The Day of The Locust - Characters

Characters

For the most part, West's characters are intentionally shallow and stereotyped, and "…derive from all the B-grade genre films of the period…" (Simon, 523) West's characters are Hollywood stereotypes, what Light calls "grotesques". The novel's protagonist, Tod Hackett (whose first name likely derives from the German word for death and whose last name refers to a common epithet for Hollywood screenwriters and artists, who were pejoratively called "hacks"), is a set painter who aspires to artistic greatness. In the first chapter of the novel, the narrative voice announces: "Yes, despite his appearance, Tod was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes. And 'The Burning of Los Angeles', a picture he was soon to paint, definitely proved he had talent."

Over the course of the novel, we are introduced to several minor characters, each corresponding to a given Hollywood trope. There is Harry Greener, the fading vaudevillian; his daughter, Faye, an aspiring starlet; Claude Estee, the successful Hollywood screenwriter; Homer Simpson, the hopelessly clumsy and disaffected "everyman"; Abe Kusich, a midget gangster; Earle Shoop the cowboy; Miguel, Shoop's Mexican sidekick; Adore Loomis, a precocious child actor, and Loomis's doting stage mother.