372
PARTISAN REVIEW
realism, any more than it was by arbitrary choice that he wrote
3.8
a realist in the first place. Far from merely being a technique selected
for its suitability to the author's talents, the realism of
The Naked
and the Dead
is in itself an expression of his response to a certain
structure of experience. The world of
The Naked and the Dead
is
one in which a varied group of clearly defined individuals are pitted
in a very direct and simple way against two allied enemies-the army
and nature. Nature brings violent storms and intolerable heat, it pro–
vides jungles to be crossed and mountains to be climbed, and it also
sets limits to the physical strength of the men exposed to its rigors.
The army, on the other hand, is a society, tightly organized, effi–
ciently ruled, and almost as confident of its power as nature itself.
From the point of view of the individual, driven by a hunger for ab–
solute freedom, hardly any distinction can be drawn between them.
Just as nature threatens him with pain and fear and death, so the
army threatens him with moral destruction, aiming finally to destroy
his will altogether and reduce him to a mere servant of its own ends.
To keep himself alive physically, he must be strong, resourceful, and
determined; to keep himself alive spiritually, he must have enormous
reserves of inner resistance.
This was an ideal situation for a writer with Mailer's natural
gift of observation. Something palpable was there to describe and he
described it brilliantly, down to the last quiver of a particular muscle
in a man's thigh as he was climbing the face of a rock, down to the
last twitch of temptation as he was saying no to an offer of promo–
tion. The availability of a great literary tradition-a tradition which
had itself developed out of just such situations
in
an age when society
seemed as solid and substantial and unshakable as the army is
in
The Naked and the Dead-certainly
helps to explain how it came
about that a first novel by a young man of twenty-five should have
exhibited mastery of so high an order. But there is more to the suc–
cess of the best passages in
The Naked and the Dead
than a happy
confrontation of talent, circumstance, and tradition. The rainstorm
that descends on Anopopei shortly after the division has landed; the
episode in which the platoon drags four huge guns through the muddy
jungle in the black of night; the climb up Mt. Anaka-all these are
so good and so moving because they are written by someone who in
the deepest reaches of his being believes that the world is made up
exclusively of stone walls and that life consists
in
a perpetual crash-
