Miller begins his study [in his series of short fictions Mezzotints] by creating a clichéd image of society as a limiting environment which forces individuals into a patterned existence based on work and sleep. This concept affords no new insights into human nature but is a typical device used in the 1920's by writers who wished to study the "types" of people who inhabit New York. The routine Miller depicts of rising early to go to work and returning home to sleep, shows that he views man as a machine with no power or control over life and the world. (pp. 11-12)

The "Mezzotint," "Dawn Travellers," depicts the Williamsberg, Brooklyn world that Miller knows best…. These "Dawn Travellers" appear to be little more than drones, as Miller borrows Dostoevsky's metaphor of the "ant hill."… (p. 12)

[The] sick reality that characterizes a society of one dimensional people whose lives are monotones and who live in a dead world beneath the earth's surface forms the basis for Miller's term "cancer," an incurable disease that eats away at and destroys our society. The metaphor for this death is the subway, a machine that carries one from the land of the living and deposits one in the grave. This idea obviously haunted Miller's imagination; for, during this same era, his short story "Glittering Pie" uses this same image of death, as a train literally carries men and women to their end. Demise is the harsh reality that one faces again and again at dawn when one becomes a "Dawn Traveller" and perceives one's lot….

The living death the workers experience horrifies Miller, who feels obligated to raise man above his meager lot in life. He accomplishes this transformation by calling him "the Great Beast," "Him," and "He." In each case, man's name is raised in capital letters and praised by the bard who sees man elevated above the role of beast of burden. Miller feels compelled to help men because they are his fellow beings, men who have suffered, like Miller, to attain an "American dream" of success. By "success," Miller does not mean the conventionally accepted better paying job; social prosperity appalls him. What he deems "success" is man's belief in and his attempt to reach his dream. (p. 13)

Besides hope, a second device that Miller uses to escape death's horror is humor. For when he entitles his following "Mezzotint," "If You're Dying, Choose a Mausoleum," he uses this undertaker's advertisement to mock the money making behind American success, a system which he believes finds its basis in undermining one man so that another can monetarily prosper. (pp. 13-14)

The need to find a better way of life comes with the realization that most men and women are takers. These entrepreneurs exploit others for their own personal gain. Such self-oriented beings are metaphorically depicted by Miller in his image of "Circe," the title of another "Mezzotint."… [The] everyday world of the subway [depicted in "Circle"] lacks the development of the images of the sewers and urinals found in Tropic of Cancer, and shows that the Miller who created the Mezzotints could not depict his environment as well as he would nine years later in Tropic…. Neither Tropic nor Mezzotints is a book of dreams. Each recounts the experiences that make up Henry Miller's "reality." For when he talks about the life in the streets of New York and Paris, he cannot couch the spit and urine in artistic images of love and beauty that are totally inapplicable to his life. It is for this reason that Circe cannot be described as having a Greek, Roman, or celestial nose. She must possess a real one and below it a mouth that is "gaping" and "red," for she is clearly a carnivorous animal, a meat-eater who is "carnal" and "lust[ing]" because her lips are "parched" and "seared" as they drain men of their blood and passions, leaving them empty shells.

The metaphor of the "vamp" who forces one to experience a living death is transformed into that of the whore when Miller's "Dance Hall" "Mezzotint" depicts the world as a place where one pays his nickel to have one's fun and lose one's virtue…. The puppets and machines that he creates by describing their mechanical and sexual movements are beings who "fuse" together, not as lovers, but as lusting animals who pay their nickels, dance, have sex, and then worry about an absurd sense of virtue totally unrelated to real life. These same beings, who are resurrected in the Tropics, make their first appearance in Mezzotints when Miller mocks their false morality by questioning our social standards…. (pp. 14-15)

This self-centered philosophy of survival leads to the creation of limited people. To Miller, life means much more than just endurance. He sees a more complete person as one who can integrate dreams and realities. This multi-faceted existence becomes the focus of the "Mezzotint," "The Awakening," a fiction about a man who hungers for a dream lover yet feels compelled to give her up for his wife and a life based on the struggling and fighting that Miller feels compose marital happiness—a many dimensional existence that carries him beyond the simplistic realm of dreams…. [A] basic realization that one's ideals are not equal to one's dreams provides Miller's protagonist with the first step in his movement towards self-awareness. The next step entails the growth of the individual to the point where he finds himself able to cope with the split between his dreams and actuality…. The cyclonic nature of this fiction seems most apparent when one realizes that the protagonist begins at home and ends up in the same place despite his journey. Yet he has left the confined world of the closely knit family for an adventure that Miller's married protagonist later experiences in Capricorn and The Rosy Crucifixion. Through the actual event of leaving home, he perceives a new path in his life, a road that affords him both peace and misery. By using the word "contrast" in this "Mezzotint," Miller suggests that a dual reality exists, a world that one must experience through getting beyond the escapes of home and sleep, and beyond the protective world of one's wife and child.

The reality that one finds by leaving the family's womb does not have to be the base, nightmarish world of "Dawn Travellers" or that of "Dance Hall" people. Instead, one can and should use one's experience to get beyond the depressing and grotesque aspects of life by rising out of the gutters and finding a world between heaven and earth, a state where base reality has been interwoven with the dream of an ideal existence, as in the final "Mezzotint," a "Bowery Phoenix." The combined image of man's baseness intertwined with his hopes leads Miller to present a dual being who appears as a gargoyle when seen in the earth's muck and mire, yet who becomes beautiful when he rises above his station…. By describing beings tied to the earth as "squat," "little," "monsters," "ugly," "misshapen," "bowlegged," and "devils," Miller shows that the men of our world who go nowhere and aspire toward nothing are grotesque beings whose minds are distorted because they fail to perceive change through growth. These monsters watch the world go by them instead of thinking and expanding their consciousness. To move forward, one must turn within and must realize one's physical and psychological short comings. Once aware of himself, man must aspire to rise above the world of limitation and must experience a new, "bronze" self. By hammering out a new being with a more positive and more realistic conception of himself, like Miller's protagonist in a "Bowery Phoenix," and like his later depictions of Thoreau and Whitman, Miller demonstrates his belief that man can and must move to a state of consciousness that displaces his basic acceptance of fear and limitation.

In this world combining such extremes as the bowery and the phoenix, Miller reaches a Whitmanesque realization that men are both saints and sinners. It is this knowledge that man has all possibilities which allows Miller's protagonist finally to accept his lot and flow with what he calls "life's river" in Tropic of Cancer, to enter and become one with both ancient and modern Greece in The Colossus of Maroussi, and to live the life of a pioneer united with the land, mountains, and sea in Big Sur And The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. Thus we see that although Mezzotints is an immature work, the images and metaphors it contains form the basis for Miller's literary ideas. His realization that life involves a process of growth that begins with self-awareness and leads to respecting others and finally moves to one's use of one's knowledge of people and one's world to change one's environment through expanding one's own consciousness, first takes shape in the sketches that compose Mezzotints, a collection of seven broadsides that form the basis for all of Henry Miller's major writings. (pp. 16-17)