The Analysis of The Loved One - Essay Example

The Loved One-Evelyn Waugh Evelyn Waugh’s seminal novel The Loved Ones is filled with gritty characters. Reading throughthe book, I still felt the topics it covers are so topical. The satirized traits, including funeral practices, the singing phoniness and the back stage venality are some of the topical issues that are packed in the novel. Come to think of it, these concerns are recent and absurd today despite the fact that Evelyn Waugh ridiculed them a generation ago. I loved reading this book since the ridicule provided me with the delight. Looking at it through perspectives, the absurdity of those traits of the American mass culture that are depicted in the book as evident from today’s mass culture from which they view themselves as being set apart. In the novel Waugh is their spokesman and not their attacker per se. In effect, The Loved One is a totally interesting and funny book. And it goes without saying that the book is finny in a current approach. The book is filled with the anticipation of almost two decades of the modern fashion for dark humor. Waugh treats painful subjects, especially death comically. The Loved One is a story about the desecrated child of a sullied land. The lead character Aimee Thanatogenos, whose name is borrowed from the doubtful revivalist of the Twenties Semple McPherson, which means in reality beloved, combines a somehow restricted natural intelligence with a complete lack of education. Her last name ironically means the tribe of death Waugh (12-22). Leafing through the book The Loved One, one discovers that the novel is not specifically observant or informative, because the objects of its irony are so evidently absurd that they require only be explained to satirize themselves. One thing is clear though: that Waugh was not keen on showing the readers the irrationality of things they had preceding taken seriously. The irony is the book is superficial, not penetrating the surface of stupidity to any essential idealistic irrationality. Arguably, Waugh’ irony is not combined by a central theme. Rather, his objects appear to merely loose miscellany of ridiculous traditions he happened to stumbled upon around Los Angeles. The Loved One plot is somehow faulty. The leading character, Dennis Barlow, has been used chiefly as a witness of things to the satirized. There is arguably no essential meaning evolving from his encounters, including his love engagement to Aimee, the mortuary cosmetician. Their affair, not in itself an object of irony, appears a somehow a parenthesis for plot interest to please the famous taste. Entertaining but phony irony and week structure contrive the whole meaning of the novel. However, Waugh’s strongpoint is his perception of the ridiculousness of most of what he mocked; although no one had satirized it so professionally. In The Loved One, Waugh does infiltrate to a crucial philosophical stupidity, which does comprise a theme by which the irony of the novel is combined. In effect, the Dennis Barlow’s profession, specifically, with regard to his relationship with Aimee, does denote a special meaning, maybe the most crucial in the book (Waugh 26-28). Aimee has been to a local University; however at no point in her profession has she learned anything about actual beauty. Ideally, beauty for her is one of the facilitating factors that assist her to find happiness as cosmetician at that meretricious moneymaker of a graveyard, Whispering Glades. Evidently, there is nothing about Aimee that makes sense. She views herself as an atheist because of, not in spite of, her progressive ideologies. She carries herself with an air of virginal pride. Most surprising is that her jarring word for decorous is morality. Aimee’s response to the attraction of a handsome young man remains impartially implicit. It is a drive that she cannot clearly recognize because to do so would be vulgar. Aimee is also capable of mistaking gratefulness for love. In the world that Evelyn Waugh has created, she is remarkably doomed. Two suitors tender for her hand. One is Dennis Barlow, a destitute poet from England. Barlow keep s his source of earnings, which is analogous her own, to himself, and Aimee does not find out that he works at a pet cemetery till quite near the end. Dennis prudently sends Aimee pieces of poems which he not composed himself. He is an genial chap, and Waugh establishes us to adore him. However, the reader comes to see that he is not a knightly hero. The other man who bids for Aimee’s hand is Joyboy, the head embalmer at Whispering Glades cemetery. He is far less palatable that Dennis Barlow (Waugh 50-55). For Aimee’s part, she is beleaguered by admiration for