I Wrote this Naked!

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General Cummings, because he was a general; Lt. Hearn, who was Cummings' foil, and engages in a series of Important discussions with the general; and Sgt. Of the three, only Croft is memorable.

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He is as unlikable as the rest; even more so. Yet his awfulness at least elevates him to an over-the-top villain. For instance, in one unforgettable scene, Croft gives a Japanese prisoner a cigarette, then blows him away: Croft felt his head pulsing with an intense excitement. There were tears in the prisoner's eyes again, and Croft looked at them dispassionately. He gazed once about the little draw, and watched a fly crawl over the mouth of one of the corpses. The prisoner had taken a deep puff and was leaning back now against the trunk of the tree.

His eyes had closed, and for the first time there was a dreamy expression on his face. Croft felt a bitter tension work itself into his throat and leave his mouth dry and bitter and demanding. His mind had been entirely empty until now, but abruptly he brought up his rifle and pointed it at the prisoner's head The prisoner did not have time to change his expression before the shot crashed into his skull.

He slumped forward, and then rolled on his side. He was still smiling but looked silly now. The reality of war is that it's mostly boring. It doesn't work in a novel. Your English teacher was right: In a war novel, that generally means a battle of some sorts I mean, a war novel without a war is like a porno consisting solely of dialogue. There is a brief skirmish at the river, which is really sort of distracting, owing to Mailer's gross over use of onomatopoeia. For several pages, my copy of The Naked and the Dead looked like an old Batman cartoon.

I just made that last one up. They are sent around to the back of the island and told to gather intelligence on the Japanese. They run into trouble. One man is killed and another wounded. The squad splits, half the men taking the wounded man back, the other half plunging forward. Suddenly, there is conflict, there is forward progress After hundreds of pages of struggle and toil, the platoon is sent running after it stumbles into a bee hive. Perhaps if I had known from the outset that this was satire Anyway, pages in, I was less than amused.

I felt like Mailer was laughing on me; like he'd pulled a fast one. Ha ha, the jokes on you. The denouement is all black comedy, with the finale focusing on Major Dalleson's attempt to get a Betty Grable pinup for a map-reading course. The ending pissed me off. Apparently, this was self-imposed censorship, suggested by the publishers. I guess this shocks me, considering that we'd just finished incinerating , Japanese women and children in Tokyo, then topped that by shadow-blasting , more with nuclear weapons.

Yet the delicate American sensitivity could not tolerate a profanity alluding to the act of lovemaking? Thanks for the sexual hangups, Puritans! I was further annoyed with Mailer's literary affectations, notably "The Time Machine" and the "Chorus. Some of them were okay, especially Croft's. Most of them, however, do little to illuminate the characters. Moreover, they are often painfully hard to read, since they are written in the idiom of the stunted character at the center of the flashback.

The Chorus sections are just plain showing off. They are written like a play, dialogue only, and touch on a certain topic chosen by Mailer, such as what the soldiers are going to do when they get home. There are some beautiful passages in the book, and some wonderfully memorably scenes. There are two deaths, for instance, that really stuck in my mind. Funnily, these were scenes that were underwritten when compared with the rest of the book.

They were short, elegant, haunting. Mostly, though, the The Naked and the Dead serves to demonstrate what happens when you write a war novel about nothing. Jun 03, Rob rated it really liked it.


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This is a book about America. Its no secret that Tolstoy is Mailer's favorite author, and reading this book right after reading War and Peace gave me a good perspective on everything defined in this book. It captures a uniquely American milieu of characters at a time when a uniquely american sence of Idenity and patriotism was being forged. It spoke of the physical and intellectual challenges of various backgrounds through about a dozen main characters with learned empathy. And in the end and th This is a book about America. And in the end and throughout you get to glimpse all the indelible cruelity of reality as would be expected by for forboding title.

The book is also brashly written by a novice. Mailer himself will admit his syntax tends towards the simplistic, which lends the book a 'page-turning,' 'thiller' characteristic that actually aides the reading experience, possibly to the chagrin or the more established lit snobs. What does hurt the book is some occasionally akward diction and character development for some of the books figures. The hispanic sergant, for example, who is a capable if not confident soldier, for some reason has an inner monologue that is written in fractured and childlike stream of consciouseness, as if Mailer equated difficulty speaking a English as a second language with stupidity.

The crudeness of the soldier banter also can occasionally ring hollow, especially given liberal use of standin euphenisms for censored swear words. In the end the book is of extreme high quality, readable, illuminating, passionate, and empathic. It is well structured and mostly well written, and in a couple places exremely influencial. I'm tempted to give it five stars, but in the end I think the book maybe wasn't as beautiful and influencial as some of my favorite five star reads. Did anyone else think the writting of Japbait was somewhat oversimplistic?

