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"The Naked and the Dead" by Norman Mailer
By Jonathan DePrizio
October 03, 2006


Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" chronicles the experiences of an army unit in the Pacific theater of the Second World War. His unique writing styles accents the many effects that war has on its wide range of participants, such as the toll that inexperience takes on the young, and the devastating physiological consequences combat has on hardened veterans. Moreover, Mailer showcases the relationships between the enlisted-men and commissioned officers, and displays the sheer boredom and the monotonous nature of warfare, which is the source of both laughter and trouble for the men.

From the opening pages of the book, it becomes clear that the men may not like or understand the war around them, but they accept that they have no choice but to be an unwilling gear in the machines of destruction. Furthermore, they comprehend what little relevance they have in the grand scheme of things. Prior to the invasion of Anopopei, Red, a character in the novel, "...felt a dire dread. There would be this campaign and then another and another, and there would never be an end to it...There was nothing to do but go from one day into the next." (12) The fact that the men had to delay after boarding their landing craft, while naval guns fired over their heads and men fought to gain a foothold on the beach, only serves to frustrate and increase the anxiety of the men. "The goddamn Army, hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait," Gallagher says (26). The apparent lack of planning on the Army's part makes the men think that their leaders are incompetent: "...if they really knew how to work these kind of things, we woulda been eating breakfast now..." (26), intentionally speaking "loud enough for the Lieutenant from the communications platoon to hear him and grinned as the officer turned his back." (27)

Throughout the first section of the book, Recon is tasked with unloading supplies and building a road to resupply the men at the front lines. The ample amount of downtime that results provides the men with the constant opportunity to complain to one another about the war, their wives, the Depression, and money. One thing Mailer makes explicitly clear is that there is no single common background for soldiers in the army; each many has his own story, but they generally divide into officers with college educations, and enlisted men for whom the army provided an escape from the day-to-day life of the Great Depression. Roth, for example, was "a college graduate, familiar with office work," (51) whereas men such as Goldstein and Minetta may not even have completed high school.

The divide between enlisted men and officers is especially poignant in the "The Naked and the Dead." Some men, such as Goldstein, go as far as to equate the officers with the Nazis: "They [the officers] slept in staterooms when we were jammed into the hold like pigs. It's to make them feel superior, a chosen group. That's the same device Hitler uses when he makes the Germans think they're superior." (52) As Goldstein observed, officers already received superior housing and amenities than enlisted men, such as field showers (89), and hot, relatively edible meals. As a result, there is a clear resentment among the men, such as Red when he states, "There ain't a good officer in the world." (128)

Throughout the novel, Mailer reminds the reader about the gruesome nature of warfare. As a first-hand participant, Mailer himself is accustomed to the violence and gore, but his words paint an unmistakable picture about the terrifying environment in which the book's characters live and work. These circumstances affect each character differently, breaking the wills of some while providing strength and determination to others.

Ironically, it is the older, more experienced soldiers that show the effects of warfare. "Out of all the old guys in recon, there ain't one of us whose nerves ain't shot. I tell ya, I'm scared all the time, and Red is too...and Martinez is the best little scout you could ever want but he's even more scared than I am," explains Brown (17). It is important to note that what Brown describes does not necessarily translate into cowardice; even though he notes Martinez is "scared," he consistently praises him as the best scout in the unit, lovingly referring to him as "jap-bait." The mental and physical ware that combat has on the experienced men of the unit dictates their actions throughout the novel. Red states that he has "accepted all the deaths of the men he knew as something large and devastating and meaningless. Men who were killed were merely men no longer around...it was merely something that happened to somebody he knew, and Red had always let it go at that." (123) War's toll is immense, however, and the gruesome death of Hennessey, who was hit by a mortar, "...had opened a secret fear...he found himself at the edge of a bottomless dead." (123)

"The Naked and the Dead" is a horrifying, yet insightful piece into the minds of the men forced to do the unthinkable. With time, their nerves wear down to nothing, and they accept their fate as insignificant pawns in an event completely out of their control. The dull, monotonous pace of the invasion on Anopopei allows the soldiers' thoughts and emotions to wonder, while providing the reader with a detailed account of the friction that exists between enlisted men and commissioned officers.