The Naked And The Dead Analysis

Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, depicts the story of a platoon of soldiers in the fight against Japan during World War II. War in pop culture is usually depicted with tons of action and has larger than life heroes. Although this may be true that war has action and heroes, very few adaptations through either film or novel, capture the psychological struggles of war on the soldiers. In times of war, soldiers have to kill other soldiers, make tough decisions on the battlefront, and even dealing with the will to survive. These types of problems are usually foreign to a new soldier when he or she is just coming from civilian life. The setting of war can have serious effects on a person. Mailer’s novel shows that the harsh setting of war can change a …show more content…
The Naked and the Dead focuses on both war and peace as its story moves back and forth between the battle on Anopopei and the lives of many of the men prior to the war. The reader is able to comprehend how the war has changed the lives of these men and the ones that they have left behind through the use of the “Time Machine”. The "Time Machine" sections are, in essence, flashbacks that allow us to understand how a character 's previous life in the civilian world has helped shape his present personality and behavior during the war. Roy Gallagher, a major character within the novel is used as an example of a changed man with from this war. The “Time Machine” enables the reader to see the love that he has for his wife and what happiness she had brought him. The war has made him into an angry, mean-spirited, and pessimistic man and when news of his wife dying in childbirth came around, he was