Modernism in The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature grade: 17 University of Frankfurt (Main) course: Decadence and Moderism in the Late 20th Century American Cinema language: English abstract: Jonathan Veitch asserts in the preface of his book American Superrealism that critics have had problems in placing Nathanael West within the literature of the 1930s and American literature in general. They understood him for example as a poet of darkness as an apocalyptic writer as a homegrown surrealist as a writer of the left as a universal satirist in a way as the prototype of the contemporary Jewish-American novelist (Wisker 1-2) or as a realistic writer (Martin see Roberts). Although some of these characterizations are contradictory they all fit because they reflect different facets of the author or rather his work. West combined all these elements and probably even several others in his writings. His style was never constant. At times his pictorial technique closely resembles collage [but also] cartoon strips movies and several different schools of painting as well as such non-graphic visual arts as the tableau and the dance. (Reid 9) Taking the (though not planned) final result of his development as a writer his last book The Day of the Locust (1939) as an example I want to show in my essay that at least one of Wests books does not fall between the different schools of writing (Wisker 2) as he once noted. He is certainly a representative of modernism the literary movement and point of view of his time (see OConner) not only because a struggle for definition is part of what those years are about (Wisker 121). Nathanael West was influenced by the same historical events and used many of the strategies other contemporary writers employed to express his way of seeing the world. I will point out the features of modernism in the novel because as Randall Reid states [i]n a century which has made expe