The Loved One

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1948

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-7

Chapters 8-10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 8 Summary

Aimée writes to Guru Brahmin again. She describes her mixed feelings about Dennis, who she says can be sweet and writes poetry but also has a cynical streak. She questions whether he’s ethical because he’s so secretive about his activities. In addition, she reveals that Mr. Joyboy has apparently withdrawn his offer to recommend her promotion to embalmer since “no more is said of that” (114) since she became engaged to Dennis. She complains that Dennis makes fun of Mr. Joyboy’s name and shows too much interest in her work.

In an attempt to mend her relationship with Mr. Joyboy, Aimée writes “try to understand” on a piece of paper with one of Dennis’s poems and leaves it on the heart of a corpse that Mr. Joyboy is about to work on. After this gesture, Mr. Joyboy appears to warm up to her again, telling her that he’d like to see more poems.

Mr. Joyboy tells Aimée that his mother’s parrot has just died. He’s arranging a funeral at the Happier Hunting Ground and invites Aimée to attend it. She accepts.

Chapter 9 Summary

After discovering that Dennis works at the Happier Hunting Ground, Aimée concludes that he’s a liar and a cheat. She breaks off her engagement with him and becomes engaged to Mr. Joyboy, who celebrates his resurrected love affair by sending Aimée smiling corpses again.

One day shortly before the wedding date, Dennis follows Aimée to a restaurant. He tells her that his theological studies are going well and that they can soon marry. She responds that she’d rather die than marry him. She then refers to his “false pretenses” (122) of sending her poems that he pretended to write but that were actually written by other people, including writers who died hundreds of years ago. Dennis blames Aimée for the deception, noting that she’s “ignorant of the commonest treasures of literature” (123). When Aimée says how awful she thought the parrot’s funeral was, Dennis responds that he tried to talk Mr. Joyboy out of an open casket because such displays work well for dogs and cats but not parrots. He suggests that Mr. Joyboy wanted her to see the absurd parrot funeral to cast Dennis in a bad light. He reminds Aimée that she swore to love him eternally, a “sacred oath in the religion of Whispering Glades” (127).

Returning to her apartment, Aimée is full of doubt. She calls Mr. Joyboy and tells him that she needs to see him right away because she’s worried and miserable. He tells her that he can’t see her right now because his mother just got a new parrot, and he needs to be with her because it’s a special day for her. Aimée insists that she needs to see him to talk about their upcoming marriage, but Mr. Joyboy refuses to see her.

Feeling desperate, Aimée calls Guru Brahmin for advice. She learns that he has just been fired from the paper that publishes his column and that his real name is Mr. Slump. He answers her phone call from a bar. When Aimée describes her situation and asks him what to do, he drunkenly tells her that she should take an elevator to the top floor and jump out the window.

Aimée goes home to her apartment and takes some barbiturates, apparently seeking to die by suicide. She wakes up with a headache at 9:40pm, goes back to sleep, and then awakens again at 5:25am. She walks to Whispering Glades and enters the building. She goes to Mr. Joyboy’s workroom, where she injects herself with embalming fluid.

Chapter 10 Summary

Dennis is planning to quit his job at Happier Hunting Ground. He’s training his replacement when Mr. Joyboy arrives and tells him about Aimée’s death by suicide. Mr. Joyboy weeps as he tells Dennis that he stored her body in a deep refrigerator. Dennis says, “I loved that girl” (136). However, he adds, “I never thought her wholly sane […]” (137). In addition, he castigates Mr. Joyboy for being emotional about her death, telling him, “Some emotion is natural—but do not go to extremes” (137).

Dennis realizes that Mr. Joyboy fears that he’ll be suspected of killing Aimée since her body was found in his workspace and their engagement was public knowledge. After some coaxing from Dennis, Mr. Joyboy admits that he wants him to help dispose of Aimée’s body for the sake of his job and his mother. Dennis suggests disposing of Aimée’s body at the pet mortuary’s crematorium. Dennis agrees to handle the details, but in return, he insists that Mr. Joyboy draw out money to finance his trip back to England.

