The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition

A friend, Bill Brissette, shared on Facebook his reaction to this book. It was so remarkable, that I wanted to expose more potential readers to this book.
"I will never forget Norman Mailer describing marines pushing an artillery piece up a hill in the jungle in the dark during a tropical downpour in his masterpiece, "The Naked And The Dead." When the marines finally got that gun up the hill, I put the book down, and I immediately realized why. I felt tired, like I had just pushed a heavy gun up a steep hill in the jungle at night during a hard rain, and I stopped and revelled in that moment and the fact that Mailer had somehow miraculously conveyed me to that dark rain swept night on an island somewhere in the Pacific during WWII and described in words the experience of pushing that gun up that hill so well that I felt it viscerally. I would swear that I could smell the fetid odor of the soaking wet, moldy jungle soil, feel the rain beating down on me so hard that it stung and stuck my uniform to my skin, taste it mixed with the sweat running down my face, feel the burn in my legs from the hard pushing and the impossibilty of getting any traction in the mud, hear the grunts and groans of my buddies, themselves slipping and falling in their efforts to push the gun up that hill, and cursing whenever the damned thing would slide backwards or sidewards on them, and hear the roar of the rain and the rush of it running down the hill in sheets , along with the violent shaking of the giant palms overhead, tossing in the wind and the relentless downpour, mixed in with the sceeches and screams of frightened monkeys and birds, all in the black darkness of that stormy jungle night lit only in momentary silhouettes frozen in time by brilliant flashes of tropical lightning which were followed almost immediately by deafening claps of thunder."

This World War II novel, which was published in 1948, has many discernible faults, and yet it has undeniable power as it follows one platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for control of a Japanese-held Pacific island. Mailer intersperses realistic and detailed accounts of their endeavors with background vignettes of the individual solders, so that the reader understands something of why they behave as they do. One thing they all have in common is an almost debilitating fear in the face of danger and a deep weariness of body and soul. That aspect seems very realistic.

What does not seem realistic is the misogynistic attitudes ascribed to the men. All seem to mistrust and denigrate women to such an extent that the reader strongly suspects them to be reflecting Mailer's personal attitude. (True Fact: Mailer stabbed one of his wives many years after this novel was written.) However, in Mailer's story the men aren't portrayed in any better light, all appearing to be somewhat despicable and deeply flawed in various ways. So maybe Mailer was a misanthropist, not just a misogynist.

One thing that takes getting used to is the writing style, which is essentially one declarative sentence after another, all structured the same. Eventually this even seems suitable because it conveys a sense of journalism rather than fiction and makes the narrative seem more true.

Some episodes stand out as so truthfully told that I could see them in my mind's eye and feel them in my body -- an ambush at a river, carrying a wounded man miles through the jungle, climbing a mountain through weariness past enduring.

I would say this is an anti-war novel only in the sense that war is just one more symptom of man's absorption with self and with maintaining the image he wishes to present to the world.

This novel was ranked as #51 on the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century. I would not have placed it on that list myself, but it is well worth reading.

It started off strong with vivid descriptions of the characters as they wait to move out on a mission, and how they spend their time. After that it moved to the actual mission and I got bored with the lengthy descriptions of their movements. Was hoping for something more like James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. Maybe the book would get better as I gotta further into it, but I couldn't slog through it.

I read far more history books than fiction, but every now and then I try to sneak in a highly regarded novel to break the pace. This one was nothing like what I expected - actually much better. It presents a wide ranging cast of characters from every kind of background, from the pampered, privileged and intellectual to the impoverished, indigent and uneducated, and fits them all together in a terrific mozaic. Those looking for a Hollywood style climax filled with supernova explosions must have missed what I thought was one of the more brilliantly presented crescendos I've ever read. The moment where Lt. Hearn is shot after Sgt. Croft lies to him about the presence of Japanese soldiers on the trail they are taking hit me like a bucket of ice water in the face, especially since Hearn along with the Jewish Goldstein are in my mind the two most sympathetic characters in the book.

But what really makes The Naked And The Dead is the way each character gradually comes to life as the book progresses. The fear many of the men feel is almost tangible, and the way their varied reactions to their situation is related to their backgrounds growing up before the war works superbly. I'm sure that people of a conservative bent hate the way General Cummings is presented, but I suspect it isn't far off the truth. War is nasty and brutish business and it feeds off taking defenseless young men - mostly from impoverished and under-priveleged backgrounds - and breaking them down psychologically until they will risk death simply because they are told to by a commanding officer. This book conveys that feeling starkly.

