NORMAN MAILER
373
ing of the head against them. It is as though the war provided
Mailer with a never-ending succession of examples that confirmed
everything he had ever felt or thought about human existence, and
one can almost detect the relish with which he piled up the evidence
in scene after astonishing scene.
The Naked and the Dead,
however, cannot simply be read as an
expression of Mailer's feelings about life in general; it also attempts
to make certain specific statements about World War II, the Ameri–
can army, and the character of American society. In 1948 Mailer–
who was shortly to become a leading figure in Henry Wallace's cam–
paign for the Presidency-subscribed to the notion that our postwar
difficulties with Russia were the sole responsibility of American capi–
talism. We had gone to war against Hitler not because the American
ruling class was anti-fascist, but because Hitler had shown himself
unwilling to play the capitalist game according to the rules, and the
next step was to dispose of Russia, the only remaining obstacle on
the road to total power. World War II, then, was the first phase of
a more ambitious operation, while the army had been used as a
laboratory of fascism, a preview of the kind of society that the
American ruling class was preparing for the future. These ideas are
brought into
The Naked and the Dead
in various ways. Some of them
emerge from the long discussions between General Cummings (the
commander of the division that has invaded the island of Anopopei)
and
his
young aide Lt. Hearn (a rich midwesterner whose political
sympathies are with the Left and whom Cummings is trying to con–
vert to his own special brand of fascism). Another channel is sup–
plied by the "Time Machine" flashbacks, which are there partly in
order to demonstrate Mailer's contention that American society is
essentially a disguised and inchoate form of the army. But it is in the
main line of the plot that the politics of the novel are most heavily
emphasized. The scheme of
The Naked and the Dead
is to follow
a single campaign from the preparations for invasion to the mopping–
up operation, and the technique is to shift back and forth between
command headquarters and one small platoon in the division. This
enables Mailer to observe the campaign both through the eyes of
the man who is running it and in terms of the day-to-day fortunes
of those who are affected in the most immediate way by his every
move. The experience of the enlisted men serves throughout as an
ironic commentary on the general's behavior, but the irony be-
