With its alternately overt and subtle use of symbolism, Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts" operates on three separate but interrelated symbolic levels: a simple symbolic level, in which objects, the people and events in a particular scene are representative of a small symptom of the general weariness felt by Miss Lonelyhearts; a more detailed symbolic level, in which objects, people and events in a number of scenes come together to represent the increasingly broad constituent elements of Miss Lonelyhearts' disillusionment; and a complex symbolic level, in which all of the above elements come together to represent Miss Lonelyhearts herself and the essence of her attraction to suffering. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get Original Essay Miss Lonelyhearts' frustration and torment first appear in "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Fat Thumb." “When he hit something, it would spill or roll on the ground.” Miss Lonelyhearts can't do anything right, not even simple things like picking up an object without dropping it. But more importantly, it can't fix anything in the larger picture of her overall life: her little foibles in "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Fat Thumb" are each, in their own way, symbolic of different aspects of her life as a whole. , and each is a microcosmic piece of the macrocosmic puzzle of its existence. “The collar buttons disappeared under the bed” – his professional appearance is a mess. “The tip of the pencil broke” – his career as a serious writer is in ruins. “The razor handle has fallen” – he cannot attend to even the simplest aspects of his purely biological human needs. “The window blind refused to stay down” – he has no privacy and the decline of his life is staged for all to see. “He fought back, but with too much violence” – he can’t even act properly according to his irrational animal urges. "...and [he] was definitely overcome by the spring of waking" - he is finally conquered by the boredom of his depressive daily routine. He runs away from his apartment into the street, only to find even more disorder, more than he can handle, until he realizes who he must turn to for some comfort - namely, Betty. Ultimately, he is also misled into doing this. “[Betty] had often made him feel that when she straightened his tie, she straightened it much more.” Of course it does, not only symbolic in itself of the overall influence Betty had on Miss Lonelyhearts' life, but also symbolic as a double meaning of the correlation between Betty and the order, between the order and a kind of sexual satisfaction. , and therefore between Betty and this same sexual satisfaction. But when Miss Lonelyhearts arrives at Betty's apartment, his idealized conception of her doesn't hold up to reality. “She arrived at her apartment door in a crisp white linen dressing gown whose edges had yellowed and turned brown.” It is shrouded in a varnish of purity that proves, upon closer inspection, to be somewhat tainted. This makes Miss Lonelyhearts self-conscious, and the only remedy for her self-consciousness is aggression: "only violence could make him pliable." But we of course remember that, previously, he was incapable of acting violently without ruining everything. Things are no different this time. “He tried to return her greeting and found his tongue had grown into a big thumb.” For someone who communicates with the world outside thehand, using his thumb - by means of words produced by his fingers rather than by his tongue or mouth - are we then to believe that the supposedly meaningful things he wishes to say to Betty would not be more valid or more deeper than the superficial advice he gives to the readers of his column? Certainly, his sudden contempt for Betty reflects his contempt for these readers, and not without reason: their romantic and sexual problems reflect his own romantic and sexual problems, and if Betty represents the source of these problems in his life, then, on a broader spectrum, people like Betty represent the source of these problems in her readers' lives: "Her world was not the world and could never include the readers of her column. She is, in effect, the spokesperson for her species, whose constant provocation of the emotional devastation of others constitutes the bulk of Miss Lonelyhearts' daily life. And if Betty embodies and symbolizes the cause of her romantic and sexual problems, and if people like her represent the cause of her readers' problems, and if her readers' problems are Miss Lonelyhearts' own problems - if they represent, in turn, everything he hates about his own life - so Betty is the umbrella under which resides all that is both seductive and disgusting: she is the repulsive