The Naked and the Dead remains the most realistic war novel I have read. It is neither a romance of heroic deeds nor the grinding, dehumanised tragedy that WWI novels tend to be. Showing war as a contrasted field of acts of courage, calculation, treachery and occasionally weakness and cowardice, but mostly as drudgery and sheer blind chance, it feels honest and true to experience.

Norman Mailer, indeed, wrote his account of WWII in the Pacific fresh from returning from the front. His book focuses on one island and tracks the destiny of a platoon, whose 15 or so members, each with their own private life back home, their fears and ambitions, become intimate acquaintances of the reader. The Naked and the Dead encompasses a complete campaign, beginning with the sea landing, building up to a major battle, and including the fighting itself. It then swerves into a wildcat mission to circumvent the Japanese line, turning into a classic nail-biting tale of jungle guerrilla, of ambushes and night-fights and forced marches, where the differences between GIs and NCOs erupt to create as much havoc as the fight with the Japanese. In parallel, the novel follows the general's intrigues among the officer corps, providing a bird's eye view of the campaign, its strategy, and its tactics, as well as their impact on the foot-soldiers.

Mailer's tome combines psychology and character analysis with the excitement of action and the realistic depiction of everyday scenes (the construction of the camp, the long struggle to move an anti-aircraft gun by foot, the night watches). It makes the reader feel present, as close as can be to standing on the actual scene. Of course, this was WWII, and every war is probably unique. Still, this is the closest thing, and it is for sure better than having to fight in one.

I had always thought of Norman Mailer as a "character," and certainly also a good writer; but I was completely unprepared for the extraordinary quality of this novel. Mailer must be a genius, not only to have written the book, but to have done so at such a young age. In terms of both content and style, it is a masterpiece, and in my experience, unique. The plot, such as it is, while hardly noticeable most of the time, is also fascinating. But the real movement of the book comes entirely from the characters. Furthermore, it comes mainly from within their minds. This is not a book of dialogues but a book of thoughts.

There was, however, one aspect of the book that did nothing for me at all and could have been entirely omitted with no loss of intelligibility: a series of "time travels" that fill us in on each character's civilian life prior to military service. Believe me, you could just skip all of them and probably have a better reading experience for it. The odd ham-handedness of these sections -- stereotypes all -- only underlined for me how fine a job Mailer did with the bulk of the book: those hundreds and hundreds of pages of riveting interior monologues. But even though the contrast is striking, I could not possibly give this book less than the five star top rating.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is the way that Norman Mailer handles the narration. Instead of having a first person perspective, or a third person perspective with one main character, Mailer focuses on a sort of group consciousness. That is, he switches back a forth between different characters within the US combat force throughout the invasion. Thus, you might be following the I and R platoon on a patrol at one moment, and then be whisked back to the general at headquarters. The reader is given a panoramic view of the invasion of Anopopei. Given the wrong writer, this method could have been a complete mess. However, Mailer handled it brilliantly, giving all of the characters personality, and depth. The book unfolds very slowly, as a the reader is introduced to all the members of an invading platoon (the Intellegence and recon platoon). At the end of many of the chapters are little subsections titled "Time Machine." These sections serve as a sort of flashback to each individual soldier's personal history (each person only gets one time machine section). These subsections help to humanize these characters, as well as to show the forces that have shaped them (economics, class, education, etc.). The scenes also let the reader view the negative and possitve sides of each person: racism, sexism, cowardice, bravery, empathy, and compassion. The members of the platoon become rounded (flawed) people. This initial process of introducing the reader to these characters is extraordinarily important at the end of the novel.
Another interesting aspect of this book is the way that it shows the internal structures that hold these people together. It examines the idea of hiearchy that the military survives on. That is, it looks at the relationship of men of different ranks to each other (officers to enlisted men, general to lieutenant, etc.). How does having control over a man's destiny effect you? How does it effect the man you control? In all, it seems that these internal struggles are among the most important of battle. In order to keep an army together, you must be able to control it. In fact, for me, one of the most interesting interactions/conflicts in the novel is between Lieutenant Hearn and General Cummings.
In all, the story is very interesting. I would recomend it to anybody who has an interest in World War Two, or simply war stories in general. However, I would caution that this is not a shoot 'em up, action adventure fest. It's a sort of study on how war effects those who have to fight it.

