Conflicts In The Naked And The Dead

Norman Mailer is regaded as one of the most politically engaged writers to have emerged in the United States after the Second World War. His first novel, The naked and the Dead tells a story that takes place on Anopopei during World War II, a fictious island controlled by the Japanese.The novel seemingly a war novel, in fact, is a political one, in the portrayal of the conflicts among army men Mailer prophesied the increasing totalitarianism of the post-war US political system.The novel also concerns the personal development of the men in a single platoon. It reflects with remarkable vividness the horrible, nightmarish quality of war, and the psychology or even the psychopathy of those army men( that is the struggle between the beast and the seer) in the confrontation with the fear and death.This thesis consists of introduction, conclusion and three chapters between them. Chapter one makes a study of the main characters, in the struggle between Hearn, the General Cummings and the similarly drawn Sergeant Croft. This chapter also study the military bureaucracy, a version of the totalitarianism which Mailer saw as already widespread throughout American society.Chapter two is an attempt to emphasize the"disharmony"in each character. When Cummings and Croft suffer defeats comparable to those of Hearn and Valsen, it can be seen that Mailer rejects a crude contrast between good and evil, he also dramatizies the conflict between the beast and the seer in man.Chapter three discusses the conflicts between humanbeing and nature. Mailer set the novel on the fictional island of Anopopei in the Philippines, which makes the soldiers face a lot of difficulties such as jungle, the hotness, the storm, and even the terrian of the land. Lives of the soldiers are in danger when they were on this island. Croft being defeated by the mountain shows the rule of nature can never be controlled by humanbeing.