beauty - a symbol, incarnate, for the hideousness of the unattainable ideal. But Miss Lonelyhearts has another place he turns to for refuge from the frustration Betty arouses in him: "He had blown his chances with Betty, so it should be Mary Shrike." Before meeting Mrs. Shrike in "Miss Lonelyhearts and Mrs. Shrike,” everything seems to have returned to some sort of order in his life. "From where he was, he could see the alarm clock. It was half past three." His routine now makes him complacent in his drunkenness. “He shaved, put on a clean shirt and a freshly ironed suit”: everything is under control again, at least on the surface. But beneath the surface he is not at ease, and this unease manifests itself in three ways: first, he is drunk, and he continues to drink: "He found some whiskey in the pharmacy and drank it. Alcohol, throughout the novel, symbolizes both Miss Lonelyhearts' sexual and romantic anxiety and the gateway to sexual experience; that is to say, these two symbols function in a complementary way in that alcohol alleviates one's anxiety in order to open the door to sexual experience (even if Mary Shrike refuses to accommodate it) because it does not can bring himself to initiate such an experience without being somewhat intoxicated. . Alcohol therefore represents the freedom of oneself. The second way Miss Lonelyhearts' discomfort manifests itself is through her purification process: "He undressed slowly and took a bath. The hot water did his body good" - he is clean after this bath, purified as if he had just been baptized, because the clothes he wore were those in which “he had been thrown the night before”. But even water can only refresh him physically, for the third way in which his uneasiness manifests itself is the observation that although alcohol frees him from himself and water gives him a newfound cleanliness, " his heart remained a piece of frozen water.” frozen fat. “Lonelyhearts,” we now see, is not just a pseudonym; it is also a self-prescribed adjective for one's personal identity. So when Shrike delivers his monologue to Miss Lonelyhearts, we realize just how frozen that piece of frozen fat must be. "My good friend," said Shrike, "I want to have a heart-to-heart talk with you. I love heart-to-heart talks and these days there are so few people you can really talk to." The ironyhere is that Miss Lonelyhearts' heart isn't really a heart at all; it's ice, it's cold and cannot be warmed by alcohol - which "only warmed the lining of his stomach" - nor by hot water, nor by coffee, nor by exercise ; in fact, he believes that only sex can warm his heart, and that's not something Shrike can offer - how, then, is a "heart-to-heart" even possible? “It's better to clean things up than to let them fester in the depths of your soul,” Shrike says, although that's exactly what Miss Lonelyhearts does. Additionally, even though he consciously seeks sex to warm his heart, Miss Lonelyhearts couldn't escape the omniscience of "sex" if he tried: Shrike repeatedly talks about "taking stock" of things, and of course, Miss Lonelyhearts' sexual impulses are triggered by the observation of a "stone tree [casting] a long, stiff shadow." .. elongating in rapid jerks... red and swollen in the dying sun, as if it were about to burst forth a load of granite seeds. The phallic pillar is not so much symbolic of sexuality in general as of Miss Lonelyhearts' need to express her own sexuality; he observes that his shadow does not lengthen "not as shadows usually lengthen", and because of his unusual perception of this shadow, we are led to believe that it is all in his head. It is with this uneasiness under control that he visits Marie. Shrike, his only alternative to Betty, even though she resembles Betty in symbolic terms. The literal difference between Mary Shrike and Betty is made clear in the realization that "only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile", and as he has already carried out his violence on Betty, he now seeks Mrs. Shrike for sexual relations. However, before meeting her, he notices a poster in Delehanty's advertising mineral water, which depicts "a naked girl made modest by the mist rising from the spring at her feet." Although her figure is largely obscured, her breasts are not, and Miss Lonelyhearts cannot help but think of Mrs. Shrike when he sees the poster, and so the illusion is ruined: the water, to which the naked woman is intrinsically linked, no longer a purifying force as when he took his bath; he was corrupted on an exciting sexual level. As a result, Miss Lonelyhearts "felt colder than before she started thinking about women" - the ice in her heart is growing stronger, not melting, and once again, women are the cause of the problem. Mrs. Shrike thus