The Naked and the Dead

Mailer builds the platoon as a cross-section of American class and ethnic resentment — a Boston Brahmin lieutenant, a Texas oil heir, a Jewish intellectual, a Mexican-American, a Southern anti-Semite — and lets the real war be the one they wage on each other, which Mailer clearly regards as more revealing of America than anything happening against the Japanese. General Cummings and his aide, Lieutenant Hearn, spend their scenes together in extended philosophical duels about power: Cummings argues, with real conviction, that history is authored by men willing to impose their will without sentiment, a proto-fascist theory of command he's applying to the campaign in real time. Hearn, appalled and fascinated in equal measure, becomes the novel's liberal conscience, and his failure to effectively resist Cummings' worldview is as damning as anything the enlisted men do to each other.

Sergeant Croft is the novel's id, a man who has replaced every other motive with pure will-to-dominate, and his fixation on personally conquering Mount Anaka — a goal with no military value whatsoever — makes him Cummings' unacknowledged double: the theory of command stripped of its intellectual justification and revealed as simple sadism. Mailer's structural device, the interspersed 'Time Machine' biographical interludes for each soldier (lifted straight from Dos Passos), keeps insisting that none of these men arrived in the jungle as blank slates — the war just gives their prewar American selves, class hatreds and family wounds included, a battlefield to finish playing out on.

Mailer served in the Pacific as an infantryman and clerk-typist with the 112th Cavalry in the Philippines, saw limited combat, and started drafting this novel almost immediately after his 1946 discharge, publishing it in 1948 at twenty-five to enormous acclaim and sales that made him instantly, and permanently, a public literary figure — a level of fame he'd spend the rest of his career alternately chasing and resenting. The novel's naturalist pedigree is deliberate: Mailer was reading Dos Passos and Tolstoy while writing it, and the book's ambition to render an entire social order through one military campaign owes more to War and Peace than to any combat memoir. Critics have long noted the irony that Mailer, later famous for cultivating his own outsized macho persona, wrote his debut as an anatomy of exactly that kind of domination-hungry masculinity, without ever quite deciding whether he was diagnosing it or half in love with it.