The Naked and the Dead is novelist Norman Mailer’s depiction of
war,
seen through the eyes of a handful of American soldiers who take part in the siege against a Japanese
stronghold in an
island in the Pacific. It focuses on the combatants, from the
general who plots the campaign to the infantrymen who lay their lives on the line against the enemy. After storming the beaches, General Cummings orders his troops to dig in while awaiting reinforcements. Having no clear idea of the actual strength of the Japanese defenders, Cummings wants more information before he can give the command to attack. A team led by Lieutenant Hearn is ordered to conduct reconnaissance patrol in a mountain situated behind enemy lines to find a possible secret route to surprise the enemy. Their scout finds the mountain pass occupied by Japanese guards but omits to tell the team leader at the instance of Sgt. Croft, a renegade, who wants to take over the command of the patrol. Hearn is killed and Croft orders the
men to climb over the mountain. Failing, they turn back and head home, suffering casualties on the way. They try to carry home a wounded comrade, but loses him in the arduous journey through the jungle. A small member of the patrol tries to leap across a chasm, but falls short and plunges down the cliff. Meanwhile, a captain unwittingly launches a full-scale attack on the enemy positions while Cummings is away, destroying them completely. The sacrifices of Hearn and his team have been unnecessary. The
novel makes use of the flashback: each protagonist goes back to his life before he went to war. Using the omniscient viewpoint, Mailer portrays his characters like a psychologist analyzing his patients as they are made to confront their fears and try to make sense of what they are doing far away from home. The general is seen as a brilliant strategist who tries in vain to understand the meaning of life even as he wielded the power to kill and destroy. Lieutenant Hearn is pictured as a drifter who fails to realize his potentials until it is too late. The rest of the patrol seemingly represent a cross section of American society: working men, immigrants, adventurers, family men, professionals, misfits. The novel appears to depict war not as the glorious arena where men perform deeds of honor and gallantry – only a place where most men would rather flee from and return to the peace and comfort of their own homes. Mailer excels in depicting scenes of action, of troopers struggling through the shell-gutted beach, dragging artillery through the muddy terrain, carrying their wounded man through the jungle, trying to reach the mountaintop. It makes no pronouncement as to whether war is evil or not. It is content to draw a picture as accurately as it can, like an artist who recreates the landscape before him as he sees it and lets others be the judge.
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