Miss Lonelyhearts Analysis

Miss Lonelyhearts’ home

Miss Lonelyhearts’ home. Home of the newspaper advice columnist whose pseudonym is “Miss Lonelyhearts.” It is an apartment with little furniture and bare walls except for an ivory Christ figure nailed to the wall with large spikes, a calmly decorative symbol that plays a crucial role in Miss Lonelyhearts’ regeneration. Early in his quest to assuage the grief and misery of his readers and vent his frustration, Miss Lonelyhearts accepts a proposal of seduction by Fay Doyle, one of his letter writers. Fay is repelled physically and in every other way by her husband, the physically challenged Peter Doyle. Miss Lonelyhearts’ room is also the setting of some reciprocal visits by Betty, his innocent, loyal, but not-too-bright girlfriend, to whom he had earlier proposed marriage.

Park

Park. Public park near the newspaper office that is presumably a little nook in Central Park, given the reference to a Mexican War obelisk at one end. This location provides the occasion for a scene in which Miss Lonelyhearts and a colleague, Ned Gates, find a man, who they believe to be a homosexual, sitting on a turned-down toilet cover in a comfort station. Miss Lonelyhearts, in whose mind the stranger represents all the desperate, broken-hearted, disillusioned letter writers who seek his advice, decides to brutalize the old man. The park, then, in addition to being a refuge for him, is also a place of...

Called a "moral satire" and a "moral detective story," the book rearranges a good many techniques to create its own vision. The effaced...

West's primary focus was the spiritual suffering of the Depression, the people's despair and purposelessness, and the culture's inability to...

West's works follow in the tradition of the most famous deadly serious satirist, Jonathan Swift, who wrote, besides Gulliver's...

Although West did not work on it in Hollywood, Miss Lonelyhearts was eventually adapted into a B motion picture, Advice to the...