This book is clearly written by a first time novelist. I have not read mailer's other works so I will not judge his prose based on his first effort, but even as he alluded in the introduction to this edition: this was written by an amateur.

That said, you have to respect his ambition with this novel and his keen understanding of the power structures that define human relationships not just in the military but in all kinds of human experience.

I was also impressed by the fact that the thrust of this book emphasizes the insignificance of the individual in the face of the wheels of war, and the pointlessness that occupied most of these soldier's time, punctuated by moments of pure terror. No other war book from this era has captured that commonly related maxim quite as well as Mailer has here.

In the light of more recently produced accounts, which trend towards the glorification of the "greatest generation" this is also a brave work to have been published only a few years after the fact, when America was still doing a victory lap and digging in for the next big one against those damn Russkies

Maybe it's the movies.......Maybe it's the movies that have de-sensitized me to expect that the subtle, internal nature of literature could possibly match the over-the-top, external stimuli of cinema. I guess this is probably no more apparent than in "war stories", where I was expecting something along the lines of "Saving Private Ryan", or "Flags of Our Fathers".

Throughout most of this book, I found myself about as lost as the platoon that was sent out to "recon" the rear lines of the Japanese Army. I struggled in the first half of the book, admittedly. Where were the battles? Where was the karnage? I was rather disappointed that nothing was really happening; that all the U.S. company was doing was preparing to prepare for a battle that they knew was possibly months away.

However, As I was finishing this book, I realized that maybe war is more properly illustrated by stories like this. Maybe war is monotonous; boring; anti-climactic; as the nature of this book describes. Maybe war involves a battle of wills and personalities more so than the battle between armies.

Probably more so than any novel I've read, the author brings you deep into the lives and backgrounds of the major players. You're given an opportunity to actually know each character, to the point where you feel it when something happens to them.

This book is not for everyone, and it took me a while to really understand and accept what the author had intended. Nevertheless, if you have time and patience it is worth it.

There must have been a glut of war novels published in the wake of World War II, so it's indicative of the high quality of Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" that its popularity and acclaim have survived when so many others have been forgotten. What makes it so powerful is its uncompromising depiction of brutal front-line combat in scenes so well written that it's easy to forgive the book for its occasionally banal dialogue.
The setting is a fictitious South Pacific island called Anopopei which is held by the Japanese. The U.S. Army has launched a campaign to take command of the island by landing six thousand troops there to confront the defensive line established by the opposing Japanese General Toyaku. Because this is fictional, I assume that the island is supposed to be a desirable strategic position because the purpose of the mission in relation to the real war is never clearly explained. In charge of the invasion is a Machiavellian General named Cummings who thinks soldiers are motivated best by fear. To defeat Toyaku's line, Cummings devises a plan tailored to the island's particular geography and assigns a reconnaissance squad to the dangerous mission, putting his rebellious and idealistic aide, Lieutenant Hearn, in charge. What the men find out is that the island's natural environment is a more formidable enemy than the Japanese could ever be.
The story focuses mainly on the dozen or so men in the reconnaissance squad. Their personal backgrounds vary greatly, although their personalities don't differ so much that it's easy to tell them apart except by name. The two that stand out the most are Roth and Goldstein, two Jewish soldiers who are made to feel like outcasts due to casual anti-semitism in the squad. Short sections entitled "The Time Machine" provide glimpses of each soldier's personal history -- how they came to be what they are. They are, for the most part, normal men with understandable fears of things like being wounded or killed and the possibility of their wives' infidelity while they are gone.
Reading this novel is like descending into a hellish abyss. It is very long and goes into extensive detail about all aspects of wartime life on the island: marching through the jungle in its greenhouse-like heat, hauling heavy equipment through muddy trails and over mountainous terrain, listening to the sporadic bursts of machine gun fire. The squad's treacherous reconnaissance mission is an almost Sisyphean task in which there is no honor or glory to be reaped from their efforts, just tired muscles and broken bodies. And yet they must continue onward, commanded by a cold and distant master plan that is concerned more with the gain of land than the loss of people. This is more than just a suspenseful war story; it is an eye-opening allegory about the apparent purposelessness of mankind's labor and suffering throughout history.

At 25, Mailer's insightful yarn about a World War II battleground shows how precocious and mature his writing skills were at that young age. After having personally lived two years in that same war, maybe Mailer - like many of the characters in the book - arrived as a boy and left as a man. But, unlike his characters, we know he was extremely literate and given a gift to write.

