizes innocence and the futility of death during war, as Roth cares for the baby bird and Croft is then enraged by it and crushes the bird in his hand. The contrast between Hearn and Roth's deaths reflects both the bonds of brotherhood made among soldiers during war and the division between rank. Lieutenant Hearn's death is immediate and has little recovery time, with the platoon mourning for ten or twenty seconds. Croft is even relieved by Hearn's death, as he is now in charge of the platoon again. In contrast, Roth's death "shatter[s] the platoon." Instead of choosing to face Croft, Roth chose to risk falling to his death. Not only is the platoon shattered, Mailer underlines the division between the empowered and powerless, the narrator declares, "It was Croft's fault that Roth had been killed."

Power

Mailer's predominant theme throughout The Naked and the Dead is illustrated through the power relations among the men, especially the relationships between commanding officers and subordinates. Power is distilled in General Cummings's character. Cummings compares himself to the “chief monk” and God throughout the book. He also openly supports the class system within the military, and states Hearn must accept the “emotional prejudices of his class”, especially since he is an officer. People of higher ranks like Hearn and Cummings, after all, enjoy a better quality of life than the other foot soldiers. They sleep in larger staterooms while the soldiers share small rooms and are jammed into cots. This power system and power relations is reinforced within the missions. After Hearn dies, Croft is "relieved" that there is no longer a rival to his power and takes over leading the platoon up the mountain. While the other soldiers clearly want to stop and give up, they continue hiking the mountain simply because Croft commands them to. Chickenshit, as termed by Paul Fussell in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, was a major aspect of the theme of power in the novel. This is shown in how Cummings makes Hearn do humiliating tasks and in the end sends him on a mission knowing he will die, which is the ultimate chickenshit since he sent him to die solely to demonstrate his power. This is another instance where the undemocratic nature of the Army is apparent. Analogous to the replacement of "fuck" with "fug," Fussell commented on the obscenity in war, arguing that explicit language in wartime became precious as a way for millions of conscripts to note, in a licensed way, their bitterness and anger.

During his service in World War II, Mailer did not yet have a plan for his war novel, but knew that he wanted to write a combat novel specifically set in the Philippines where "the American hunger for power was palpable." Mailer told his sister that he wrote to his wife, Bea, about his plans for a novella with "'a ridge or a peak as a symbol' of 'the higher aspirations of man, the craving for the secret, the core of life,'" and the Faustian need for power. In another letter to his wife, Mailer recounted an encounter with the top mess sergeant, who called him "'a chickenshit son of a bitch.'" This real life incident inspired Mailer to construct the pivotal confrontation between General Cummings and Lieutenant Hearn which leads indirectly to Hearn's death. Initially, Cummings burdens Hearn with small, chickenshit tasks, and later Hearn retaliates within restricted power dynamics by dropping a match on the General's floor and grounds it into the floor with his heel. According to General Cummings, "what Hearn had done was equivalent to a soldier's laying hands on his person." Thus, Cummings transfers Hearn to the platoon with Croft.

Homosexuality

The theme of homosexuality is most evident through Cummings. In his "Time Machine", Mailer illustrates Cummings growing up experiencing gender-role confusion. Although his mother supports Cummings' identity, his father refuses to have a son who is homosexual and thus sends him to military school. This portages the notion of the Army being only for "real men". However, there were a lot of homosexual men who were soldiers during WWII and as Allan Bérubé illustrates in Coming Out Under Fire: History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, they were often seen as trusted and respected soldiers and medics. While in the Army, it is clear Cummings developed romantic feelings towards Hearn and sexually desired him. Through Cummings, Mailer illustrates his beliefs about homosexuality. Although Mailer believes being homosexual is evil, it is interesting he had the general be the homosexual character in the novel, especially since he depicts the general as being a powerful figure who is a good leader. Mailer also includes homosexual characters in his other works as well, such as in The Deer Park. Mailer directly addresses this theme and his beliefs about homosexuality in "The Homosexual Villain," stating he saw homosexuals as evil and always depicted them as the villain in his works but realized they were humans. Mailer utilizes the trope that men coded as homosexual are villains, repressed, and effeminate.

Brotherhood

The Naked and the Dead depicts the bonds of brotherhood during World War II, particularly examining the relationships among platoons. During World War II, soldiers developed strong friendships to which civilians could not relate. Croft expresses his feelings of brotherhood and tells his comrades, “You’re all good guys. You’re all chicken, and you’re all yellow, but you’re good guys. They ain’t a goddam thing wrong with you.” Mailer's use of Croft in this scene emphasizes the unilateral sentiment and necessity of brotherhood during wartime. The theme recurs in Part III when Brown, Goldstein, Ridges, and Stanley attempt to carry the wounded Wilson back to camp. Despite the physical strains, the men persisted in order to save Wilson. The brotherhood of the platoon is also illustrated by the group's reactions to the deaths of Hearn and Roth. New to the platoon, Hearn, when he was killed by Japanese soldiers, the platoon stood shocked for a couple of seconds but quickly moved on under the continued leadership of Croft. However, in the wake of Roth's death, "the platoon was shattered. For ten minutes they huddled together on the shelf, too stricken, too terrified, to move on. The gravity of Roth's death demonstrates the deep bond of brotherhood, pervasive not only during World War II but more specifically within the platoon.