becomes Betty: attractive, but destructive and inaccessible not in a sexual sense, but in an emotionally fulfilling sense. On the aforementioned detailed symbolic level, the two women develop a symbolic partnership in Miss Lonelyhearts' mind to represent women in general, and on a more complex symbolic level, women in general come to symbolize the root cause of her problems. , can he turn around? There's only one way Miss Lonelyhearts can melt the ice in his heart: it's to follow a path he would recommend to all his problem readers if only she didn't become the butt of Shrike's jokes: “Christ [is] the answer.” But in "Miss Lonelyhearts Pays a Visit," which directly follows the spinoff of "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Cripple," Miss Lonelyhearts finds Christ through Shrike's jokes on the subject, not just in spite of them: "He smiled at Shrike like the saints are supposed to have smiled at those who were about to martyr them With this new false confidence, he dismisses Shrike and turns his attention to the cripple, Doyle, and once again,alcohol is both a symbol and a means of liberating oneself. This becomes a real source of confidence: "They left the speakeasy together, both very drunk and very busy: Doyle with the wrongs he had suffered and Miss Lonelyhearts with the triumphant thing that his humility had become." In the scene that follows, Miss Lonelyhearts dines with Doyle and his wife, and unlike Betty and Mrs. Shrike who do not react, Mrs. Doyle openly expresses her desire for Miss Lonelyhearts. Her husband naturally disapproves of this, and the ensuing argument takes a surreal turn when Mrs. Doyle "rolled a newspaper into a club and hit her husband in the mouth with it... He growled like a dog and grabbed the newspaper in his teeth. When she let go of his tip, he fell on all fours and continued the imitation on the floor. The diary largely symbolizes Miss Lonelyhearts himself, his work and his reputation - he writes for the diary - and there is a certain irony in seeing one of the readers of his column take this diary and use it to address the subject of his letter to Miss Lonelyhearts in his mouth; Miss Lonelyhearts' words, literally, "go to the dogs", and two individuals who would otherwise be the very subject of her column seize the medium in which this column appears and use it not only to attack and silence each other , but like a toy that they tear apart. Symbolically therefore, Miss Lonelyhearts deteriorates in front of this couple as much as it had deteriorated earlier, in “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Fat Thumb”. "[Doyle] growled like a dog and grabbed the newspaper in his teeth" – once again, Miss Lonelyhearts' career is in ruins, and he has found himself in a situation that would otherwise only involve the readers of his column. He is therefore not superior to his readers, nor qualified to give them advice, because he is one of them. "Miss Lonelyhearts tried to get the cripple to stand up and bend over to lift him; but, in doing so, Doyle tore Miss Lonelyhearts' fly, then rolled over on his back laughing wildly" and again, the intimacy of Miss Lonelyhearts, in fact, her sexuality is open and exposed for everyone to see. "[Mrs. Doyle] turned away with a snort of contempt." Once again, women in general are the “repulsive beauty”. What alternative is there? "The cripple returned the smile to [Miss Lonelyhearts] and held out her hand. Miss Lonelyhearts shook it, and they stayed like that, smiling and holding hands, until Mrs. Doyle came into the room. piece. “What a sweet pair of fairies you guys are,” she said. “Again, Miss Lonelyhearts’ sexuality is a problem area for him, especially as her orientation is called into question. But rather than turning to violence, as he did before Betty, or to despair, as before Mrs. Shrike, Miss Lonelyhearts turns to the ways of Christ - he turns to compassion - and offers Mrs. Doyle's advice on how to take care of her. husband. And once again, he fails to do things correctly, he makes a mistake: "From the first words... he had failed to capture the strength of his heart and had contented himself with writing a column for his newspaper." We have come full circle and now see that Miss Lonelyhearts' misadventures in "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Fat Thumb" and "Miss Lonelyhearts and Mrs. Shrike” are, on a smaller scale, symptomatic of the greatest misadventures of his exceptionally misguided life. , and these same misadventures reach their climax in "Miss Lonelyhearts Pays a Visit". "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Fat Thumb" opens with the words: "Miss Lonelyhearts found herself developing an almost insane sensitivity to order" - in fact, we could call it.