''The Dream Life of Balso Snell'' is a 1931 novel by American author

Nathanael West Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein; October 17, 1903 – December 22, 1940) was an American writer and screenwriter. He is remembered for two darkly satirical novels: ''Miss Lonelyhearts'' (1933) and ''The Day of the Locust'' (1939), set r ...

. West's first novel, it presents a young man's immature and cynical search for meaning in a series of dreamlike encounters inside the entrails of the

Trojan Horse The Trojan Horse was a wooden horse said to have been used by the Greeks during the Trojan War to enter the city of Troy and win the war. The Trojan Horse is not mentioned in Homer's ''Iliad'', with the poem ending before the war is concluded, ...

Plot summary

Balso, the protagonist, comes across the

in the tall grass around

Troy Troy ( el, Τροία and Latin: Troia, Hittite: 𒋫𒊒𒄿𒊭 ''Truwiša'') or Ilion ( el, Ίλιον and Latin: Ilium, Hittite: 𒃾𒇻𒊭 ''Wiluša'') was an ancient city located at Hisarlik in present-day Turkey, south-west of Ç ...

and promptly seeks a way to get in: “the mouth was beyond his reach, the navel provided a cul-de-sac, and so, forgetting his dignity, he approached the last. O Anus Mirabilis!” The literary critic

Leslie Fiedler Leslie Aaron Fiedler (March 8, 1917 – January 29, 2003) was an American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work incorporates the application of psychological theories to American lit ...

reads much into this and sees the whole novel as “a fractured and dissolving parable of the very process by which the emancipated Jew enters into the world of Western Culture.” Inside the Trojan Horse Balso encounters an array of odd characters who, he realizes, are all “writers in search of an audience”. These characters also represent various religious and artistic ideals. Balso hears their stories systematically, only to discard them one by one, in a strictly nihilist fashion.

Literary significance and criticism

The novel's lack of a coherent plot structure, along with its juvenile humor and abundant scatological details, are all intended to aggravate, perplex and annoy readers. The desired result, according to West, is a book that is “a protest against writing books”. The juvenility and incoherence of the novel have prompted critics to disregard it as “a sneer in the bathroom mirror at Art” ( Alan Ross), “squalid and dreadful” (

Harold Bloom Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was described as "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking worl ...

) and “a hysterical, obscure, disgusted shriek against the intellect” (James F. Light). Nonetheless, by its complete and disgusted rejection of all religious, political and artistic ideals ''The Dream Life of Balso Snell'' foreshadows the nihilism of West’s subsequent novels.

Publication history

West began developing material for ''The Dream Life of Balso Snell'' as early as 1924; he worked on the novel during his stay in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

in 1926 and finished a complete draft in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

between 1927 and 1929, under the title ''The Journal of Balso Snell''. The manuscript was rejected twice before finally getting accepted, largely due to a favorable appraisal by

William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both pedia ...

. The book was published in New York City by the Paris-based Contact Editions in August 1931 in an edition of 500 copies. There were no other printings during West’s lifetime. After West became famous (years after his death) for ''

Miss Lonelyhearts ''Miss Lonelyhearts'' is a novella by Nathanael West. He began writing it early in 1930 and completed the manuscript in November 1932. Published in 1933, it is an Expressionist black comedy set in New York City during the Great Depression. It is ...

'' and ''

The Day of the Locust ''The Day of the Locust'' is a 1939 novel by American author Nathanael West set in Hollywood, California. The novel follows a young artist from the Yale School of Fine Arts named Tod Hackett, who has been hired by a Hollywood studio to do scene ...

'', ''Balso Snell'' was reprinted in a single volume edition of his complete novels, as well as in the

Library of America The Library of America (LOA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LOA has published over 300 volumes by authors rang ...

edition of West's collected works.West, Nathanael. ''Novels & Other Writings''. Ed.

Sacvan Bercovitch Sacvan Bercovitch (October 4, 1933 – December 8, 2014) was a Canadian literary and cultural critic who spent most of his life teaching and writing in the United States. During an academic career spanning five decades, he was considered to be one ...

. New York: The Library of America, 1997. 813.

Footnotes

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dream Life of Balso Snell, The 1931 American novels Novels by Nathanael West 1931 debut novels