War Novels: "The Naked and the Dead"

 

by Pa Rock

Reader

Journalist, dramatist, filmmaker, and novelist (and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize) Norman Mailer served in World War II as a cook in an American combat unit that was actively trying to retake the Philippine Islands from the Japanese.   It was jungle fighting under very brutal conditions.  During the time that he served with that unit, Mailer made notes on a hundred or more of the men with whom he served, and he later used those notes and his personal recollections of what it was like to fight and survive in the jungle to write his fictional epic account of a unit fighting its way across the islands of the Pacific.
 
Modern Library published a list of the best one hundred English-language novels of the twentieth century, and “The Naked and the Dead” was fifty-first on that list.
 
I read this novel somewhere around forty years ago, and while it does tell a gripping tale of jungle warfare, it is not something that I would tackle again. Mailer, for the uninitiated – like I was – requires a great deal of concentration and effort on the part of the reader.  He knows his craft, a fact that he makes clear, especially in this novel, with long, meandering sentences that sometimes take up entire paragraphs, and paragraphs that can cover multiple pages – and all of that in fine print.   While I like to read and have always been an avid page-turner, the spell of the work gets broken by having to go back and reread sections in order to decipher what the author was trying to communicate.
 
There were more than a few times while reading this war novel that I felt as though I was hacking my own way through a jungle with a dull machete.
 
But for those who would like to have a feel for what it was like to be fighting across the island jungles of the Pacific during the Second World War, this novel draws upon actual people, places them in settings faithfully recalled by the author, and inflicts unromanticized horrors of war upon them.    “The Naked and the Dead” presents war in the jungle as it really was and undoubtedly still is:    tense, dangerous, sweaty, ugly, and very, very real.  The war of Norman Mailer’s retelling certainly had the feel of what the experience must have been for himself and those with whom her served.
 
Mailer’s novel of World War II is a good literary vehicle for bringing the Pacific portion of that war to contemporary students of history, but, for me at least, one reading was plenty.    It took me there, and I was able to feel the war on a very personal level, but the way the story was told was, at times, too difficult to fully comprehend - just as war is.