In college, Mailer claims to have written a lot - over 250,000 words. And, all before the age of computers, easy editing, and electric typewriters. This book, approximately 210,000 words, was amazingly completed with ribbons, manual returns and hand corrections in a period of 15 months.

Painstaking detail to the accounts of the 10-person unit enables the reader to feel the anguish and boredom often entailed among enlisted men. We enter their torpid minds sodden by the Japanese rains and febrile from the metallic heat, and learn why these drones constantly reject the authority of the commissioned as well noncommissioned officers who outrank them. The dichotomy existing in the military ranks is obvious. But, everyone puts one pant leg on at a time, we're all flesh and blood, we all are nothing special in the larger realm, or as one character (Red) says, "There damn sure ain't nothing special about a man if he can smell as bad as he does when he's dead."

In addition,behind closed doors, we witness the private life of the general overseeing all of them. His self hatred swells so greatly that he actually seeks defilade in war from his oppressive wife and home life.

Contrasted to the extremely thorough prose about the few weeks on the Japanese island, Mailer gives each main character a brief 9-12 page "life's story" - but not as a rendition, but instead laid out as a weave of few life-changing events, or discussions or both. These mini-biographies are all amazingly detailed in such cleverly simple delivery - very similar to Hemingway's best.

But, the greatest aspect of his book is the creation of the main characters' dialogue. Unlike other great writers, whose dialogue uses spellings and juxtaposed grammar to catch the accent and flavor of the region's "patois", Mailer has a vast number of accents to work from and deliver. Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, prep school, Chicago, Brooklyn, Mexican and others are all brilliantly depicted dialogues in this book. To be capable of creating such diverse accents is amazing. To deliver such amazing diverse dialogues at 25 is almost incomprehensible.

By the end, like any war story, we learn to love those who die and learn to hate some who live. Boys will be boys and some will never "do the right thing." And, sometimes it is the "good who die young." And, luckily, sometimes the good writers live, come home, rethink what horrors they just lived through, apply their God-given writing skills to such memories and deliver a book which will justly last for generations.

This is the novel that made Norman Mailer an overnight literary sensation, and was perhaps the first famous literary work dealing with events in WW II. Unlike some of the other great WW II classics like CATCH-22 and GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, it was written immediately following the war.
From the comments I read from other reviewers, I seem to like this novel a bit less than others. While it is unquestionably a novel of great scope and seriousness, I found much of it to be stiff and somewhat dated. Many of the characters seemed to me to be stock characters, and almost all of the conversation struck me as stiff and artificial. I should add, however, that I have heard Mailer interviewed on several occasions, and interestingly I find his own conversational style to be somewhat stiff and artificial. So, it might be that the style in THE NAKED AND THE DEAD follows his own inner voice.
Nonetheless, even for a relative nonfan of the book, there is much to admire in this book. One scene describing a battle at night possessed a great deal of power. And while I found the conversations awkward, over the course of time you get a sense of the dynamics and personalities of the various platoon members. What especially surprised me about the book was how cynical and disillusioned the novel felt. It was, after all, published in 1948, and the flush and pride of victory already feels stale and faded. This is not the John Wayne in THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA.
One disconcerting aspect of the book was the extensive use of pseudo-profanity. Obviously, in 1948 Mailer or his editors either felt or knew that the novel would face censorship charges if the F-word were used. Instead, the word "fug" is substituted liberally throughout, and the effect for modern reader is jarring and unpleasant, almost as if the men were speaking a different dialect. It may have been one of the factors that made the prose seem somewhat artificial to me. After more than 50 years, it would be nice to see Mailer authorize a new edition with more explicit speech. This makes the novel sound more dated than it ought.
While I found this somewhat disappointing and less moving than I had anticipated, this is nonetheless well worth reading. From a literary standpoint it features one of the most full-blooded tales of combat in WW II and from a historical standpoint it was the first great English-language fictional account of the conflict. Either of those reasons would suffice to make this a worthy read.

