The Naked And The Dead Of Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer is one of the great American writers of the 20th century. Born in New Jersey the year 1923, died in New York in 2007. Taking his own experience in the South Pacific during World War II, the naked and the dead it was published when she was twenty-six years. The field of battle, warfare, subjection to the limit of the human resistance, are only a decorated, the pretext to deepen the feelings most atavistic and primal human condition. Only in extreme conditions the person shown as it is, seems to want to tell us Mailer. Each character with their strengths, limitations, phobias and neuro, confronts the events clearly showing her personality, which the author complements with intelligent and brilliant flashback describing us sentimental, labor and family environment in which he lived immersed each character before enlisting.
Death appears fast and fulminating, which causes a great impression on the reader, but the action and life (survival) as if nothing, continue turning the corpse into the plunder of a bad dream, a nightmare that all want to finish as soon as possible. The reader sees on the head of all the characters in the story, the sword of Damocles that makes them susceptible to disappear at any time, which creates a disquiet that keeps the attention in reading. The thoroughness in the psychological treatment of the protagonists involved, sometimes certain slowness in the advancement of history. You could say that it’s a purely psychological novel, in which Norman Mailer making use of an extraordinary power of observation and description, shreds us a variety of possibilities, from among all the existing ones, of human behavior. A great novel.