Nathanael West's A Cool Million: The Great Lemuel Pitkin

Abstract

In his A Cool Million, Nathanael West touches one of the significant topics in American literature, the American dream of success. The ideology of the American dream to West is the ideas and philosophy of Horatio Alger and Benjamin Franklin. The two thinkers insist that Americans can grow and succeed, morally and financially, once the Americans live the life of what is called "the Puritanical work ethics." Lemuel Pitkin, a protagonist in A Cool Million, tries to practice the old teachings in his real life. However, the rewards he receives for his sincerity, temperance, and industry are totally opposite to the promises Alger and Franklin made: "Jail is his first reward. Poverty his second. Violence is his third. Death is his last." The argument I make in this thesis is how it is possible to elaborate the great discrepancy between the American success ideology and the reality Pitkin experiences in daily life. In order to suggest the possible answers for the question, I introduce several discourses of America like Jean Baudrillard's "simulacra," Richard Slotkin's "American frontier mythology," Simone de Beauvoir's epistolary records of America, and Jonathan Raban's critique on American value.