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The Naked and the Dead & I, The Jury

Sam Croft in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Mike Hammer in Mickey Spillane's I, The Jury are both macho characters, but there are great differences between the two. Croft is a sadistic man without a heart while Hammer is simply a man who can be tough when he needs to be, but can also be gentle and loving. This study will show that Mailer has created an evil and violent fascist in Croft, while Spillane has created in Hammer a hard-nosed private detective with a heart. Croft is out to do damage wherever he can, while Hammer is out to serve justice, especially in terms of avenging his cruelly murdered friend Jack Williams. Hammer is shown to care about other people

---including the person who murdered his friend, while Croft cares about nothing and nobody but himself.

Mickey Spillane leaves no doubt in the reader's head that his private eye Mike Hammer is capable of great violence. Hammer lets us know this in his own words:

There are ten thousand mugs that hate me and you know it. They hate me because if they mess with me I shoot their damn heads off. I've done it and I'll do it again (Spillane 5).

However, Hammer is saying these words in the heat of his anger over the murder of his friend. He vows to kill the murderer, but he does so in the context of his love for his friend. It is up to the reader to decide if Hammer is a truly violent man at heart, as Croft certainly is, but there is no doubt that in Hammer we find other qualities which are absent in Croft. For example, even though he is about to view the murdered body of his friend for the first time, he has enough compassion to comfort the dead man's girl friend. There is no doubt of his deep affection for Jack:

In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. . . . Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungl...

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The Naked and the Dead & I, The Jury. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:58, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690262.html