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===Naked and the dead===
Throughout his correspondence to his editors and his several books,{{pg|430|431}}Matthews maintained a passionate defense of his eyewitness journalistic standard, a position those close to him understood. “Matthews never believed anything he had not seen with his own eyes,” Joris Ivens wrote. “He never saw his job as reporter as one that permitted him to sit in his hotel and read the handouts of the War Ministry.” {{sfn|Ivens|1969|p=112 Sidney Franklin recalls that some writers wrote their pieces before arriving in Madrid, and came only for the “legitimacy” of the Madrid dateline.{{sfn|Franklin|1952|p=232}} And Matthews hated, on principle, having his name attached to an article that violated the integrity of his witness. The only way to achieve objectivity, for Matthews, was to acknowledge one’s subjective perspective. Writing to his publisher, Matthews argued that “the full documentary value” of his coverage was lost when the editors altered his submissions for “the apparent necessity of giving more or less equal space to both sides.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=Sulzberger}}  
{{dc|dc=P|aul Boyer points out that in most of the major American novels}} of the
immediate post-Hiroshima years—Lionel Trilling’s ''The Middle of the Journey'';
Saul Bellow’s ''The Victim''; Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead''—
“the atomic bomb is notable by its absence.”{{sfn|Boyer|1985|p=246}}  Mailer’s 1948 war novel
adheres to the era’s avoidance of the atomic bomb by focusing on acceptable
socio-political issues, but differs from other war novels of the period through
its preoccupation with the uncanny, defined by Freud in his seminal essay on
the topic as a profound dread provoked “either when infantile complexes
which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or
when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be
confirmed.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=639}} Although the uncanny remains an often frustratingly
broad topic, mostly because it is a concept “whose entire denotation is a connotation,” most critics adhere to Freud’s definition of the uncanny
as something familiar made strange.{{sfn|Cixous|1976|p=528}} {{efn|Freud’s article on the uncanny remains a seminal text, but in recent years the uncanny’s boundlessness
has seen it approached via the works of postmodern thinkers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard
and Jacques Derrida. For a discussion of the uncanny as a trope of deconstruction see
Nicholas Royle, ''The Uncanny'' (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003). The uncanny has also become
a trope of postcolonialism; see Homi Bhabha, ''The Location of Culture'' (London and New
York: Routledge, 1994); and Julia Kristeva, ''Strangers to Ourselves'', trans. Leon S. Roudliez (New
York: Columbia UP, 1991); feminism; see Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading
of Freud’s ''Das Unheimlich'',” ''New Literary History 7.3'' (Spring 1976); and psychoanalysis; see Ernst
Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” trans. Roy Sellars, ''Angelaki'' 2.1 (1995); and Sigmund
Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. James Strachey, ''New Literary History'' 7.3 (Spring 1976). For
other significant studies of the uncanny see Terry Castle, ''The Female Thermometer: 18th Century
Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny'' (New York: Oxford UP, 1995); Anthony Vidler, ''The Architectural
Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely'' (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1994); Hal Foster,
''Compulsive Beauty'' (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1993); Gordon Slethaug, ''The Play of the Double
in Postmodern American Fiction'' (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993); and Paul Coates,
''The Double and the Other'' (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).}}  Intellectual uncertainty
regarding the animate nature of what is inanimate and vice versa (as provoked
by automatons or episodes of uncontrollable behavior), and the “return
of the repressed” are all deemed capable of eliciting profound
discomfort. Mailer’s ostensibly realist text is complicated by its depiction of
weird mechanical soldiers who are plagued with superstitions regarding
death and filled with dread provoked by an oddly menacing environment.
This conscious use of the uncanny illustrates popular postwar concerns {{pg|471|472}} connected with conformity and totalitarianism, but the real strangeness of ''The Naked and the Dead'' relies on its ability to reveal unconscious fears connected with Mailer’s personal uncertainties regarding his writing and cultural unease about the atomic bomb.


The destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the annihilation of their
As with Matthews, so too Hemingway. Indeed the commitment to subjectivity
civilian populations are never mentioned in novels such as Herman Wouk’s
fit quite well with Hemingway’s modernist aesthetics. If Hemingway
''The Caine Mutiny'' (1951) and James Gould Cozzens’ ''Guard of Honor'' (1948),
focused the dispatches on his perspective—on his own experience dodging
novels which purport to be about World War II but which exclude a fundamental
artillery—more than Matthews and more than most, he did so at least partially
part of the conflict. As Paul Brians points out, “nuclear war must be
to fulfill expectations. NANA approached him, after all, for his name
the most carefully avoided topic of general significance in the contemporary
and personality as much as whatever he would write. Before he even left the
world.”{{sfn|Brians|1987|p=17}}  Although the bomb provoked significant debate in the
states it pitched him to potential publications, sending out a promotional release
newspapers of 1945, there was a silence in serious literature revealing both the
with text to be used alongside his forthcoming dispatches and suggesting
difficulty of representing mass death and how well that mass death was repressed.{{efn|The first, and really only, in-depth writing on the atomic bomb by an American in the period
they include a photograph: “Mr. Hemingway’s assignment is to get
was John Hersey’s article “Hiroshima” published in ''The New Yorker'' in 1946, which relates the
both from the bombed towns and bombed trenches the human story of the
experiences of six Hiroshima residents on the day of the attack. Before Hersey’s piece, the majority
war, not just an account of the game being played by general staffs with pins
of discussions about the atomic bomb in the popular press focused on statistics of devastation
and a map.”{{sfn|NANA|1937|p=Hemingway}}{{ NANA also released each individual dispatch with a one-sentence “precede” about the “famous” or “noted” author. Ernest Hemingway was not writing as Herbert Mathews, ace reporter;
rather than the human toll, chiefly to encourage international control of atomic power
Hemingway was writing as Ernest Hemingway, famous author of novels and
or promote civil defense. Hersey was the first to tackle the effects of the bomb on its Japanese
stories well known to be drawn from his own experiences.
victims, yet his dry journalistic tone struck some readers as oddly dispassionate. The effect of
Hersey’s approach, however journalistically appropriate, was to spare readers emotional engagement
with the bomb’s victims. One reader wrote to ''The New Yorker'' commending Hersey’s
report for reasons the author might not have anticipated: “I read Hersey’s report. It was marvellous.
Now let us drop a handful on Moscow.” For an in-depth discussion of this topic, see
Joseph Luft and W. M. Wheeler, “Reaction to John Hersey’s ''Hiroshima'',” ''Journal of Social Psychology''
28 (Aug 1948): 135–40.}}  Although nearly 100,00 feet of color film were filmed of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki by Air Force film crews following the bombings, the
entirety of this documentation was classified top secret because of the horror
it revealed.{{sfn|Norris|2000|p=184}} The human toll of the atomic bomb was so repressed
that in 1955 when the “Hiroshima Maidens” visited the United States
in order to have corrective surgery for their radiation burns (a trip organized
by a group of Americans), some people were so threatened by this reification
of American atrocity that they wondered whether the organizers of the visit
were Communist agents.{{sfn|Filreis|2007|p=}}


The difficulties inherent in the representation of mass death were exacerbated
That he understood this to be his assignment is further evidenced by a
in America during the late 1940s and early 1950s by increasing conformity
cable Matthews sent to his Times editors on April 9, 1937, concerning the
and widespread consensus, especially regarding the military. Mailer
Loyalist attack: “WORKED CONJOINTL WITH HEMINGWAY TODAY HE SENDING EYEWITNESS DESCRIPTION WHILE EYE SENT GENERAL STRATEGY.”{{sfn|Matthews|1937|p=April}} When a year later the Times asked NANA to ensure Hemingway’s reports differed from Matthews, NANA complied by asking Hemingway “to emphasize color rather than straight reporting” not necessarily out of dissatisfaction with Hemingway’s reportage as Baker contends,{{efn|Baker’s notes date the Times request to NANA as 8 Apr. 1938, and NANA’s to Hemingway as 15
points out that a period of Cold War is “obviously equal to greater censorship”
Apr. 1938 (Princeton University, Firestone Library: Box 18, Folder 8 “1938”), the date of “The
and suggests that “[i]f good writers write novels which are conventionally
Bombing of Tortosa” dispatch.}} but to increase{{pg|431|432}}the chance of selling to the Times and indeed to ensure the spirit of NANA’s original arrangement with Hemingway. {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=329}}
obscene or exceptionally radical, you can be sure that they would
have one hell of a time getting their books published.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|p=23}} Although he establishes a clear delineation between an artist who “follows
his own nature” and commercial talents who “do what they are obliged
to do, and say what they are obliged to say,”
Mailer’s desire for literary individualism coexisted with a strong desire for
popular success, which countered his radicalism with a certain amount of accommodation
to consensus.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|p=25}} Despite the fact that ''The Naked and the Dead'' depicts the Pacific conflict against the Japanese, Mailer adheres to the era’s
avoidance of the bomb. When asked in an interview whether he believed {{pg|472|473}}  that people want to “look into the abyss,” he replied, “No, I don’t. I think it’s very hard. I think people are petrified of it.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|p=45}}
 