The thing that makes this work most interesting, at least to me, is when and by whom it was written. Consider that this epic of the pacific war was first published in 1948, while the ink was still wet on Japan's surrender. Consider also the author, inescapable in the pantheon of american literature in the second half of the last century, but in 1948 just a kid in his mid-twenties who had actually been in the pacific theatre.
That aside, The Naked and the Dead provides a glimpse into the awfulness of war - cruelty, hatred, agony, meaningless life and meaningless death. The narrative is puctuated by digressions into the pasts of every man in the platoon, their lieutenant, and the general in charge of the campaign. I suppose that these life histories are meant to provide the reader with insight into the motivations of the characters. Unfortunately, Mailer's soldiers are, almost without exception, horrible people. With the possible exceptions of Lt. Hearn and Pvt. Goldstein, these men were damaged goods before the army ever laid eyes on them. It is difficult to care about characters so unremitingly callous and cowardly.
Regardless of how much the individuals of the story may annoy, the novel makes an interesting point about war. While most war stories (particularly those of the silver screen) emphasize the contribution of individuals, The Naked and the Dead reveals the truth - that wars are won and lost regardless of individual heroism. The inevitability of American victory on Anapopei against a Japanese contingent cut off from supplies, running out of ammunition as well as food, leaves even General Cummings with the knowledge that his decisions were not significant to the outcome, to say nothing of the sacrafices made by our heroic recon patrol.
To sum up - ugly story, ugly characters, but powerful message.

The intensity of this book is astounding. It is a story of individual men being stripped of their individuality as they become united in a common task that eventually loses its purpose. The argument that this book is the definitive WWII novel has merit, particularly because it can be seen as an analogy to what the American people were experiencing during that time period: a compulsion to come together and rally around a cause that had, after some time, lost its urgency in the haze of blind, zealous patriotism. While many people would expect such an important novel to take place in the European Theater, its setting in the Pacific Theater lends an exotic novelty to the story, which allows the author to use horrific imagery that is exclusive to the alien nature of the jungle-choked island. The realism that defines this novel makes the story infinitely more tragic, particularly when the reader is exposed to the depressingly cyclical nature of the soldiers' lives. This is evident in all of the allusions to the past campaign in Motome, and the suggestion of further combat in the Philippines. The reader learns that there several kinds of people involved in the war, and the most evident dichotomy is between people who were made for combat (Croft) and those that relish the mundane, detail-laden periods between combat (Dalleson). Also, there is a strong distinction between people who can view war in the abstract (Cummings) and those that are powerless to block out the naked humanity that surrounds them (Every soldier in the platoon becomes the latter type at one point or another). Many other themes exist in this text, and I will leave it for future readers to discover them. Keep in mind that this book is not for the faint of heart- if the only favorites you have in your book section are classics you read in high school, this will not be an enjoyable read for you. However, if you are interested in WWII and wish to experience it via the printed word, this is an imaginative yet realistic novel whose harsh lessons will move you to a great deal of thought. Gone are the days when I considered WWII as mere historical fact.

The reviewers that have panned this novel have all uniformly pointed out that none of the main characters were likeable. Correct, and that is the whole point! This is not a story written where the Apple pie, sweet youths emerge as the heroes. No, the protagonists lived hardscrabbled lives, and had deep character flaws. And, oh yes, we can take umbrage with any/all of them. But, when placed in a near-suicidal mission, they performed with heartbreaking valor-even at the prodding of a maniacal, bloodthirsty sergeant.
Here's another eye-opening revelation: We learn about 2/3 through the mission that the whole mission has been rendered moot, due to success on another front. Mr. Mailer scored a bunch of points in the arena of portraying the waste of human sacrifice.

This novel is brutal, but not how you might think. The battle scenes are stark - evidence that Mailer lived this and cares not to dramatize them at all.

But it's not blood/guts that make this novel unforgiving. It's the characters' ignorance and anger and hatred. Trapped in years of war, the constant despair is so difficult to take. It's boredom bordering on murder.

Yet, this is a real-life diary of the horror of war. This is genius. Mailer hides nothing. And with each passing scene you simply want it all to be over, much like the soldiers themselves.

This book is terrific on multiple levels. At the surface, it's war story, and a good one. Beyond that, it's a character study, and this is where it's genius. The recon patrol is, of course, an assortment of young American men. The group is varied, without being cliched (there aren't the typical roles, i.e. the joker, the smart guy, etc). Mailer expertly peels there past to illustrate the causes of their current behaviors and reactions, in a first person, dream-like style.
At a deeper level, Mailer is conducting a ideological level, represented by the conflict between Cummings and Hearn -- whether it's liberalism vs. conservatism or totalitarianism vs. freedom, hasn't sunk in with me yet. However, I'm looking forward to re-reading some of their exchanges so I can have another look at Mailer's point.

