Literature Analysis: The Loved Ones

1. The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh is a story about a British poet who moves to Hollywood, California trying to pursue a career as a poet. Unfortunately for his dreams, he is forced to take a job as a mortician at a local pet cemetery. One day he is planning a ceremony and meet a girl named Aimee Thanatogenos. She is a cosmetician, and he tries to woo her by reciting British poetry that he claims is his own. The conflict arises when Mr. Joyboy enters the picture and both men have to compete for Aimee’s love and affection.
2. The theme of the novel is disillusionment and dreams. The protagonist, Dennis, is an expatriate from Britain who moves to Hollywood trying to fulfill his dream of being a poet. He does not know that Hollywood is also known as the “City of Broken Dreams” and is disillusioned by his naive hope.
3. The author, Evelyn Waugh, had a comedic but dark tone in this novel. She spoke grimly of death and painted detailed pictures using grotesque adjectives, but displayed it in a comic way. For example when she described Dennis, “A young man of sensibility rather than of sentiment. He had lived his twenty-eight years at arm’s length from violence, but he came of a generation which enjoys a vicarious intimacy with death.” The second example is, “As he said this there came vividly into Dennis’s mind that image lurked there, seldom out of sight for long; the sack or body suspended and the face above with eyes red and horribly startling from their sockets, the cheeks mottled in indigo like the morbid end-papers of ledger and the tongue swollen and protruding like an end of a black sausage.” In this last example, the author describes Dennis’s first thoughts of Aimee. “Her hair was dark and straight, her brows wide, her skin transparent and untarnished by the sun. Her lips were artificially tinctured, no doubt, but not coated like her sisters’ and clogged in all their delicate pores with crimson grease; they seemed to promise instead an unmeasured range of sensual converse. Her full face was oval, her profile pure and classical and light. Her eyes greenish and remote, with a rich glint of lunacy.”
4. Five literary elements in this novel include protagonist, minor character, plot, setting, and narrator. The protagonist in this novel is Dennis. He is the hero and main character of this novel.