Mailer describes his first novel as “the book of a young engineer” written “mechanically” with the aid of a “sturdy” working plan utilizing extensive character dossiers and charts, thus emphasizing its consciously controlled construction.{{sfn|Mailer|1964|p=13}} Yet while the text’s comprehensive character
studies and minute details regarding the hardships of military life
contribute to a sense of its depiction of the gritty reality of war, the reality Mailer presents remained palatable enough to render the book a bestseller. One review highlights its canny way of appearing to leave “nothing to the imagination” while exposing “the blood, if not always the guts, of war.”{{sfn|Dempsey|1948|p=6}} During the 1950s, Mailer became aware of a division in his mind between a “conscious intelligence” engaged with political issues and an unconscious mind “much more interested in other matters: murder, suicide, orgy, psychosis.”{{sfn|Mailer|1964|p=15}} This fascination with unconscious material, unacknowledged at the time of writing ''The Naked and the Dead'', explains
the text’s oscillation between familiar conventions of realism and a
realism rendered uncannily strange. Although Mailer’s narrative strategy is
designed to resist unconscious preoccupations, it cannot entirely keep them at bay. As Mailer himself points out, writing is “a very ''odd, spooky'' activity” and surging beneath the novel’s conscious delineation of
socio-political issues are darker unconscious themes connected to Mailer’s
haunting problem: the unbridgeable gap between his conscious and unconscious
concerns.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|p=142}}
 
The conscious theme of the novel can be summarized as power: “the power
of man overman, the power of military force, the power of political thought
and polemic, the inexorable power of events on the lives of men.”{{sfn|Jones|1976|p=97}} The platoon consists of one of almost every representative American type
whose differences in class, politics, race and religion guarantee personal conflict. Mailer’s characters behave in ways controlled by their socio-economic
backgrounds, which aligns ''The Naked and the Dead'' with the naturalistic
works of writers such as Stephen Crane and John Dos Passos, but as much as
individual powerlessness over fate is a part of the naturalistic worldview,
much of this concern springs from Cold War sociological issues that would
eventually develop into the popular figure of the corporate-controlled “organization man” as outlined in William Whyte’s non-fiction study ''The''{{pg|473|474}} ''Organization Man'' and fictionalized in popular novels such as Sloan Wilson’s ''The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.'' Mailer’s political interests see the novel exploring the potential for the forces fighting fascism to behave in similarly totalitarian ways. A review in the ''New York Times'' reveals how carefully Mailer handled this potentially subversive theme when it points out that “Mr. Mailer obviously doesn’t like war, or the people who fight it,” but concludes that he is attempting to show “that much of its unpleasantness comes from the nature of the participants” rather than from any implicit problem with the American military.{{sfn|Dempsey|1948|p=6}}
 
The nature of the war’s participants in ''The Naked and the Dead'' connects
the novel to issues deemed relevant to postwar American life. Mailer
suggests,
 
{{quote| It was as if back in the late Forties and early Fifties a great many people unconsciously began to sense that they were getting further
and further away from themselves. There was something
funny in the scheme of things. The whole apparatus of the buildings
about us, the things we read, the things we eat, the things we
see for entertainment, the philosophies about us, the faiths—everything was making it harder and harder for someone to have a sense of identity.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|pp=199-200}} }}
 
Mailer’s apprehension of something wrong in postwar life defies clear expression
and his grammatical errors between the past and present tense reveal something of the troubling vagueness of this estrangement. Loss of individual identity is linked with an obscure dread, suggesting that the loss
of self in an era of conformity registers as uncanny. Mailer’s depiction of the subservience of the individual is far more worrying than other novels of the era concerned with the same theme, and his soldier automatons represent a
disturbing manifestation of the loss of humanity.
 
