Naked and the Dead, The

Novel by Norman Mailer, 1948

The Naked and the Dead was the first major novel to emerge from World War II and was an immediate critical and financial success. Largely well reviewed in the national press, Norman Mailer's debut novel sold more than 200,000 copies in its first year and spent 63 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, including 11 weeks at the top. Some reviewers, however, found its violence too graphic and its depictions of ordinary soldiers depraved and unrealistic. Many found it obscene. Although Mailer substituted the word fug for the more vivid fuck to make The Naked and the Dead more acceptable to a wider range of readers, the presence of even this variant in a book published in 1948 merely added to its notoriety.

The novel depicts the invasion of a fictional Pacific island, Anopopei, by a regiment of a fictional infantry division. Its commander, Major General Cummings, is a controlling, calculating man who has conceived his campaign as a slow, methodical advance against a dug-in Japanese force. His aide, Lieutenant Hearn, is a somewhat idealistic Harvard graduate and former labor organizer who becomes a sounding board for Cummings's ideas on power, leadership, politics, and the human condition. Officers, he contends, must take privileges beyond those afforded enlisted men to ensure that the soldiers will fear them and thus fight more effectively. Hearn disagrees, but soon finds that the general has made him into his own best example of the effects of that kind of leadership. A parallel plot shows the members of an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon serving on various details including a brief, harrowing stint in combat. The men are a representative cross section of soldiers, among them Southerners, Jews, a Catholic, and a Hispanic, led by an extremely competent but psychopathic killer, Sergeant Croft.

The two plots combine when Cummings relieves Hearn and assigns him to lead the platoon on a patrol around the unoccupied side of the island to gather intelligence to help revive his stalled offensive. This patrol brings out each character's limitations and capabilities as a soldier; a number are killed or wounded. Some of those who survive carry a wounded private, Wilson, to the landing beach, and the latter half of the novel alternately depicts their struggles and those of the patrol. Resentful of Hearn's taking command of his unit, Croft engineers the lieutenant's death, enabling Croft to lead the men up a mountain about which he has become obsessed but which is tangential to the platoon's mission. The patrol ends in failure, the men routed near the mountaintop by a sudden swarm of bees. Meanwhile, in Cummings's absence, Japanese resistance mysteriously collapses, and the campaign ends successfully. Neither Cummings's plans nor the reconnaissance have anything to do with the victory.

Brooklyn-born Mailer graduated from Harvard, where he majored in aeronautical engineering, in June 1943, and was drafted in March 1944. Trained as an artillery surveyor at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he was assigned to the 112th Cavalry, a unit sent to the Philippines in 1945. There he participated in the campaigns on Leyte and Luzon, serving in several capacities, including a series of lengthy intelligence and reconnaissance patrols. This assignment became the basis for much of the novel's action, with both the mountain and the bee swarm incidents having actually occurred. The men in the platoon are drawn from soldiers Mailer met in basic training. The novel takes its title from an earlier Mailer [Page 562]play, based on his very brief stint as an orderly at Mattapan State Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts. Drawing heavily on the example set by John Dos Passos in his U.S.A. trilogy (1930–36), the novel includes “Time Machine” passages that present vignettes of the men's lives before the war.

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