Contrast and Comparisons Between 'the Naked and the Dead' and Fahreheit 451 in Exploring Individualism Within Western Culture Iin the 20th Century Essay

Compare and contrast the literary and expressive techniques used by both Norman Mailer and Ray Bradbury in their novels The Naked and the Dead and Fahrenheit 451 respectively in exploring individualism within Western culture in the mid 20th century.

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer is a highly original and brutal novel detailing the variation of male ego, both proceeding and during the Second World War. The book is based on Mailer's own The text follows several characters who represent the individuals that make up the uniform mass that is the American Army as they participate in the U.S assault of the Japanese islands. The novel was wrote in the late 1940s and published in 1949 and was based on Mailer's own experiences of the second world war and in America. In Mailer's attempts to detail the men's motives and actions throughout the assault and through lengthy summaries of their previous existence he both exposes the futility and destructiveness of war and the hopelessness of man's quest for individuality in modern Western society. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is set in a vast and deliberately unspecified American city. The book takes place in the future as the West is dominated by the population’s eternal pursuit of instant gratification and the authorities’ war on knowledge. The science fiction tale was published in 1954 and was in part inspired by the McCarthy witch hunts and Bradbury's own experience of the authorities' predujice. The novel centres around the protagonist Guy Montag as a number of chance meetings with a girl named Clarisse lead him to try and achieve freedom and knowledge outside of the unthinking conformist majority. Through Montag's journey Bradbury attempts to express both the importance of self reflection and free time through books as well as the need for individualism in a technologically powerful country and an unrelenting metropolis. Although The Naked and the Dead and Fahrenheit 451 contrast in style and genre, the texts use...