Among all the psychical uncertainties that can evoke an uncanny feeling,
doubt regarding the animate and the inanimate is one of the most potent, especially when this doubt “only makes itself felt obscurely in one’s consciousness.”{{sfn|Jentsch|1995|p=11}}  Historically the machine was often seen as somehow demonic, an obscure threat disruptive of traditional social practice, but it is the machine’s relationship to the human that renders it uncanny. Whereas {{pg|474|475}}  in “the premodern instance the machine is thought to mimic the organic movements of the body,” in the modern instance “the machine becomes the model, and the body is disciplined to its mechanistic specifications.”{{sfn|Foster|1991|p=51}} In ''The Naked and the Dead'', General Cummings decides that it is “a not
entirely unproductive conceit to consider weapons as being something more
than machines, as having personalities, perhaps, likenesses to the human.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=568}} Fittingly, he also suggests that soldiers are “closer to machines than
humans.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=569}}  Battle is thus transformed from the heroic clashes of history
into “an organization of thousands of man-machines who dart with governing
habits across a field, sweat like a radiator in the sun, shiver and become
stiff like a piece of metal in the rain.” The General’s disturbing
conclusion is “[w]e are not so discrete from the machine any longer, I detect
it in my thinking.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=569}} Intellectual uncertainty between the human and
the inhuman is not merely played out on a physical level in Mailer’s novel but
has infiltrated into the very deepest recesses of personal space. The machine
is uncanny “because it assumes our human vitality and because we take on
its deathly facticity” and Mailer’s soldiers cease to “think of themselves
as individual men” becoming “merely envelopes.”{{sfn|Foster|1991|p=51}} {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=568}} 
 
The ability of mechanization to penetrate not just industry but impinge
“upon the very center of the human psyche” has significant implications
for the human experience of warfare.{{sfn|Giedion|1948|p=41}}  General Cummings is so estranged
from the human that he lacks recognizable expressions and merely
displays “a certain vacancy in his face.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=81}}  When this inhuman
commander attempts to smile, the only result is that his face looks
“numb.” Yet this vacant cipher commands his troops with an absolute power
they have little choice but to obey. Ordered out on patrol and lit up by the
light of a flare, the soldiers become a mass of “black cutouts moving past a
spotlight”, two-dimensional objects obeying orders “with no consciousness
any longer of what they were doing.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=129, 131}} Even in extreme situations
they are unable to react as humans. When a Japanese soldier is caught
in a rain of bullets, he remains standing with “no expression on his face; he
looked vacant and surprised even as the bullets struck him in the chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=153}} 
Even the bodies of the dead are inhuman, with one swollen corpse resembling
“a doll whose stuffing had broken forth.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=211}}
 
Mailer’s insistence on unreality is a thematic preoccupation shared by
uncanny texts, which Susan Bernstein points out frequently depict lapses of
consciousness registered as experiences of dislocation and loss of control.{{sfn|Bernstein|2003|p=1125}}  {{pg|475|476}} Mailer’s soldiers know “very little about what was happening in the campaign” and the days repeat themselves without incident until they are “no longer able to distinguish between things which had happened a few days before.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=252}} This estrangement is compounded by their lack of agency within the military structure’s repetitiveness. The soldiers “stand guard at night, awaken a half hour after dawn, eat breakfast, wash their mess kits, shave, and load onto trucks” which transport them to their duties. They “return at noon, go out again after chow, and work until late afternoon when they would come back for supper, take a bath perhaps in the stream just outside the bivouac, and then go to sleep soon after dark.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=252}}  These minutely observed details of military life should intensify the fictional reality; instead, the obscurely felt doubts regarding the soldiers’ human identities complicates the suspension of disbelief necessary in the reading contract. When the platoon is sent out on reconnaissance, they march in a “leaden stupor . . . without any thought of where they went, dully, stupidly.” Any empathetic response to the plights of these men rendered mechanical by war imperatives is complicated by the description of the soldiers’ heavy packs becoming “part of their bodies.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=505-6}}  Although metaphorical, Mailer’s strategy provokes obscure doubts regarding the status of the soldiers as “real” people, fictional ciphers or uncanny machines, and destabilizes reader response to a text that appears to be realist but which is also oddly unreal.
 
