War and the individual in Norman Mailer's the naked and the dead

Abstract EN

The paper casts light on the Norman Mailer’s depiction of the individual experience and a view of behaviours and attitudes of man within the framework of the military experience in his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (١٩٤٨).

Mailer tackles these topics in the depiction of the reconnaissance of the American platoon on the Japanese held-island Anopopei in the Second World War (١٩٣٩-٤٥).

In addition to that, the novelist presents different issues as totalitarianism, systemization, the conflict of man and machine and the fragmented society structure of America.

Mailers readers might see the novel as pessimistic ; nonetheless, the novelist believes that hope lies in man’s strife against the mechanistic forces and struggle for a better world. “A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined ; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.” Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers.