Critique of Consumerist Culture in West’s The Day of the Locust

Abstract

The present research paper analyzes the fragmentation and artificiality caused by consumerist culture in Nathanael west’s The Day of the Locust. Beside this, the researcher has tried to find how the social rule, costume, human desires, languages, families and materialistic desires are determined by the state, how state rules over common people and attempts to prove how state agencies break the natural desires of the people. Moreover, it tries to find out how the protagonist, Tod and other common characters are compelled to live under the shadow of capitalist ideology due to the desires of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. In order to analyze the text, the researcher has brought the idea of Louis Althusser’s Ideological state apparatus. On the basis of Althusserian ideology, the research establishes an idea how the state ideologies shape desires of the ordinary people in the society and how common people have become victims of consumerist culture.