Arguably the best fiction detailing the day to day lives of a combat troop, the readers follow a reconnaissance platoon through the weeks of invasion and battle at a Pacific island against the occupying WWII Japanese force. The plot bounces back and forth between the active jungle warfare and the biographical snap shot of each platoon member providing a kaleidoscopic look of America before and during the war.

I've read this masterpiece last summer. The book still rings fresh in my mind, although it has been a little more than a year since I've read it.
The book is simply the best American masterpiece on war written in the latter half of the 20th Century. The book ultimately rankles in its frustration and later disenchantment with the triumph of totalitarianism embodied in an institution that was the Army. That Lt. Hearn is ultimmately murdered by the sadistic Sgt. Croft and aloof Gen. Cummings, echoes the hopelessnness and frustration that Master Mailer--one of America's literary gods--felt with the Left.
Many writers since have tried to emulate his gritty and cutting prose without much success. The book not only brilliantly gives the realistic feel for ground combat at a small unit level, but effectively shows how the macro-view (grand strategy)-- as presented by Gen. Cummings and his staff--affects the I & R (Intelligence & Reconnaissance) Platoon. But more importantly, the recon mission of the platoon serves as a fable of struggle between two contending ideologies, and between Man and Nature. I've yet to see one book--save CATCH-22--that has succesfully juggled these aforementioned elements. It is simply splendid.

Earlier this year I decided to improve the quality of the books I was reading - or, at least, to mix more "good" books in with the easy reading. The Naked and the Dead was the first of these - and what a good choice it was.
Norman Mailer writes with a clarity that is often missing from other good novelists. He develops very strong characters and focusses closely on the interactions between them and their environment. Don't expect an action-packed story: The tales here are the soldier's lives and the lack of action is part of war which seems to be very realistically reconstructed.
The story, for what it's worth, follows a band of recon soldiers on an island in the Pacific during World War II. The book opens with the initial assault on the Japanese-held island; it finishes with the quick and anti-climatic (deliberately so) mopping up of the last troups. In between we follow the soldiers' progress through the jungle, go with them on a desperate recon. mission, and learn about their lives through a series of personal flashbacks.
We also see a full range of characters - at all levels in the army - and see their private and semi-private battles with authority. Often the authority in question is an over-demanding or idiotic superior; just as often it is an insolant, stubborn inferior. It is this interplay between the ranks that makes this novel stand out.
The book seems long, but it really is a page turner up with the best of them. At the end of it, you'll be able to say you really enjoyed a work of great fiction.

I've read this masterpiece last summer. The book still rings fresh in my mind, although it has been a little more than a year since I've read it.
The book is simply the best American masterpiece on war written in the latter half of the 20th Century. The book ultimately rankles in its frustration and later disenchantment with the triumph of totalitarianism embodied in an institution that was the Army. That Lt. Hearn is ultimmately murdered by the sadistic Sgt. Croft and aloof Gen. Cummings, echoes the hopelessnness and frustration that Master Mailer--one of America's literary gods--felt with the Left.
Many writers since have tried to emulate his gritty and cutting prose without much success. The book not only brilliantly gives the realistic feel for ground combat at a small unit level, but effectively shows how the macro-view (grand strategy)-- as presented by Gen. Cummings and his staff--affects the I & R (Intelligence & Reconnaissance) Platoon. But more importantly, the recon mission of the platoon serves as a fable of struggle between two contending ideologies, and between Man and Nature. I've yet to see one book--save CATCH-22--that has succesfully juggled these aforementioned elements. It is simply splendid.

Earlier this year I decided to improve the quality of the books I was reading - or, at least, to mix more "good" books in with the easy reading. The Naked and the Dead was the first of these - and what a good choice it was.
Norman Mailer writes with a clarity that is often missing from other good novelists. He develops very strong characters and focusses closely on the interactions between them and their environment. Don't expect an action-packed story: The tales here are the soldier's lives and the lack of action is part of war which seems to be very realistically reconstructed.
The story, for what it's worth, follows a band of recon soldiers on an island in the Pacific during World War II. The book opens with the initial assault on the Japanese-held island; it finishes with the quick and anti-climatic (deliberately so) mopping up of the last troups. In between we follow the soldiers' progress through the jungle, go with them on a desperate recon. mission, and learn about their lives through a series of personal flashbacks.
We also see a full range of characters - at all levels in the army - and see their private and semi-private battles with authority. Often the authority in question is an over-demanding or idiotic superior; just as often it is an insolant, stubborn inferior. It is this interplay between the ranks that makes this novel stand out.
The book seems long, but it really is a page turner up with the best of them. At the end of it, you'll be able to say you really enjoyed a work of great fiction.