Mailer’s army transforms human will, autonomy and labor into a series of estrangements experienced by dehumanized cogs and the strangeness of this fictional process is intensified by the process of fiction, which necessarily
attempts to transform language into constructs perceived as human. The writer’s power “to alter reality in other people’s minds by the way we use words” remained an enigma for Mailer, who noted that “[d]ealing with words is a mysterious matter. It’s very insubstantial because they’re just little pieces of dark curly pigment on a white page.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|p=161}}
This “mysterious matter” sees Mailer’s text constantly veering between moments
of verisimilitude and self-reflexivity, and is the reason for the novel’s
strange preoccupation with what Freud terms “the omnipotence of thoughts.”{{sfn|Freud|1976|p=633}}  The ability to alter reality through language is even identified by Mailer as the mystery “that drove Hemingway insane.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|p=161}}  The soldiers’ fears regarding the omnipotence of thoughts is clearly connected with Mailer’s conscious theme of the loss of individuality, {{pg|476|477}} but is also linked to Mailer’s unconscious fears regarding his power as a writer and the threat posed to him by writing itself. Mailer explains how “a book takes on its own life in the writing” and suggests that the writer has “a certain responsibility” to a book which becomes like “a creature to you after a while.”{{sfn|Mailer|1964|p=26}}  The writer feels “a bit like a master who’s got a fine animal” and Mailer admits to often feeling “a certain shame with what I’ve done with a novel.” If Mailer feels guilty about his failure towards something raised by him “like a child” then what kind of revenge might this ill-treated novel wreak on its author?{{sfn|Mailer|1964|p=26}} 
 
In his numerous interviews, Mailer returns time and time again to Hemingway, who represents not just a great writer but one undone by the perils of writing. The mystery identified as driving Hemingway mad poses a similar threat for Mailer, who describes craft—as opposed to “the natural
mystique of the novel”—as a bulwark against “the terror of confronting a reality which might open into more and more anxiety and so present a deeper and deeper view of the abyss.”{{sfn|Mailer|1964|p=30}} Reliance on craft is something Mailer attributes to mediocre writers yet he admits that “there
was a time when I wanted very much to belong to the literary world. I wanted to be respected the way someone like Katherine Ann Porter used to be . . . As a master of the craft.”{{sfn|Mailer|1964|p=29}} Mailer’s fears about writing are thus twofold: on the one hand, he fears the mystery which he believes rendered Hemingway insane; on the other hand, he fears not belonging to the literary world of the masters of craft to whom writing poses
a threat.
 
This discomfort with the powers of narrative plays out through the soldiers’ superstitious fears regarding death. When Gallagher flippantly comments, “You’re only gonna get your fuggin head blown off tomorrow,” he is suddenly seized with “a cold shuddering anxiety as though he had blasphemed.” As he hurriedly recites the Hail Mary, he has a vision of himself “lying on the beach with a bloody nub where his head should have been.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=7}} Similarly, when Martinez cannot stop repeating the phrase “‘I don’t care if I do die, do die,’” he is overwhelmed with certainty that “something terrible” is about to happen.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=21}}  The awful “something” that constantly
threatens the soldiers is annihilation by war and by language. Croft is convinced
with “passionate certainty” that Hennessey will die that very
day; when this does indeed occur, Croft becomes privy to “vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=29, 40}} Red also {{pg|477|478}} correctly predicts, or conjures, Hennessey’s death, and interprets it not as “large and devastating and meaningless” like the deaths of his other fallen comrades, but as a death which opens “a secret fear” because it seems “so ironic, so obvious, when he remembered the things Hennessey had said.” Red finds himself at the edge of a “bottomless dread” thinking about a death seemingly caused by his thoughts and Hennessey’s words.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=123}}  When he remembers the moment he knew his friend would die, he experiences “a moment of awe and panic as if someone, ''something'', had been watching over their shoulder that night and laughing. There was a pattern where there shouldn’t be one.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=39}}  
 
