The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer
Summary
An American platoon fights to secure the fictional Pacific island of Anopopei from Japanese forces under General Cummings, an officer who treats the campaign as a personal experiment in imposing order and fear on the men under him. Cummings assigns his ambitious but morally uneasy aide, Lieutenant Hearn, to lead a dangerous reconnaissance patrol partly as punishment for a private grudge between them, and Sergeant Croft, a ruthless and capable soldier who resents Hearn's authority, effectively takes real control of the platoon during the mission. When one soldier, Martinez, lies under pressure about the position of enemy troops, the patrol walks into an ambush that kills Hearn, and Croft, now unquestionably in command, pushes the exhausted survivors toward an unauthorized attempt to climb the imposing Mount Anaka, driven by his own private need to conquer something rather than by any actual military necessity. Soldiers die along the way, Roth falls attempting a jump across a ravine and Wilson dies of an earlier wound the men have struggled to carry him with, and the climb finally collapses when the platoon disturbs a hornets nest and flees in chaos back down the mountain. They straggle back to the beach only to learn that the island campaign has already ended without them, decided elsewhere by luck and Japanese supply failures rather than by anything Cummings's careful strategy or Croft's brutal will actually accomplished.
Mailer alternates the platoon's story with Time Machine interludes, brief flashback chapters giving each soldier's civilian life before the war, so that men who exist on the island mainly as targets and casualties become, briefly, fully realized people with histories of their own. It reads with real narrative drive despite its length and density of detail, propelled by the platoon's exhaustion and Croft's obsession, though some readers find the accumulation of documentary detail, weapons, terrain, army procedure, slows the momentum in its middle stretches.
Mailer was twenty five and had served with the 112th Cavalry Regiment in the Philippines campaign, first on reconnaissance patrols and then, after the war ended, as a cook, when Rinehart published his debut novel in 1948, drawing directly on his own limited combat experience for a book far more violent than what he had actually witnessed himself.
Historical Context & Significance
Mailer, an American citizen, was eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when The Naked and the Dead appeared in 1948, but the 1949 prize went to James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor instead, a more restrained novel of a stateside air base that many later readers have found far less memorable than Mailer's.
The novel was an immediate sensation, selling 200,000 copies in its first three months and staying on The New York Times bestseller list for sixty two weeks. George Orwell, reviewing it in 1949, called it awfully good, the best war book of the last war yet, and the publisher Bennett Cerf named it one of only three worthwhile novels published that year, though the Times Literary Supplement complained the book grew increasingly unreadable under the weight of Mailer's own exhaustive detail, and Gore Vidal later dismissed it as a fake built from characters borrowed from other novels rather than lived experience. It remains ranked among the Modern Library's hundred best English language novels of the twentieth century.