Biopolitics In The Naked And The Dead

The Naked and the Dead is a masterpiece by American writer Norman Mailer,which mainly tells the story of the fighting between the American and Japanese armies on Annopope Island.The novel is narrated in two threads,one is the upper officers mainly Cummings and Hearn,and the other is the bottom soldiers represented by the reconnaissance platoon,the two clues are intertwined,exposing the totalitarian autocracy within the US military.This paper uses The Naked and the Dead as the research object,and uses Foucault and Agamben’s biopolitical theory to explain the text.In the introduction part of the paper,it mainly introduces the life and works of the writer,briefly sorts out the development of American war novels,and believes that The Naked and the Dead inherits the anti-war tradition of the United States since World War II.The main body of the paper is divided into three parts.In the first part,the island of Annopopé,the site of the battle,is taken as the object of study and interpreted on the basis of Agamben’s concept of the "state of exception" and Foucault’s "discipline",showing that The island of Annopopé is not only a space for the production of power but also a space for the practice of power.The soldiers on Annopope are not only subjected to physical torture,but are also constantly domesticated mentally,becoming ’tamed bodies’.The second part,which analyzes the main characters in the novel,shows the intervention of power in life.From the perspective of "Bare life","Evil of mediocrity" and liberalism,it reveals the lonely,dirty,barbaric and ephemeral state of existence of soldiers,thus showing the destruction and destruction of human nature by totalitarianism.The third part analyzes the content of the novel that confronts and dissolves totalitarianism.The battle on Annopope Island put the soldiers in an abnormal environment,where they confronted the sovereign through alcohol and sex,dissolving their own war machine attributes and gaining a sense of subjectivity.At the same time,the author shows through the natural elements in the novel and the spiritual power in Goldstein that although totalitarianism is powerful and terrifying,the emotions and cognition in human nature cannot be completely obscured,and natural life cannot be disciplined.The conclusion is that The Naked and the Dead reveals the autocracy and oppression within the US military and the tragic situation of the soldiers at the bottom,and then reflects and criticizes the fascist ideology in the United States.Through the role of Goldstein,Mailer reveals how to settle in the world of "devices".