The Day Of The Locust Analysis

The Day of the Locust, by Nathaniel West, explores the harsh realities and effects of living in Los Angeles. West uses the degradation of his main characters as his example of how Los Angeles changes people. Through the lives and experiences of Tod, and Homer, the readers see the ways the city alters one’s characteristics from one that is greatly ambitious, into one that is extremely arrogant. Additionally, the novel highlights the fallacy of how Los Angeles is known as the “land of dreams”. Instead, West makes it clear that Los Angeles is actually the land where dreams come to die. Throughout the course of the novel, West focuses on showing the degradation of Homer from being harmless into one that is consumed by the nature of Los Angeles …show more content…
The first feature one would notice is the specific diction used to describe the character. It is easy to conclude how harmless and vulnerable Homer is by the consistent use of words like “struggle”, “afraid”, and “laboriously”. The author uses these words specifically in some of the first paragraphs of introducing Homer to ensure that the reader gets the idea of how timid Homer is. Additionally, the syntactic structure throughout this whole passage is a great representation of Homer’s thought process. Seeing how abrupt each sentence is, one can conclude that this is a description of an internal process, and specifically that Homer is very impulsive and makes quick judgements. Each sentence in this passage is purposefully using the minimum number of syllables to get the point across. The author seems to be doing this to embody how surface-level Homer’s thought is. This definitely causes the reader to not see Homer as any threat to society; if anything, society is a threat to him. This vulnerability stems from the idea that he only has internal conflicts, which he is barely managing to cope with. The addition of external conflicts from a city like LA is detrimental to a person who is already caught up in all the problems going inside his head. This whole passage merely illustrates a scene of him taking a nap, but the rising problems in what is meant to be a simple task shows how Homer overcomplicates these things. It shows how Homer’s main conflicts occur internally; he is trying to figure out how to control his body and the way he thinks. Clearly, he is introduced as a completely harmless and gentle creature and one that could never be a threat to