Mr. Joyboy, and falls prey, in principle, the moment her offers to promote her to his own department. When the two go out on the first date, he Mr. Joyboy fails of success when she meets the outrageous mother with whom she lives with. Aimee is then caught between a hard place and a rock when she is unable to decide between the men. Resolutely, Aimee consults her sister, Guru Brahmin, in reality an out-and-out drunk who advises her to jump off the bus. There are numerous themes in The Loved One. The first is the theme of faux-simple children’s story. Waugh has creatively ramifying them from time to time into irony. It is the theme that has first been introduced in the novel and of the British society. In Love One, irony compacts about the trait of Sir Ambrose Abercrombie. He is doyen who adopts aristocracy and puts in force the comme il faut. Sir Ambrose marks out acting as career similar to the three customarily gentlemanly ones. In doing so, he makes acting in California sound as if it were white man’s burden. Sarcastic or not, the tone in which Waugh depicts Sir Ambrose, blunt when it’s not honest. It arguably asserts that you understand where your position is with the limeys. The author of the book implements also mock-heroic attitudes for specific flight of hostile irony. He evidently, remarkably achieves this when he depicts Aimee, with the most approximate floridity, decision to commit suicide (Waugh 60). The essential theme of The Loved One starts to appear when one glances underneath the dissimilarities between its two chief objects of irony: Megalopolitan Studio and Whispering Glade cemetery; these two things perceive an essential similarity. The purpose of the cemetery is just apparently the plain business of dumping the dead. It chief purpose, like that of Megalopolitan Studio, is the clear intricate business of pressing a show. The lead characters are the dead. Waugh’s irony of another primary target, the Hollywood British colony, shows their embroidery of truth into a spurious manifestation recognizable to the movie studios. Delusions, tricks, and false forms infiltrate The Loved One. There is food, luscious looking peaches that have stones and taste like cotton. The approach with which Waugh presents the British attitudes about Los Angeles, while introducing the primary theme of delusion supplemented for truth. Waugh in some places does concentrate ironically on truth also; however to just show what lies behind a delusion. Consequently, behind the glamour and the sappiness of movie production Waugh reveals to us the insipid brutality of studio executives firing Sir Francis after twenty years’ service, and thus far pushes him to suicide. Behind the character of Mr. Joyboy, the prodigy undertaker of Whispering Glades, vested in dignity and adorned with embalming university degree, Waugh shows us the spiteful truth (Waugh 59-75) In The Loved One world of delusion and phoniness, Waugh achieves something potent with the character of Dennis Barlow and his relationship with Aimee Thanatogenos. Dennis Barlow has been presented by Waugh as somehow mysterious and, on the other hand, somewhat a less palatable young man. It is quite absurd that Dennis out Aimee’s body inside an animal crematory and calmly read a book whilst it burns. The author has marked out Dennis Barlow as a total pragmatist among all the delusion, apart perhaps from in his admiration for Aimee. Some of the delusion appeals to him, specifically Whispering Glades. Thus far, Dennis Barlow is somewhat skeptically extraneous about that place, about Happier Hunting Ground. He is also skeptical about Mr. Joyboy, about Sir Ambrose amid other things. To start with, Dennis Barlow is Waugh’s ironical spectator and spokesman inside the book. Aimee Thanatogenos, conversely, is a total devotee of delusion, with a crazy sincerity of belief that appears to one of her admiration for Dennis Barlow. For besides being a pragmatist, Dennis is a committed poet. Formerly, noticing that writing for the studio would wreck him as a poet, he had taken flight to the job at the pet cemetery, where he had extra time to write (Waugh 80). I would recommend this book to any avid reader who has not read it yet since it is hilarious and, while it’s highly entertaining, it is descriptive. The book teaches as the intricacies that are often associated with emigration and nationalities. It teaches us about the subjective British colonial mentality. I would love to read more of Evelyn Waugh’s books because his brilliant style fizzes with enthusiasm. Also Waugh’s funny and witty writing makes one look forward to the next page. Work Cited Waugh, Evelyn. The Loved One. New York: Little Brown, and Company, 2004. Print. Read More