The Naked, the Eloquent, and the Dead

Authors

  • Alba Newmann Holmes Willamette University Author

Keywords:

pain and embodiment, The Naked and the Dead, war trauma, empathy and violence, World War II literature, war and dehumanization

Abstract

The Naked and the Dead explores pain as a tool used to damage and promote fear—a tool in the administration of power, exercised over both the enemy and the US troops. Mailer examines pain and the coping mechanisms through which the individual struggles to mitigate suffering. The novel offers the possibility of a communicative power within pain. Mailer’s writing engages, not in the trivialization of pain, but in a vision that reveals profound empathy in the face of suffering, as well as offering a visceral, affecting portrait of the brutality of war. Mailer allows the naked and the dead to speak.

Author Biography

  • Alba Newmann Holmes, Willamette University

    Alba Newmann Holmes is a member of the English Department and Director of the Writing Center at Willamette University. She received her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, with a focus on twentieth-century American literature. She is currently at work on her first book, On the Map: Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Cartography, which examines the ways in which poetic structures, like cartographic structures, organize knowledge—how they can claim territory or order experience, while leaving necessary openings for uncertainty, interpretation, and discovery. A portion of this work was published in the William Carlos Williams Review as “Paterson: Poem as Rhizome.” She lives in Salem, Oregon.

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Published

2026-10-10

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014): Future Bound

Section

Articles