Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer is without a doubt one of the most talented authors of the twentieth century. He burst onto the literary scene just after World War II, and over the course of several decades, his prolific output, though not always well-received by critics, was widely read and became a part of the American dialogue particularly as it related to his favorite subjects: war and, even more so, the people caught up in it. Although Mailer’s novels have many differences, it is this common subject matter that ties them together despite the author’s evolving style and voice.
Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published in 1948 and based heavily upon his own experiences in World War II in the Pacific. It is clear from the novel that Mailer is against war, but this certainly did not make him unique among war novelists of the time. What stands out about this book is the characterizations of the people in the unit the story focuses on. They are almost without exception unfeeling and harsh, and this is reflected in their actions and their language, including near-constant use of a four-letter expletive that Mailer’s publisher made him misspell to make the book palatable for 1948’s taste. Throughout this extremely long novel, Mailer seems to be arguing that war is awful, but the people within it are partly to blame for that. However, the people fighting the war are also caught up in it like pawns, and they are shaped in negative ways by the war they are forced to fight. Mailer’s use of flashbacks makes each of the characters come alive, which only serves to bring home the senselessness of the fighting they are doing and the horrible way they treat each other; even when characters die that the reader has cared about, the other characters do not seem to care. With The Naked and Dead, Mailer established himself as a new voice that could speak directly to and of the horrors of war and the casualties—both living and dead—of the war that defined a generation.
American Dream, another of Mailer’s best novels, came after a writing break of ten years, and Mailer seemed to have come up with a lot to say in the interim. The book is in some ways a thematic successor to The Naked and the Dead, since it deals with the lingering effects of war. In the book, a young man returns from fighting in World War II, becomes a politician, and tries to rebuild his life after the experience of fighting, but fails and eventually murders his wife. Just as in the earlier novel, Mailer is writing about the terrible effects war can have. . In The American Dream, Mailer also uses a more poetic and less literal style than in the previous book—a change that seems to fit with his protagonist’s increasingly unhinged state of mind in the story. One other crucial difference between this novel and The Naked and the Dead, however, is that Mailer takes a more personal approach here, writing from the perspective of the protagonist, who serves as narrator. Earlier, Mailer used an omniscient narrator to afford a sweeping view of World War II’s action with the reader invested in the lives and fates of a whole unit of men, but in this book, he personalizes the story, making the reader connect with one person and really see the devastation the war has wrought in this one life and the lives that touch it. Thus, Mailer’s theme remains the same, but his style evolves from book to book
A third novel that shows Mailer’s style evolving while he stays with his favored themes is 1968’s Armies of the Night. This book is about a protest march in 1967, the March on the Pentagon, which was a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Unlike the previous two books, this one does not focus specifically on war itself and what it does to characters—Mailer has widened his lens and is now taking on what war does to society as a whole. In this case, the war in Vietnam is the catalyzing event of the whole march, and everything that happens, then, is an indirect result of war.
While the theme remains relatively constant, in terms of style, this novel shows Mailer evolving into an even more personal vein than American Dream, since he is himself one of the central characters in the book; it is what is referred to as a “nonfiction novel.” All of Mailer’s books are about war and engage with his own experience of war, but the writing’s scope and focus evolved over the course of several books. Whereas as a young novelist Mailer began with a wide focus, he narrowed it progressively as the years went on, and the result is this book, which shows him at his most focused on his own experiences. In this book, we also see the most irony: though all three books are ironic, here Mailer is playing with the form of a novel and blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction, even quoting articles about himself before moving into the fictional part of his text. His ironic use of others’ words brings the reader out of the story in a way that was not the case in the two previously discussed novels.
Ultimately, The Naked and the Dead, American Dream, and Armies of the Night have a lot in common. They share the theme of war’s devastation and the damage it can do to individual people. However, looking at these three books in succession shows how Mailer grew and changed as a novelist, narrowing his focus from the wide to the very specific, and changing his language choices from book to book. The progression of style and constancy of theme are both key to understanding Mailer as an author.