With its alternately overt and subtle use of symbolism, Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts" functions on three separate but interconnected symbolic levels: a simple symbolic level, in which objects, people and events in a particular scene are representative of a small symptom of the general tiredness experienced by Miss Lonelyhearts; a more detailed symbolic level, in which objects, people, and events in multiple scenes come together to represent the larger, broader building blocks of Miss Lonelyhearts' disillusionment; and a complex symbolic level, where 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Miss Lonelyhearts' frustration and torment come to the fore for the first time in "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Fat Thumb." “When it touched something, it fell over or rolled on the floor.” Miss Lonely Hearts can't do anything right, even simple things like picking up an object without dropping it. But more importantly, he fails to fix anything in the bigger picture of his overall life: his little foibles in "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Fat Thumb" are each, in their own way, symbolic of different aspects of his life in his complex. , and each is a microcosmic piece of the macrocosmic puzzle of his existence. “The collar buttons disappeared under the bed” – his professional appearance is in disarray. "The tip of the pencil is broken": his career as a serious writer is in crisis. “The razor handle has fallen off” – he cannot even take care of the simplest aspects of his purely biological human needs. “The window curtain refused to stay down” – he has no privacy and the decay of his life is staged for all to see. “He reacted, but too violently” – he can’t even properly act on his irrational animalistic impulses. “…and [he] was finally defeated by the sound of the alarm clock” – he is ultimately overcome by the boredom of his depressing daily routine. He flees from his apartment into the streets, only to find even more clutter, more than he can bear, until he realizes who he needs to turn to for some reassurance: namely, Betty. Ultimately, he too is misled into doing this. "[Betty] had often made him feel that when she fixed his tie, she fixed it a lot more." Of course it is so, being not only symbolic in itself of the overall influence that Betty once had on Miss Lonelyhearts' life, but also being symbolic as a double entendre of the correlation between Betty and order, between order and a sort of sexual satisfaction. , and therefore between Betty and that same sexual satisfaction. But when Miss Lonelyhearts arrives at Betty's apartment, his idealized conception of her doesn't hold up to reality. “He arrived at the door of his apartment in a crisp white linen dressing gown that yellowed to brown at the edges.” It is cloaked in a patina of purity that turns out, upon closer inspection, to be somehow contaminated. This makes Miss Lonelyhearts self-conscious, and the only cure for her self-consciousness is aggression: "only violence could make it pliable." But of course we remember that, before, he was unable to act violently without ruining everything. Things are no different this time. “He tried to return his greeting and found that his tongue had grown into a fat thumb.” For someone who communicates with the outside world with his hands, using his thumb - through words produced by his fingers rather than thehis tongue, or from his mouth - are we then to believe that the apparently significant things he wishes to say to Betty would not be more valid or profound than the superficial advice he gives to readers of his column? Of course, his sudden disdain for Betty mirrors his disdain for those readers, and not without reason: their romantic and sexual problems mirror his own romantic and sexual problems, and if Betty represents the source of those problems in his life, then, on a broader spectrum, people like Betty represent the source of those problems in her readers' lives: "Her world was not the world and could never have included the readers of her column." She is, in effect, the spokesperson of her species, whose constant provocation of the emotional devastation of others constitutes the majority 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 hates its own life - then Betty is the umbrella under which resides everything that is at once seductive and disgusting: she is the repulsive beauty - a symbol, made flesh, of the horror of the unattainable ideal. But Miss Lonelyhearts has another place he turns to seek refuge from the frustration Betty stirs up within him: "She'd ruined her chances with Betty, so it should be Mary Shrike." Before meeting Mrs. Shrike in "Miss Lonelyhearts and Mrs. Shrike", everything seems to be back in some sort of order in his life. "From where he lay 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 uncomfortable, and this discomfort is made evident in three ways. First of all, he is drunk and continues to drink: "He found some whiskey in the medicine cabinet and drank it." Alcohol, throughout the novel, is symbolic of both Miss Lonelyhearts' sexual and romantic anxiety and the gateway to sexual experience; that is, these two symbols function in a complementary way to the extent that alcohol relieves his anxiety to open the door to sexual experience (even if Mary Shrike refuses to welcome it) since he cannot bring himself to begin such an experience without being in some drunken way. . Alcohol, therefore, represents freedom from oneself. The second way Miss Lonelyhearts' discomfort manifests itself is through her purification process: "She slowly undressed and took a bath. The warm water made her body feel good" - after this bath she is clean, purified as if had just been baptized, because the clothes he was wearing were the same ones in which "he had been thrown the night before". But even water can only refresh him physically, because the third way in which his discomfort becomes evident is through the observation that, even if alcohol gives him freedom from himself and water gives him a newfound cleanliness, « his heart remained a clot of congealed blood." frozen fat." "Lonelyhearts," we now see, is not just a pseudonym; it is also a self-prescribed adjective for his personal identity. And so, when Shrike delivers his monologue to Miss Lonelyhearts, we realize how frozen that must be piece of frozen fat. “My good friend,” says 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 actually talk to." The irony here is that Miss Lonelyhearts' heart isn't a heart at all; it's ice, it's cold and not can be heated neither by alcohol - which "theonly warmed the stomach