User talk:CVinson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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 her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06
 Winchester)” (35).
+Moving to the beginning of Mailer’s career, it is obvious that every character in The Naked and the Dead () is issued regulation small arms: the
+officers with caliber . ACP Model A pistols, the enlisted men with -
+ M Garand rifles (as distinguished from Rojack’s smaller M carbine) or
+. Thompson submachine guns. Perhaps the most crucial episode in which
+one of these weapons figures is late in the book, during the abortive attempt
+by I & R platoon to climb Mt. Anaka, when Red Valsen rebels against Staff
+Sgt. Croft’s leadership and is forced to obey at gunpoint: “Croft . . . unslung
+his rifle, cocked the bolt leisurely. . . . It was worthless to temporize. Croft
+wanted to shoot him” (–).When Red capitulates, it signals the end of all
+resistance to Croft, which is emblematic of the allegorical conclusion by
+Mailer that reactionaries would dominate post-war America and which emphasizes the novel’s pessimistic message, its naturalistic bias
+If war is the most obvious arena in which guns figure, it is not hard to
+find the others: hunting and, in urban civilian life, criminal pursuits. The
+most striking of the latter occurs in Hemingway’s great story, “The Killers,”
+and Mailer’s  murder mystery, Tough Guys Don’t Dance. In the former,
+the two hit men, almost robotic in their mindless, inexorable commitment
+to a job that must be done, pursue their prey, ex-boxer Ole Anderson, with
+a chilling, leisurely assurance and sawed-off  gauge shotguns. In the first
+cinematic version of the story (), a classic film noir with Burt Lancaster
+and Ava Gardner in their first starring roles, the killers (one of whom is
+William Conrad, later of TV“Cannon” fame) use more pedestrian Smith &
+Wesson Model  . Special revolvers. As in Hemingway’s story, Ole Anderson, in true naturalistic fashion, passively awaits his death.
+In Tough Guys Don’t Dance,several of the seven violent deaths are carried
+out by the three matching . automatic pistols bought by Meeks Wardley
+Hilby III, including his own suicide and that of his doppelgänger Lonnie
+Pangborn. These parallels in death echo the sexual parallels in the lives of
+these characters and the novel presents a sexual nexus in which virtually
+every character is attached carnally to several others.