Miss Lonelyhearts Themes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 5 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Miss Lonelyhearts.
Related Topics

Miss Lonelyhearts Themes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 5 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Miss Lonelyhearts.
This section contains 182 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page)
Buy the Miss Lonelyhearts Short Guide

Miss Lonelyhearts Summary & Study Guide Description

Miss Lonelyhearts Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:

This detailed literature summary also contains Literary Precedents on Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West.

Preview of Miss Lonelyhearts Summary:

Many themes help define this spiritual problem as it appears in the Depression. From suffering come false visions and numb despair. The narrow innocence of Betty, Miss Lonelyhearts's girlfriend, brings a failed return to Eden on the farm. Shrike's comic cynicism, in denying all escape from suffering, fails absolutely to help. Miss Lonelyhearts's vision of religious order fails to communicate to his correspondents because, due to Shrike's omnipresent rhetoric, among other things, the language has lost the power to tell the truth. As Shrike's words emphasize, both nature and Christ fail to bring the moral order needed to deal with the people's problems. Only apocalypse promises to make a big enough change to heal this wound.

In the face of these moral questions without answers, Miss Lonelyhearts oversimplifies his mission. Chapter by chapter, he moves from compulsions to their opposites, from ascetic Christianity to sensual paganism, as simplistic...

This section contains 182 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page)
Buy the Miss Lonelyhearts Short Guide
Copyrights
Gale
Miss Lonelyhearts from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.