Norman Mailer (1923-2007), the combative, controversial and often outspoken novelist who loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer, is one of the most important unavoidable American writers in the year after world war two. In his long and distinguished career, Norman Mailer published about 40 books, including 8 certifiable novels, 5 new journalistic political, technological and sports reportage, 4 nonfiction novels or “novel biographies”.
The Naked and the Dead is a 1948 novel by Norman Mailer. It was based on his experiences with the 112th Cavalry Regiment during the Philippines Campaign in World War II. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Naked and the Dead 51st on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The Naked and the Dead was Mailer's first published novel and is still his top ranked novel by sales; it established his reputation as a novelist and got international recognition.本文来自优/文(论+文?网，毕业论文 www.youerw.com
This story is set on an island in the South Pacific where the American Army under General Cummings is trying to drive out the Japanese. The Naked and the Dead focuses on a single reconnaissance platoon. The novel is split between alternating chapters that depict ongoing action on the island and retrospective chapters that focus on a particular character's personality and past.
1.2 Literature Review
The novel has been studied, analyzed, dissected, and discussed from every imaginable critical perspective, yet it remains unexhausted. During the research, the author checked abundant critical stuff on the novel. More than fifteen critical books and several biographical studies of Mailer have been published.
Ihab Hassan is an American literary theorist. Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence is one of the most persuasive studies of The Naked and the Dead. He said “Hearn is an ironist and scapegoat who both links and oppose the Faustian Cummings, with his demonic chess-board approach to war, and his earthly double, Croft, whose power lust is primitive, almost feral”. (1961:130)
Nigel Leigh’s(1990) Radical fictions and the novels of Norman Mailer also says in the study on Mailer that the novel shows us the dilemma about the nature and meaning of power in which Marxist-influenced structural values suppress a content that hints at contrary epistemologies incompatible with the novel’s prescribe leftism.
Jean Radford’s (1975) Norman Mailer: a critical study argues that Mailer's view of human nature, which moves from the somewhat determinist perspective of The Naked and the Dead to a more existentialist view of man as a “collection of possibilities” in his middle and later works.
In China, there are also many critical articles about this novel. Dou Qin lan’s (2007) Existentialism Embodied in The Naked and the Dead talks about the social phenomena in this novel. The fiction not only discloses the American social contradictions, but slowly carries out a deep research and analysis on the American people’s mentality of that age.
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