诺曼·梅勒的小说《裸者与死者》与史诗《贝奥武甫》在形式上有着许多看似相似实则相反之处。《裸者与死者》运用了史诗的叙事模式和主要符号——英雄、死亡、继承者,并对这些符号进行重写,赋予其全新的意义,使文本间形成一种否定互文性。小说利用否定互文性谴责了美国社会中极权势力时人性的扼杀,表现出对人性光辉的期待。这种创作手法为现代主义和后现代主义语境下社会现实的文学表征提供了新的手段。 Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead has many similarities and differences in form to the epic Beauvoir. The Naked and the Dead uses epic narrative patterns and key symbols - heroes, deaths and successors - and rewrites them, giving them new meaning and making the text a negative intertextuality. The use of negative intertextuality condemns the killing of human nature in the power of the totalitarian society in the United States, showing the glorious expectations of human nature. This creative approach has provided a new means of literary representation of social reality in the context of modernism and postmodernism.