Normal Mailer's The Naked And The Dead

It is easy to find out who won a war, and it is easy to find statistics on casualties and fatalities. What is less accessible however, is the intangible component that is mental survival. We know that many of those who survive wars develop some level or form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but we pay less attention to the mental state that exists for these soldiers during the war. During the most widespread war in history, WWII, countless individuals abandoned their lives of normality and comfort to fight on the frontlines. Nations did their best to dehumanize their soldiers so that they could mechanize and maximize them as tools of war. Soldiers became numbers – thousands deployed, thousands dead, and thousands never returning to …show more content…
Using Mailers novel as a conceptual guide, testimonies from U.S. soldiers who fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa will support the notion that brotherhood is essential in overcoming the hopelessness and morbidity that follows dehumanization. Mailer’s novel serves as a credible source of inspiration. It was written and published only shortly after the conclusion of the war, and his first-hand experience as a solider helps to give him authority as an author, for we can assume that a lot of the situations he writes up about his characters are highly inspired by real-life …show more content…
Dehumanizing a soldier means encouragements to detach from one’s self. If a soldier is hung up on their old life and preoccupied with their family and comfort of security, their mind refuses to focus on the war at hand. Dehumanization means being able to treat soldiers as tools or objects. If a soldier is merely an apparatus to hold and fire weapons, management and organization of war becomes much easier. To acknowledge the troubles of a soldier’s mind during war only serves to complicate things. Mailer describes this process of dehumanization in the beginning months, as men get used to the life of a deployed soldier. The process of dehumanization is first seen when a soldier remarks that he is having trouble remembering what his wife looks like – his memory having been compressed to memory of nothing more than her photo. Corporal Richard Nummer, a marine stationed on the island of Iwo Jima, expresses his thoughts in the first days of the battle, in saying, “we were walking around like zombies… we had all this death on our mind, and we knew it was going to go on farther.” The psychology of war is overwhelming for soldiers. WWII saw many men uprooted from their homes, drafted, deployed, and fighting on the front lines in no time. This sudden and harsh transition did not allow for a lot of mental absorption of the situation at hand. Going from a life of security to one