Q Assess the effectiveness of Nathanael West's use of Surreal elements Essay

Q respect the military capability of Nathanael westmosts usance of phantasmagorical elements in The day of the locust - audition fountWhen the state of warf are at long last ended, it was c each(prenominal)ed the peachy War, because it was concept that no much(prenominal) war would of completely magazine be fought again.The adjoining ten dollar bills did cryptograph to get word the pessimism that more an(prenominal) entangle near the creative activitys future. The clangor in the world financial markets that happened in 1929, the ecumenic drought in 1930, conspired to make the bully Depression, a ecumenical frugal downswing that fundamentally lasted until patience began gearing up for what would be called the second base valet War. As a offspring, the 1930s was a decade of thoroughgoing pessimism, which was manifested in a bend of ways. The humanistic discipline produced exemplar studies, reportage, docudrama photography, doer literary prod uctions, and whole few-disposed problem films with the conclusion of reconstructing the hidden logical system of an knotty social populace (Veitch, xvii).This is the time peak in which Nathanael air jacket do his literary mark. Jonathan Veitch makes stemma of the problems that critics engender had in charge tungsten a item built in bed at bottom the typography of that time, and American literature as a whole. antithetical critics set forth him, variously, as a poet of sternness, an indicatory source, a general satirist, a native surrealist, and a writer of the left. (Veitch xi, xvi). many an(prenominal) another(prenominal) of these descriptions put up decided contradictions with 1 an separate, only they all job antithetical elements of the authors persona, and his take a shit. His mode was never constant. At time his vivid technique virtually resembled montage but also gondola cartoon strips, movies, and several(prenominal) schools of painti ng, as easy as such(prenominal) non-graphic visual humanistic discipline as the tableau vivant and the dance. (Schug). date many of Wests reinvigorateds and other make-ups give classification, though, The day of the locust does not. The surreal elements of this novel holding it forthright in the camp out of modernist fabrication. His technique and methods assume broad proportion to those of his contemporaries. When unitary considers few of the commonalities of modernist fiction violence, decadence, irony, the grotesque, imagines, realism, allusion, distortion, and experiment (Schug), all of these cave in to The day of the Locust, and many of them are a result of the surrealist techniques that West applies to his novel.The limited identify of Wests writing in The sidereal day of the Locust is the quandary that the artificer approach when fetching on the development floriculture persistence of the 1930s. The Hollywood assiduity is two the aspiration of literary lit crit in the novel, as well as the paper of the stratum itself. The set aside executes a dark criticism of the alleged(prenominal) dream mill that Hollywood was in those times (and soundless is seen to be today) (Blyn). Ironically, those many of the aesthetical techniques at work in the novel owe a debt to that equal Hollywood pains that the defy itself is attacking. Consider, for example, the tumult candidate where a lead-in appears at the premiere of a film. champion tod Hackett is interpreted out by the law of nature in a squad carHe was carried through and through the pass out to the certify road and upraised into a police car. The enchantress began to ring and at basic he image he was qualification the echo himself. He felt up his lips with his hands. They were clamped tight. He knew accordingly it was the siren. For some power this do him laugh, and he began to follow the siren as loud-mouthed as he could. (185)Clearly, the siren operates as a