Analysis Of Norman Mailer's The Naked And The Dead

American society , his personal experiences and perceptions formed on the basis of those experiences.

Writing about the hero in contemporary American Literature, Ihab Hassan comments that heroes in fiction are made ,not born and that he is one mirror fiction uses to surprise reality and identify its forms .The hero thus becomes a reflection of reality.

This paper argues how Mailer,s heroes also become a medium of expressing the American cultural and social reality.As America slides

Aldridge [1971:134] writes:

“ No novel since Red Badge of Courage and War and Peace has contained a more vivid or terrifyingly acute picture of the conditions of actual warfare and certainly no novel of our time since U.S.A has projected its theme on a more variegated background of human experiences. On page after page and in episode after episode. It is Mailer’s magnificent reportorial sense, his gift for evoking the tactile essence of a scene, that sustains the book and that will keep it alive at least as long as the events it describes live in the memory”.

On the narrative level, The Naked and the Dead is an account of American conquest of the Japanese held island of Anopopei in the South Pacific. The novel opens by focussing on an anonymous soldier in the hold of one of the troopships the night before the landing. The book closes four months later as the mopping up operations are being completed and Major Dalleson is occupied with his plans for filling time before the campaign of

In its structures and effect on men it represents Mailer’s view of the modern social order. As Richard Poirier [1972:21] has stated, "War" was the determining form of his imagination long before he had the direct experiences of war that went into his first big novel. Though, The Naked and The Dead is a novel about war, it has very little to say about the military enemy, the Japanese forces led by General Toyaku. The novel mainly deals with the actions of a handful soldiers of I and R platoon, the division commander General Cummings and his young aide Lt. Hearn. As we become familiar with the characters of the novel we find that what they most despise and fear is rooted in their prior experience of life in America. Mailer interrupts the narrative flow with, “ Time Machine” vignettes which summarize the life of characters in the pre-war America, and account for how they became the persons they are at a crucial point of their careers. The novel deals less with war and more with lives of the men involved in the war. Aldridge observes [1971: