A Brief Study of The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West's Apocalyptic Tale and Artistic Fear

Jun 7, 2009

Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust prophecies the destruction of society as well as the annihilation of literature as an art form, as motion pictures rise.

Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust practices dual eschatology, cleverly infusing elements of the traditional apocalyptic with specifically American concerns, like the corruption of Hollywood and the disillusionment of those who emigrated from their hometowns to “live the dream.”

K. Edington notes, “The American dream has spun out of control and the images of apocalyptic vision suggest that the moral disarray of Hollywood anticipates the decline and fall of American society” (67).

Hollywood is a town made up of middle-Americans, all of whom seek something more exciting, more fruitful, and more fulfilling than what they thought they could find in their own hometowns. Hollywood is symbolically, if not quite geographically, the furthest point of the American frontier; thus, it is the epicenter of new hopes for fulfillment of the great American Dream.

The advent of the “Hollywood era” and its boom in production of motion pictures also signified, to West, among others, the destruction of literature as the popular art form. To West, motion pictures, as well as the actors, producers, and crew involved in their creation, were all phonies, presenting to the public flawed material which was digested as fact.

Thus, The Day of the Locust as a novel is “a symbol of crisis and upheaval, an emblem of the failure of mass culture and the danger of that betrayal” (Springer 443).

Characters as Grotesques

Perhaps the most notable argument in West’s narrative, though, and the true representative danger to American culture are the people which, in the novel, West equates to the Biblical locusts.

All of the main characters in The Day of the Locust are grotesques who seem not out of place in the Hollywood which West depicts; however, it is the characters who have been weighted down by the realization that their dreams have come to nothing who are, in fact, the narrative’s locusts.

These sad dreamers “end up at the edge of the western ocean” only to “riot in the eerie conclusion.” Indeed, they are “products of middle-America, the degraded descendents of the Populists, with no further frontiers to conquer” (Aaron 635).

Fiction and Reality

The Day of the Locust is a warning to those who would blur the lines of reality and fantasy; it is a reprimand to those who would trade a veteran medium in exchange for fast-paced, shiny pictures which offer up a paradise that does not exist.

It is prophetic of the angst and panic which will ensue when the American people realize that their great frontier is gone and that all their dreams have been gambled away on an unsustainable, badly crafted production set named Hollywood.

Aaron, Daniel. “Waiting for the Apocalypse.” Rev. of The Day of the Locust, by

Edington, K. “The Hollywood Novel: American Dream, Apocalyptic Vision.” Literature

Springer, John. “This is a riot you’re in’”: Hollywood and American Mass Culture in

Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. Literature Film Quarterly. 24.4 (1996): 439-44.

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