Who else loved that last line of the book? Aug 09, Jessica marked it as aborted-efforts Shelves: Executioner's Song was one of the best books I've read in the past year -- so good I haven't felt up to reviewing it -- so I had high expectations for The Naked and the Dead. The front-cover blurb from the SF Chronicle speculates that this novel is "perhaps the best book to come out of any war," which really jacked up the ante and got me intrigued.

It's not even a true classic, though it is a good read. The Naked and the Dead was probably a lot more essential before we had access to so many war movies; you can see all the war movie cliches already present, though there isn't a black guy the troops aren't yet integrated, and Jews and Hispanics are the minority characters here. I have to say that I don't think this has aged all that well. You can definitely see why it was a bestseller at the time, and you can also see Mailer was in his early twenties when he wrote this, his first novel.

It's a well-told story, and interesting, but it's pages long. If it were pages or if I cared more or didn't have other options I'd keep going, but I need to get through my post-Proustum depression with something that really makes my toes curl, and this ain't it. Maybe some other time? It is a fun read. One of my favorite things is how all the characters say "fug" all the time, as in "fug you, motherfugger!

View all 14 comments. Jun 02, Josh Moyes rated it did not like it.

The Naked and the Dead

This is the shittiest book I have ever read. Lovecraft, the horror writer from the earlier decades of the 20th century, wrote very little dialogue in his stories because he was aware that he wrote bad dialogue. He knew that his forte was the description and action of his stories and so for the most part he stuck to that and wrote some very satisfying creepy stories.

By contrast, Norman Mailer wrote a great deal of dialogue in the "Naked and the Dead". He didn't wri This is the shittiest book I have ever read.

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He didn't write it because it was his strong suit. He wrote it because apparently he had no one close to him who was kind enough to say, "Norm, this is garbage. You need to rewrite this. He really could have used a friend who told him, "Really, man, this whole book is a steaming pile of poop.

When the stench is gone you'll feel much cleaner. Admittedly, not all of it has been great see: And some of it has been amazing. Some of it brought tears to my eyes and other stuff made me so angry I wanted to run over a convent of nuns. And in all this reading, of so many different types of fiction, I have never, and I say this with no equivocation or uncertainty, read anything as shitty as "The Naked and the Dead". I gave it one star because I couldn't figure out a way to give it a negative number of stars.

As I alluded, the dialogue was horrible.


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But also incredibly condescending. Most characters in the book were written in overwrought colloquialism that made them all seem retarded. None of the characters in the story had a any redeeming qualities, or, b anything that made them interesting. Every emotion in the book was set in as clumsy a manner as I've ever read. I've seen better from high school sophomores. Everything the characters said, and every thought they had Mailer made sure to share everything everybody thought for the duration of the book was an incessant bitch-fest: Combine all this with the fact that nobody, nobody at all, succeeded in doing a single thing they set out to do over the course of pages.

Whether it was leading a platoon on patrol, standing up to the crazy sergeant, or carrying a body back to camp, or any of the score of other things characters in the book "tried" to do, everybody failed and the entire point of everything they attemted was to give the reader the opportunity to listen to their fucking whining about it. Nothing happens in the first ! Well, okay, there was some bitching. And this perverse tension as the latently homosexual general plays dominance games with his lieutenant aid. And one character's clap won't go away.

But aside from that, there is a page lull at the beginning that brings into question my own sanity for finishing commitment, baby, commitment. So after a "dry beginning" that is longer than most novels, the platoon goes on its big mission.

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So they look at the sunset and they go on their mission and not a great deal happens there either and then the book is over. I read this book because Norman Mailer is one of the most acclaimed authors in the American canon. I wanted to see what sort of achievement his breakthrough novel at the tender age of 24 might be.

I expected "Saving Private Ryan". What I got was an insufferably boring novel. I might burn it. I sure wish Norman Mailer had. Your time would be better spent reading Archie comic books. This is an amazing book considering it was the author's first published novel. All the more amazing considering Mailer was something like 20 years old when he wrote it. I picked it up after reading somewhere that Mailer actually joined the military during WWII in order to gain some life experience so he could write a book. I really enjoyed Mailer's writing style. It was vivid, alive and gritty.

Mailer describes the jungle in perfect detail. You can almost feel yourself being smothered by the den This is an amazing book considering it was the author's first published novel. You can almost feel yourself being smothered by the dense foliage and overpowering humidity. Add to this the atmosphere of fear and anxiety that Mailer so deftly creates and you've got a great war novel.