Masculinity

The Naked and the Dead acts as Mailer's introduction into the literary pantheon, and like his later works, Mailer portrays women as sexual objects. Many men, especially Brown, fear their wives are cheating on them while they are at war. This causes them to have more hatred towards women and a deep distrust towards them. Brown tells Stanley that if he finds out his wife cheated on him, he will beat her then throw her out. Later, in the Chorus “Women,” Polack insists that “there ain’t a fuggin woman is any good” and Brown agrees. Women are especially emphasized within "Time Machine" segments. In these segments, the men’s romantic relationships and sexual experiences are described in detail. In many of the "Time Machines", such as Martinez's, women are portrayed as simply sexual objects. In Croft's "Time Machine", we learn he was cheated on by the women he loved which resulted in him being cold and having a hatred towards women. The men seem to disregard the fact that they have cheated several times on their partners but show extreme hatred in the thought of their wives cheating on them. The only character that seems to positively view his wife is Gallagher, who becomes miserable and lost after she dies. This deep hatred for women, however, is a way to mask how strongly these men miss and desire women; they desperately need women for a variety of different reasons. Mailer exemplifies the construction of the masculine identity, and analyzes masculinity as socially constructed, context-specific and culture-bound. Male studies enforces The Naked and the Dead as part of American literature which reflects American society's conception of masculinity based on the representation of masculinity in American fiction. The construction of American masculinity predicated on violence and adventure narratives is particularly distilled in Croft as the typified combat soldier.

Development

Writing development: Before he left for basic training, Mailer was certain that he could write "THE war novel" based on his experiences as a cook and the experiences of soldiers in World War II. After returning home from the war, he moved to France with his first wife, Beatrice, where he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. Here, in just 15 months, Mailer wrote his war novel as noted in his introduction to its Fiftieth Anniversary Edition.

Mailer states his writing inspiration came from the great Russian novelists like Leo Tolstoy. While writing, Mailer often read "from Anna Karenina most mornings before he commenced his own work." Mailer believed Tolstoy enabled him to bring compassion to his pages; Tolstoy taught him "compassion is valueless without severity." Mailer was convinced he brought this compassion to The Naked and the Dead, and it is what enabled a 25-year-old to write an incredible war novel. The influence of the U.S.A. trilogy on the text has also been noted.

Throughout his writing process, Mailer explained, he "used to write twenty-five pages of first draft a week," which allowed his novel to flow from page to page. Mailer felt this novel was the easiest for him to write, as he finished it quickly and passionately. He later stated, "Part of me thought it was possibly the greatest book written since War and Peace."

Despite the author’s self-praise, he acknowledged his writing immaturity within the novel. Mailer insisted "it was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective." However, despite this criticism, Mailer believed the book deserved to be a best seller. It was written with vigor and contained acute descriptiveness which enabled readers to imagine what World War II was really like. Mailer admitted that he still returned to The Naked and the Dead occasionally and reread passages because they gave him hope “for all of us”.

Character that represents Mailer: Mailer stated he did not portray himself as one of the characters. However, he mentions the character of Roth is the most similar to himself. He states Roth's experiences within the novel closely resembled his own experiences in WWII, especially in comparison to the other characters. This similarity is also evident in how they are both Jewish but don't necessarily strongly declare being Jewish.

"Fug"

The publishers of The Naked and the Dead prevented Mailer from using the word "fuck" in his novel, and he had to use the euphemism "fug" instead. In 1988, Mailer shared an anecdote about the word:

The word has been a source of great embarrassment to me over the years because, you know, Tallulah Bankhead's press agent, many years ago, got a story in the papers which went..."Oh, hello, you're Norman Mailer," said Tallulah Bankhead allegedly, "You're the young man that doesn't know how to spell..." You know, the four-letter word was indicated with all sorts of asterisks.

The incident is mentioned in John Green's An Abundance of Katherines (2006). Colin Singleton tells Lindsey Lee Wells he likes to read literary criticism after reading a book. Colin says the publisher indicated that no one in 1948 would buy The Naked and the Dead "'because it contains even more F-bombs than it does Regular Bombs.' So Norman Mailer, as a kind of fug-you to the publisher, went through his 872-page book and changed every last F-word to 'fug.'"

The rock band the Fugs took their name from this word.

Reception

The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948, when Mailer was twenty-five years of age. The book drew immediate commercial success, selling 200,000 copies in its first three months and remaining on the New York Times best seller list for 62 weeks. In 1949 George Orwell wrote about the novel in a comment that would appear on paperback copies of the book for decades that it was “awfully good, the best war book of the last war yet.” Later, Modern Library named The Naked and the Dead one of the top hundred novels in the English language.

Publisher Bennett Cerf declared in 1948 "only three novels published since the first of the year that were worth reading ... Cry, the Beloved Country, The Ides of March, and The Naked and the Dead."

Hartley Shawcross as Attorney General for England and Wales explained why he would not prosecute the book under the Obscene Publications Acts: "Whilst there is much in this most tedious and lengthy book which is foul, lewd and revolting, looking at it as a whole I do not think that its intent is to corrupt or deprave or that it is likely to lead to any result other than disgust at its contents." Tom Driberg welcomed the decision. In its initial review the Times Literary Supplement complained that the novel "grows increasingly unreadable" due to Mailer's tendency to "leave nothing out". The Daily Telegraph described the novel as "dull" for the same reason.

Later, Gore Vidal would write:

My first reaction to The Naked and the Dead was: it’s a fake. A clever, talented, admirably executed fake. I have not changed my opinion of the book since… I do recall a fine description of men carrying a dying man down a mountain… Yet every time I got going in the narrative I would find myself stopped cold by a set of made-up, predictable characters taken not from life, but from the same novels all of us had read, and informed by a naïveté which was at its worst when Mailer went into his Time-Machine and wrote those passages which resemble nothing so much as smudged carbons of a Dos Passos work.