This book is mostly about the interior thoughts resulting from exterior forces(the war, relatives back home, other soldiers). It is a wonderfully in depth study of character.
In the end the characters show us that each of us is in some way naked and vulnerable to the world. Those that don't believe it are dead.
This is a prime example of a book that should never be made into a movie because there is no way to portray such complex mental processes on film.

by reflecting the tension everyone in it is under while they prepare and prepare and wait and wait for something to happen? The agony of anticipation and the unknown. Then the suddeness of what does happen. Norman Mailer does this very well and I especially liked that there were no answers to anything - just life in a brutal situation. And it goes on....

Don't misunderstand me, for me it was a page turner. I thought it was great.

If ever anyone has captured the monotony of military service, it is Norman Mailer. The Naked and the Dead brought back memories of the "hurry up and wait" and idle sitting around and waiting for something to happen that I experienced in the Army. Then when something finally does happen, the diversion is unexpected and short-lived.
While this book seemed to creep along at a snail's pace, I was mysteriously drawn to keep going. I wanted to find out what was going to happen. Who was going to live and who was going to die.
The Time Machine was an excellent way to help the reader understand the men in the platoon. One moment you are watching the action from a discreet distance and then suddenly you are thrust into the head of one of the soldiers and reliving his past.
This book would not be everyone's cup of tea. War is not a pleasant subject. These guys are not politically correct and their attitude toward women is not all that complimentary. But if you wish to visit an era in our history quite unlike that of today, by all means take the journey.

I bought the book based on size and reputation. I read nothing from Mailer prior to this book, and I needed something to occupy several hours of travel in Europe. Over 800 pages of prose would do the trick.
I ended up reading the book in the hotel, four hours at a stretch. I was fascinated by it, particularly in seeing so many familiar literary devices originate with this novel. The backstories of the characters were excellent, and I found it to be a compact way of developing the characters and explaining their motivations.
What I particularly liked was the writing style, and the Lieutenant-General struggle was perhaps the real soul of the book. The self-awareness of each competitor, and the misconception of what each was trying to accomplish, was a microcosm of each struggle throughout the book. Every point of conflict was sharply defined through a misunderstanding, a lack of communication, a little misstep here or there, compounding to some surprising and gut wrenching conclusions.
Because the ending was frustrating to me, I found it completely believable and realistic. I can see someone stumbling into a victory; I can see our hero dying due to betrayal; and I can see the flawed, vaguely malignant leader emerge largely unscathed from the chaos.
...I can understand the reservations of some reviewers, but only in an abstract, "right to your opinion" sort of way. For me, this was a 4.5 on a 5-star scale. The only reservation was the self-censoring of certain words and phrases to pass editorial review, something I feel should not be an author's consideration when writing. I can forgive this weakness in a 25 year old Norman Mailer, however. He's certainly earned it.

Mailer has a great piece of work here, especially considering it was his first novel. The characters are interesting and this is what drives the book. Norman is able to create very vivid and realistic scences. At times, the words just become pure gold. However, his inexperience does show a small number of times. There are momoments that it becomes tedious abd repetitive. All in all though this is still a great book and i recommed it.

I picked up an old paperback edition of this book and couldn't put it down. An amazing accomplishment for a 25-year-old writer, even though Mailer's style is a mixed bag, and he had to use "fug" as a euphemism for that other so-common word. Reminds one of Hemingway, but also in its gritty realism of Saving Private Ryan.

