The Day Of The Locust:An Innovative Hollywood Novel

Nathanael West is positioned as a successful novelist and talented prose writer in American literature and is probably the most influential Hollywood writer to appear in the 1930s. His last novel The Day of the Locust is now hailed as one of the best English novels and is unanimously accepted as a canonical Hollywood Novel. West is often regarded as an outstanding Hollywood writer because he ushered in the relentless critique of Hollywood and the film industry.Most criticism and studies on The Day of the Locust have highly focused on its satiric art and techniques and West’s literary status as the progenitor of "Black humor." Little attention has been given to the perspective of the work as a Hollywood Novel. The present thesis aims mainly at an in-depth analysis of the very reasons of The Day of the Locust as a typical and representative Hollywood Novel in the dimensions of setting, subject and theme. Attempts have also been made to elaborate on the peculiarities of The Day of the Locust and West’s contribution to the development of the Hollywood Novel as a genre.The introduction is intended, after a brief comment on West as a Hollywood Novel writer, to give a general survey of previous criticism and studies on The Day of the Locust and the Hollywood Novel as a genre.The first chapter probes into the characteristic and significance of the town of Hollywood from the aspect of setting. Thanks to the geographical and sociological advantages, Hollywood has become the film capital, where the whole story of The Day of the Locust is set. This deliberate selection of setting helps to mould the personalities of the characters and deepen the theme of the blurring of illusion and reality. The second chapter mainly discusses the American film industry and a group of dream-seekers on the fringes of this industry from the perspective of subject. As one of the most influential forms of mass culture, the film exerts a great influence on people’s way of life, style, and thought. In The Day of the Locust, there are a crowd of grotesques who flock to Hollywood and gather around the film industry, only to be cheated and become despairing. The third chapter mainly delves into the defining themes of this novel from the aspects of the confusion of illusion and reality, and the dismantling of the Hollywood Dream. In Hollywood, what seems to be real is actually fake. Due to this artificiality of Hollywood, people fail to discern the distinction between illusion and reality. The conclusion summarizes the key points of the present thesis and emphasizes the contribution of West to the Hollywood Novel genre, which are embodied in West’s criticism of the film industry’s destructive consequence and Hollywood’s deceit and artificiality through the presentation of misery and despair that the dream-seekers suffer and the shattering of the Hollywood Dream.The present thesis has affirmed that Hollywood has degenerated from the America’s dream factory to America’s dream dump. It also reveals West’s satire on the film industry and his sympathy with the Hollywood Dream seekers.