lining" - neither from hot water, nor from coffee, nor from exercise; in fact, he believes that only sex can warm his heart, and this is not something Shrike can offer - how is this possible, so, a "heart to heart talk"? "It's better to clear things up than to let them fester in the depths of one's soul," says Shrike, even though that's exactly what Miss Lonelyhearts is doing. Furthermore, even if she consciously seeks the sex to warm the heart, Miss Lonelyhearts can't escape the omniscience of "sex" if she tried: Shrike talks several times about "cleaning the breasts" of things, and of course Miss Lonelyhearts' sexual urges are triggered by the sighting of a "well of stone [casting] a long, stiff shadow. .. stretching in rapid spurts... red and swollen in the dying sun, as if about to shed 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 the shadow lengthens "not as shadows usually lengthen" and, due to his unusual perception of this shadow, we are led to believe that it is all in his head who visits Mary Shrike, his only alternative to Betty, although she is similar to Betty in symbolic terms. The literal difference between Mary Shrike and Betty is made evident by the knowledge that "only friction could make him hot or violence make him mobile. ", and since he has already exercised his violence on Betty he now seeks out Mrs. Shrike for sex. However, before meeting her, he notices a poster in the advertisement for Delehanty's mineral water, which depicts "a naked girl made modest by the fog that rose from the spring to his feet." Although her figure is largely obscured, her breasts are not, and Miss Lonelyhearts cannot help but think of Mrs. Shrike when she sees the poster, and so the illusion is ruined: the water, to which the naked woman it is intrinsically linked, it is no longer a purifying force as it was when it bathed; has been corrupted on a titillating sexual level. As a result, Miss Lonelyhearts "felt colder than before she started thinking about women" - the ice in her heart strengthens, doesn't melt, and once again, women are the cause of the problem. Mrs. Shrike thus becomes Betty: seductive, but destructive and unattainable not in a sexual sense, but emotionally satisfying. At the detailed symbolic level mentioned above, the two women develop a symbolic partnership in Miss Lonelyhearts' mind to represent women in general, and at a more complex symbolic level, women in general come to symbolize the root cause of her problems. Where, then, can he turn? There's only one way Miss Lonelyhearts can melt the ice in her heart; is to follow a path that he would recommend to all his troubled readers if only he weren't the butt of Shrike's jokes: "Christ [is] the answer." But in "Miss Lonelyhearts Pays a Visit," which directly follows the confrontation in "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Cripple," Miss Lonelyhearts finds Christ because of Shrike's jokes on the subject, not simply in spite of them: "She smiled at Shrike, as one supposes that the saints smiled at those who were about to martyr them." With this newfound false confidence, he dismisses Shrike and turns his attention to the cripple, Doyle, and once again, alcohol is both a symbol and a conduit for freedom from oneself. It becomes a real source of confidence: "They left the speakeasy together, both very drunk and very busy: Doyle with the wrongs she had suffered and Miss Lonelyhearts with the triumphant thing that her humility had become." In the scene that follows, Miss Lonelyhearts dines with Doyle and his wife and, unlike Betty and Mrs. Shrikewho do not respond, 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 bat 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 end, he fell to his hands and knees and continued the imitation on the floor." The newspaper is largely symbolic of Miss Lonelyhearts herself, her work and her reputation - she writes for the newspaper - and there is a certain amount of irony in seeing one of the readers of her column take that newspaper and use it to target the subject of his letter to Miss Lonelyhearts in his mouth; Miss Lonelyhearts' words are, literally, "being fed to the dogs," and two individuals who would otherwise be the very subject of her column take over the medium in which that column appears and use it not only to attack and silence each other , but but like a toy that they tear to shreds. Symbolically, then, Miss Lonelyhearts decays before this couple as much as it deteriorated before, in "Miss Lonelyhearts and the Fat Thumb." "[Doyle] growled like a dog and took the newspaper between his teeth" - once again, Miss Lonelyhearts' career hangs in the balance, and he has found himself in a situation that would otherwise only involve readers of his column. He is therefore not superior to his readers, he is not qualified to give them advice, because he is one of them. "Miss Lonelyhearts tried to get the cripple up, and stooped to lift him up; but, as she did so, Doyle tore Miss Lonelyhearts' fly, then rolled onto her back, laughing wildly" and once again, Miss Lonelyhearts' Privacy, in effects his sexuality, it is open and on display for all to see. "[Mrs. Doyle] turned away with a snort of contempt." Again, women in general are the "repulsive beauty". What alternative is there? The cripple smiled back [Miss Lonelyhearts] and held out his hand. Miss Lonelyhearts shook it, and they remained like that, smiling and holding hands, until Mrs. Doyle came back into the room. “What a sweet pair of fairies you boys are.” , he said." Once again Miss Lonelyhearts' sexuality is a problem area for him, especially as his orientation is called into question. But instead of resorting to violence, as she did before Betty, or desperation, as she did before Mrs. Shrike, Miss Lonelyhearts turns to the ways of Christ - turns to compassion - and offers Mrs. Doyle advice on how to care for her . Husband. And once again he can't get it right, he messes up: "With the first words... he had failed to harness the strength in his heart and had simply written an article 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 greater misadventures of her exceptionally misguided life. , and those same incidents reach a 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" - indeed, we might question the validity of the "almost" disclaimer. When he visits Betty, he finds that "her [sense of order] was not [significant]" - naturally, since she is not the symbol of order. The same goes for Mrs. Shrike: "I had a hard time... When I was a child, I watched my mother die. She had breast cancer and the pain was terrible." It's a disaster; a symbol and a walking prototype of the address book of.