Few figures in modern literature are as under accomplished and overrated as the execrable Norman Mailer, who has basically skated for 50 years on the reputation of this semi autobiographical novel. So what's interesting is to realize how many of his later faults were presaged here, in this bloated, unpleasant, faux macho, homoerotic, self-indulgent mess of a book. The Naked and the Dead is little more than war viewed through the eyes of one sexually conflicted Jewish man, who didn't enjoy his wartime service much. The opposite of a universal tale, it's sort of Hemingway with anti-Semitism thrown into the mix. It is necessarily an anti-War novel, because any time you shrink a human exercise down to a sufficiently limited scope, it appears senseless. But, even, or especially, with it's totally Mailercentric view of the War, it opens up several interesting avenues for discussion.
The first, and most general, point is that the very narrowness of the view presented in the novel is symptomatic of the worst tendencies of modern literature. It is of course the ultimate in 20th Century Romantic Relativistic Freudian Individualism to view WWII through the prism of your own experiences; as if the war was only important because of what you went through. But it is also fundamentally dishonest; great events matter because they are huge and affect the many, not because they affect Norman Mailer. There is nothing in the book about why the men are fighting or why the island is important. The war is simply Mailer's vehicle for getting this group of men together and deploring their interactions. It could be set in virtually any male milieu.
By shrinking the experience of WWII down to the daily tedium that this platoon faces, the War inevitably seems senseless, brutal and soul deadening. The enemy after all remains distant, mysterious, dare one say--inscrutable. The real enemies that the men face, as far as Mailer is concerned, are the racism, anti-Semitism and mere inhumanity of fellow soldiers and the arbitrary seeming orders of superiors. But if we were to pull the camera angle back, we would see that these men are engaged in what virtually every thinking human would consider to be a just war. The event is actually defined by the aims of the war, not by the unpleasantness of GI life. It is only by holding such a tight focus on the unit that Mailer can portray the War as senseless. Of course, in this narrow a focus all war appears senseless. Men fight and die for patches of earth or unnamed hills, following inane orders, in every war. From the perspective of the dead of Antietam, the Civil War was meaningless. But Mailer is either unwilling or unable to consider the big picture and place the battle in context, for, to do so, would reveal the pettiness of his concerns.
The second point, which flows from this portrayal and from the near universal judgment that this was the best novel about the War, is that it is mere generational bigotry that has allowed us to glorify the WWII generation and vilify the Viet Nam generation. ...
My generation was lucky, I guess. We never had a war of our own (other than the general Cold War) and I doubt that we would have produced a literature that was any more edifying. But I think it's high time that we bring the hammer down on the chest beating and self congratulations of the WWII generation. As books like The Naked and the Dead reveal, they too were a "me generation". It is little wonder that their children were even worse.
GRADE: D

After marching through 721 pages of Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" I feel compelled to comment. First, the Good. I agree with many reviews that marveled at Mailer's descriptive detail, complex world view and fully dimensional characters (though they are distasteful characterizations). Now, the bad. I waded and waded (and waded) through page after page of highly detailed marching and moaning hoping for an amazing payoff to the story. Sorry soldiers, this march leads to nowhere. I read a review that referred to this novel as having been written in a reporter's style. Through most of my reading I completely disagreed. The facts only reporter's style didn't jibe with the complex portraits Mailer conceived. Nevertheless, at the end I understood the "reporter" comment. Journalism not being a dramatic form doesn't rely on compelling plotting. So too is the case with this novel. "The Naked and the Dead" has a lot of marching, character development but ultimately DISSAPPOINTING PLOTTING. Finally the ugly. The 50th Anniversary edition boasts a new introduction by Norman Mailer himself. At less than two pages the introduction comes off as merely tossed off if not written by somebody clearly irritated by the task.
One other note. Although Mailer's characters were fully dimensional, I found them to be a pretty distasteful bunch. In fact, I was hoping that most, if not all, of them would be killed by the end. I kept thinking that the Japanese had to be less dispicable than this lot. Mailer clearly has a low opinion of men and mankind in general. I don't buy it. I'm sure our army in WWII had some bad eggs but not the whole carton.

this book has potential but fails to deliver the goods. too much time is invested for the pay off. i hated the time machine sequences they were a total waste of time, eventually i just skiped them to help get the book over. this is a shame because there were some very good parts to the book a good editor could have improved it by trimming a few hundred pages.

Mailer delves deep into the heart of every soldier in a small platoon on an island during world war II, he spares no guts or grittiness, which is why I like this book so much, it is honest. And it portrays a side of the Armed Forces which I would have never seen having not read this book. It is a book I love I rank it up there with The Fountainhead, 1984, and Clockwork Orange. If anyone has any information on this book(chapter reviews, book reviews etc. I'd love to see them)

Mailer is a genuine original. The book is brutal, agonising and astonishingly thoughtful. Its better than The Thin Red Line. And it probably is one of the best novels to come out of the war, any war. READ IT.......NOW.

An awesome epic. 'The Naked and the Dead', along with Nicholas Monsarrat's 'The Cruel Sea' form the magnificent twin peaks of World War II fiction. Impressed by the movie 'Platoon'? Norman Mailer's classic overwhelms even that cinematic experience.