Some of the flashbacks can become a little drawn out and at times it is a little hard to keep track of who's who due to the large number of characters. I love the fact that there is no hero or character who can be seen as the good guy. Mailer exposes each characters hang ups and dysfunctions and simply shows how each functions under the stress of combat and military life in general.

I can see why this book was so controversial when it came out in the 50's cussing, graphic violence, sexuality, homo-eroticism, etc. This must have been a wake up call for a lot of people who were used to the sanitized John Wayne style stories of heroism and clear cut moral divides. Jul 30, Jack rated it liked it. Probably the best war epic in the "from here to eternity" vein I've read. And all the more astonishing because mailer seems to have started that style - at least in America; I've not read Tolstoy.

And then even moreso because Mailer was only 24 when it came out. Definitely a spectacular first novel. The problem is that it also confirmed for me that I'm just not all that into the war epic in the "from here to eternity" style. I admire Mailer's plot and character development on principle, and there Probably the best war epic in the "from here to eternity" vein I've read. I admire Mailer's plot and character development on principle, and there are some brilliantly written passages.

But the structure just doesn't click for me. I also thought the characters, while portrayed well, often fell into stereotypes. The greatest touch getting at their humanity is how equitable is the time Mailer gives them. Deaths are not foreshadowed, nor are they parts of an arc.

It's a war, and people often die without dramatic music to prepare the audience for what's coming. Dec 21, Kip rated it really liked it. Less a war novel and more a rumination on class and military structure, Norman Mailer's World War II book is a hard-edged "Catch 22" that dispenses with satire and revels in cynicism.

Unlike Joseph Heller's masterwork, perhaps the definitive WWII book in close contention with Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," The Naked and the Dead contains no character we may call completely sympathetic, and is perhaps the only war novel out there that lacks a strict protagonist. The main character in The Naked Less a war novel and more a rumination on class and military structure, Norman Mailer's World War II book is a hard-edged "Catch 22" that dispenses with satire and revels in cynicism.

Mailer invents the island of Anopopei to serve as a backdrop for his multi-character study. There's enough of a war plot here to keep the casual reader entertained; but it's clear from the outset this is not Mailer's purpose in writing. A sharp criticism of the military's structure, and what it does to the minds of men ensconced in mortal combat, becomes quickly apparent, and his characters are less fully realized individuals though he'll give you a back story for each, conveniently around the time the reader begins to hate them or they are killed than stand-ins for ideas.

The hard-nosed, straight-laced General Cummings cares more for his personal standing than the men he must order into battle; his foil, Lieutenant Hearn, is a ne'er-do-well Ivy League boy whose idealism gets him thrown into danger.

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The men of the recon platoon harbor their own discriminations and a grating chauvinism that can make passages of the book difficult to read for modern audiences. Still, Mailer gets his hard-headed point across in gripping fashion, making you care just enough about the cannon fodder who are just as capable of pathos as they are of committing unspeakably violent and terrible acts. Mailer also writes with the breathless, straightforward prose you would expect from a journalist yet paints a convincing picture of his characters and their surroundings.

Casual readers will balk at the attention to military detail, a convention neither Heller nor Vonnegut thought necessary to make their points and one that can bloat Mailer's tale at times. Still, this work deserves to be read in that same post-military-industrial-complex vein, and is a worthwhile read for the sociologists and anthropologists out there as well.

View all 15 comments. Sep 29, Nandakishore Varma rated it really liked it Shelves: I read this long, long ago and none of the story or characters have stayed with me. What is left is an impression of a war so gritty and dirty that one feels disgusted I remember one character having some sort of kidney problem, with attendant stomach-ache and blood in urine - for me, this has become the defining image of war.

Also, the last sentence - "Hot dog! I think Mailer achieved what he intended, at least with me. I'm bored and this is slow going so I'm giving up in total frustration. It's not a bad book but it would take me way longer to finish than I can possibly bear.

May 12, Richard rated it really liked it. This is one of the great war novels from World War II. Norman Mailer studied aeronautical engineering at Harvard, but he became interested in writing, having his first story published at age He was drafted after he graduated from college in He served in the Pacific with the United States Army, where he obtained the knowledge and experience to write about soldiers in combat.

The Naked and the Dead was published when Mailer was It instantly became a huge success, spending 62 weeks on This is one of the great war novels from World War II. Mailer's reputation as a novelist was established by this book, which would be the first of a long line of best-selling war novels from the likes of other war veterans, including James Jones, Leon Uris, Herman Wouk and others.

Mailer would go on to become a hugely famous, if combative American author. He would have more than 30 books published before his death at age 84 in , including the receipt of two Pulitzer Prizes. There is plenty of military terminology and methodology but the book is more focused on the psychological development of the main characters as they interact in the situation they are placed into.