Death is the hidden secret that lies at the heart of the uncanny. Uncertainties
regarding what is animate or inanimate, real or unreal, self or
other, are uncanny not merely because of a discomforting blurring of
boundaries, but because these liminal areas evoke the nothingness of unbeing.
During Minetta’s stay in hospital, his proximity to damaged bodies
and corpses renders death “almost tangible.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=363}}  Whereas death had once
been unreal, “the way a man’s face may sometimes seem unreal if he gazes
at it too long in the mirror”, Minetta is faced with death’s reality so
viscerally that he becomes “afraid to breathe, as if the air were polluted.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|pp=355, 363}} He wonders, “How do they expect a guy to stay here, after some poor
Joe died right next to you?”, a query reflecting not just the difficulty
of repressing knowledge of death while in close proximity to it, but which
also reveals a deeper fear regarding the menace posed to the living by the
dead.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=365}}  When Gallagher receives news from America that his wife has died
during childbirth, although he keeps repeating to himself “[s]he’s dead,
she’s dead,” he is unable to really believe it.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=280}}  As if in confirmation of
Gallagher’s sense of his wife’s continuing existence, the delays of the postal
system result in her letters continuing to arrive. Understandably unnerved
by these spectral communications, Gallagher is even more horrified by the
arrival of the final letter since it is the true harbinger of Mary’s death. Upon
taking it to the beach to read, Gallagher experiences a “jolt of horror”
ostensibly inspired by the strange reptilian sheen of the giant kelp but
which seems more likely to stem from his close encounter with death that
takes place beside it.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=284}}  Gallagher controls his communion with the dead by
insisting that is it the kelp that frightens him rather than his experience of
a communication that seems to transcend the boundaries between the living and the dead.{{pg|478|479}} Mailer’s insistence on the soldiers’ dehumanization reflects acceptable postwar fears regarding conformity and corporatization, but also offers a critique of the processes through which violence to the human body is normalized during periods of war. Mailer’s over-elaboration of this motif registers as particularly uncanny. The repetition of mechanical descriptions renders description itself mechanical, sapping imagery of meaning and miring interpretation in a confusing space where familiar literary conventions have become strangely unfamiliar. The novel ends with yet another insistence on the unreality of war when the soldiers realize that “tomorrow the endless routine of harsh eventless days would begin once more.” The final disastrous patrol is “unfamiliar, unbelievable,” yet the bivouac before them is also “unreal.” Finally, Mailer suggests, “everything in the Army was unreal.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=709}}  This constant reiteration regarding the unreality of war acts as a comment on psychological coping mechanisms during combat but it also reveals something of Mailer’s inability to cope with his material.
 
For any reader versed in the events of the war, never mentioned yet never
entirely banished from the novel is the fact that the conflict Mailer describes
will soon result in the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The bomb is nowhere in the text but resides in what might be thought of as the text’s unconscious; in the spaces created between a reader’s
knowledge and what the text depicts. Nagaoka Hiroyoshi defines atomic bomb literature as expressing the evil of the bomb and the survival of human
dignity,{{sfn|Treat|1995|p=20}}  a paradigm that obviously puts an American writer in an ambiguous position. Most American writers who did write about the
bomb in its immediate aftermath thus avoided its military application in favor of imagining its more benevolent role in a future utopia. Writers such
as Morris Ernst, whose 1955 book ''Utopia 1976'' promised a pleasing future of
atomic power, envisaged a world in which nuclear technology would provide
unlimited energy, control the weather, manufacture germ-free foods, provide
medical cures and revolutionize agricultural practice. Boyer argues that
utopian dreams of a new world of atomic energy were a way of avoiding the
unsettling reality of America’s use of atomic bombs to obliterate entire populations.{{sfn|Boyer|1985|p=122}} Such utopian dreams of the future “facilitated the process by which Americans absorbed Hiroshima and Nagasaki into their moral history.”{{sfn|Boyer|1985|p=124}}
 
Mailer’s reluctance to describe the deaths of the Japanese soldiers as real—resorting to imagery of dolls and insects to describe their corpses—is thus {{pg|479|480}} particularly revealing. Theme chanization of Mailer’s soldiers becomes even more relevant in this context, since the destruction and death meted out by the Second World War comes not from human hands but from technology. Although Mailer does his best to focus on the issues that concerned Cold War America by using the war as a fictional trope through which the country’s changing socio-political physiognomy can be examined, he cannot entirely avoid gesturing towards the abyss of total war and mass death. The dark secret hidden at the heart of mid-twentieth century life—the atomic bomb—stages an uncanny return through Mailer’s strangely mechanical soldiers, resulting in a novel that both avoids and highlights the terrifying inhumanity of World War II.
 
== Notes ==
{{notelist}}
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