They incinerate Aimée’s body at the Happier Hunting Ground crematorium. While the fire burns, Dennis fills out the required paperwork for Grade A service to ensure that a card will be sent to Mr. Joyboy every year that reads: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you (145).

During his last night in Los Angeles, Dennis feels fortunate that he has survived his expatriate experience “not only unravished but enriched” (146).

Chapters 8-10 Analysis

In the final chapters, Waugh brings his parody of the absurd excesses of the funeral industry to a shocking conclusion by bringing together the human and animal mortuaries in the most appalling way possible. The parrot funeral is the first nail in the coffin of what Waugh sees as the funeral industry’s facade of decorum. When Aimée complains about how awful the parrot’s funeral was, Dennis explains it in a deadpan manner that only highlights its absurdity:

The Joyboy parrot? Yes. I think I can explain that. Mr. Joyboy would have an open casket. I advised against it and, after all, I knew. I’d studied the business. An open casket is all right for dogs and cats who lie down and curl up naturally. But parrots don’t. They look absurd with the head on a pillow. But I came up against a blank wall of snobbery. What was done in Whispering Glades must be done at the Happier Hunting Ground (124).

While the preposterousness of an open casket for a parrot is blatant, the subtext—accentuated by the last line of the quote—is the larger question of the propriety of displaying anything, or anyone, who has died. Earlier, Dennis expressed the same revulsion at seeing Sir Francis’s painted corpse on display.

However, the outrageous spectacle of the parrot funeral is just a warmup to the grand finale in which a human is cremated in a pet crematorium, and paperwork is prepared that indicates she was a dog. It’s a fitting ending to highlight what Waugh obviously saw as an industry motivated more by money than by the dignity of the deceased.

In earlier chapters, Dennis hid his sense of superiority from Aimée. However, in this section, his British arrogance blasts through unfiltered. When Aimée chastises him for working at Happier Hunting Ground, Dennis responds, “My dear, you as an American should be the last to despise a man for starting at the bottom of the ladder” (124). He then tries to cast himself as the victim of her American naivete: “It is I who should be disillusioned when I think that I have been squandering my affections on a girl ignorant of the commonest treasures in literature” (123). This condescending arrogance only heightens her revulsion toward him.

Additionally, Waugh lays bare the brutal work culture of 1940s Los Angeles, which extends beyond the film industry. Mr. Joyboy is so concerned about losing his job that he agrees to incinerate his fiancé’s body in a pet crematorium. Meanwhile, after being fired from his newspaper job, Guru Brahmin vents his bitterness by telling Aimée, essentially, to die by suicide, reinforcing her predilection to seek the “easeful Death” (85) and join her works of art.

During Aimée’s final walk to Whispering Glades, Waugh repeatedly uses the silence and emptiness motifs that appear throughout the novel to symbolize death. When she starts her final journey, Waugh writes, “It was still night; the sky was starless and below it the empty streets flamed with light” (131). Then, as she enters the mortuary, the text reads, “They glanced at her incuriously as she passed silently through them, for urgent work was done at all hours. She took the lift to the top story where everything was silent and empty save for the sheeted dead” (133). The repeated symbols of silence and emptiness foreshadow the finality of her death by suicide.

When Dennis takes Sir Ambrose’s advice and decides to return to England, he expresses a sense of triumph at having taken what he could from an inferior land before returning to his homeland with the loot:

On this last evening in Los Angeles Dennis knew he was a favorite of Fortune. Others, better men than he, had foundered here and perished. The strand was littered with their bones. He was leaving it not only unravished but enriched. He was adding his bit to the wreckage; something that had long irked him, his young heart, and was carrying back instead the artist’s load, a great, shapeless chunk of experience; bearing it home to his ancient and comfortless shore; to work on it hard and long, for God knew how long. For that moment of vision a lifetime is often too short (146).