Mailer, considered to be an early proponent of narrative fiction, presents a fascinating mix of individuals who all seem to be suffering from some kind of character flaw or other. Mailer throws flashback-style personal histories of the main characters at intervals as the current story unfolds. The one common denominator of all characters is that no one comes out of this story any better than when it began. This is in support of probably the central thesis of Mailer, that war is not just hell; it is psychosis. Some of the guys in the recon platoon include: Minetta, the malingerer, who fakes battle fatigue, only to find out that being the only sane person in a psycho ward is worse than being in combat; Red, the pre-war drifter, who finds out on the island that his health is deteriorating at an alarming rate; Wilson, the philanderer who used to laugh at getting a mild case of venereal disease and finds out before going into action that he is seriously diseased; Roth, the Jew who is not accepted as an equal by anyone on his anti-Semitec crew, who might finally find respect by sharing the platoon's trials on an arduous march, only to be killed in a fall from a cliff.

The enlisted men hate their officers and the officers hate each other. Major Dalleson, the unimaginative S-3 Operations Officer fumbles to find a way to deal with a situation in place of the general, who is away for the day reporting to his superiors, and muddles through a solution that wins the battle against the Japanese, only to find that all recognition and credit for his actions is suppressed in the official battle history. Even the Division General, Cummings, is obsessed that enemies at Higher Headquarters will find cause to use any mistakes against him and stall his career.

Hearn is probably to be considered to be the central character in the story. He starts by working as General Cummings' aide but gets removed from that position when he makes it clear that he can no longer tolerate hearing about the General's fascist world-view. He finds himself reassigned to the recon platoon just when it is assigned to perform a mission to travel behind Japanese lines and find a way for the Army to get its stalled invasion moving again.

This patrol becomes the central element of the book, when these fourteen men go on this most physically grueling and dangerous march. Hearn, and the platoon, find that they must deal with rough terrain, jungle heat, the enemy, and perhaps most fatefully, the nominal leader of the platoon, Sgt.

Croft, to me, is indispensable to the meaning and the progress of the book. His character flaw is that he is a psychopath. He is a highly motivated leader of his men and is the bravest of the group; he is the glue that holds everyone to their tasks when the going gets tough. But he is deranged. He leads his men by fear, and he enjoys killing.

He becomes a seething vessel of rage when the platoon he had been leading is placed under the command of an officer Hearn prior to going on their fugging Mailer's euphemism event -filled reconnaissance, and this will not end pleasantly for Hearn or for the rest of the men. He describes the book in the second person, as a very good effort by an amateur, albeit a passionate, hard-working amateur who had written over a quarter of a million words in college.

He admits to some sloppy writing style in parts, with, to use his description, words that came too easily and the habit of all of the nouns in every sentence holding hands with the nearest adjective. I think he was a little bit self-critical but he was looking at his first big success from the perspective of fifty years of continuing writing success.

He certainly was true when he said the book had immediacy, coming out when everyone was hungry for a "big war novel", and that he delivered with a good, vigorous story that got only better as it unfolded. Dec 04, S. As a young woman I swore I would never read anything by that bastard Norman Mailer. I'd read "The Executioner's Song" and thought it okay but I despised Mailer as if from a personal feminist vendetta.

In fact, I still do. Substitute teacher Rob Anderson is offered a full-time teaching job, but is reluctant to make that long-term commitment. Megan's disapproving father, high-powered businessman Reginald, has invited Megan's successful ex-boyfriend Cody. Rob goes out drinking with his best man, Benny, only to wake up on his wedding day, naked in an elevator in a hotel far from the church. He is arrested for streaking , but when the church bells ring, he is pulled back in time, waking up in the elevator an hour earlier; Rob is in a time loop , reliving this hour.

Desperate to go through with the wedding, Rob gradually adapts to his situation.

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When he learns that no wedding at that church has ever been canceled, he concludes that God has intervened to make it so. Rob develops multiple ways to obtain clothing and travel to the church; gains the trust of a police duo, a biker gang, and singer Brian McKnight ; learns that Cody is planning a hostile takeover of Reginald's company; and has meaningful conversations with his mother, Megan, and Reginald.

He also discovers that Megan's jealous maid of honor Vicky abducted him and put him in the elevator after hiring a prostitute to seduce him; the prostitute only ended up helping Rob with his vows. In the final iteration of the loop, Rob exposes Cody and Vicky, earns Reginald's approval, and marries Megan. He tells her he has accepted the teaching job and wants to have a stable, grounded life with her.