The Loved One

The Loved One: Characters

Here is a look at the main characters from Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One.

Dennis Barlow

The novel's protagonist is an English poet struggling to make it in the movie industry. Forced to work in a funeral home for pets, Dennis has become an embarrassment to the stuffy group of British expatriates who live in Los Angles. Dennis is often shown to be aloof and detached from other people. As he struggles to find purpose in his life, he feels limited and frustrated by the expectations of the other British expats.

Aimee Thanatogenos

Aimee is the junior cosmetician at Whispering Glades Funeral home and the center of the novel's love triangle. While Waugh depicts Aimee as well-educated and highly skilled at her job, he also depicts her as unable to make decisions. This is reflected in her childish devotion to the founder of Whispering Glades and her urge to get life advice from a relationship columnist. Her first name is French for "loved one," and her surname is the Greek word for "born of death."

Mr. Joyboy

Mr. Joyboy, the manager and senior mortician at Whispering Glades, is in love with Aimee. Extremely talented and ruthless, Joyboy successfully manipulates grieving families into spending excessive amounts of money. His technique depends upon preparing the corpses with a ghoulish grin known as the "Joyboy smile." He is physically unattractive but has a magnetic personality which he uses to coerce those around him.

The Loved One: Themes

Evelyn Waugh uses The Loved One to explore the American culture and the country's approach to death.

Commercialization and avoidance of death

Waugh's trip to America left him with severe culture shock, particularly concerning American attitudes towards death. In England, death and funerals were somber affairs that did not shy away from the inescapable sadness of loss, while the American culture had a more sentimental and glitzy approach.

In the novel, Mr. Joyboy constantly upsells bereaved families on useless and expensive additions such as satin lining for the coffin's interior. Waugh saw these predatory practices as exploiting Americans' inability to deal with death. By preparing corpses to look life-like and happy, Americans did not have to face the finality of death. The bright, shininess of the coffins and graveyards ultimately serve as a distraction to take people's minds off the gravity of death.

Waugh felt this avoidance of death was extremely unhealthy and childish. As American culture became more focused on ideas of comfort and convenience, he argues that Americans would become increasingly unable to cope with the darker realities of life, most notably death.

The Loved One: Genre

During the early stages of his career, Evelyn Waugh was considered one of Britain's leading satirists. Works like Vile Bodies (1930) and Decline and Fall (1928) mocked the British class system and stuffy aristocracy. However, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Waugh turned to more serious literary styles to explore his spirituality and conversion to Catholicism.

The Loved One is a return to his roots as a satirist. The novel uses dark humor and cutting wit to ridicule the American funeral industry and the shallowness of the British expat community in Los Angeles. Waugh uses the dark contrast between Mr. Joyboy's add-ons and the graphic descriptions of the actual preparation process. The embalmer and beautician work to give the corpses gruesome smiles, which are supposed to be comforting to the family but are, in reality, horrifying.

While characters like Mr. Joyboy pretend they offer solace and comfort to the grieving families, Waugh depicts them as predators taking advantage of vulnerable people. Instead of helping people come to terms with death, they allow them to ignore it with shiny distractions and expensive extras.

The novel's subtitle, An Anglo-American Tragedy, refers to Waugh's belief that English and American cultures are incompatible and will never see eye-to-eye. While much of the book attacks the shallowness of American culture, Waugh also presents the British expat community as highly hypocritical. They constantly complain about American culture yet also display some of its worst traits, including an obsession with money and social status. This snobbery is ultimately used against them as Dennis scams a substantial amount of money out of the community.

The Loved One: Quotes

The Loved One is Evelyn Waugh's dark satire on the funeral home industry and the shallowness of American culture. Here is a look at some of the novel's darkly humorous quotes.

Lord Ambercrombie, the leader of the British expat community in Los Angeles, often complains about the vapid nature of Americans. While some of the observations on America come from Waugh's disastrous visit to the country in 1947, the novel also mocks the shallow snobbery of the British abroad.

At the novel's end, Dennis adds Joyboy's name to the Happier Hunting Ground mailing list. This type of dark humor highlights the absurdity of how America treats its dead. The novel constantly contrasts an overly sentimentalized approach to death with the graphic realities of funeral homes.