Dennis is the ironic protagonist who outfoxes the other characters (and merges at the end with the writer of the book we've just read) but the keystone figure of The Loved One is the Dreamer, the visionary who established Whispering Glades and whom Waugh modeled on Hubert Eaton, the sales agent who was hired by a run-down boneyard to market "before-need" plots and who transformed the enterprise into Forest Lawn, with its insipidly comforting commercial-religious creed. We never see Waugh's Dreamer, but we read inscriptions based on his beliefs ("Behold I dreamed a dream and I saw a New Earth sacred to HAPPINESS" (39), and "hear" his recorded voice from various speakers in the vast burial ground.
Waugh's Dreamer bathetically ties The Loved One to the medieval literary tradition of the dream vision, which includes the Consolation of Philosophy, the Dream of the Rood, the Romance of the Rose, the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, and Piers Plowman, a tradition which, as John Fleming has written, typically "leads an at first uncomprehending narrator from ignorance to understanding or from despair to consolation" (52). These are visionary works but may be thoroughly compatible with satire. As Fleming writes of the Romance of the Rose, for instance, "Jean de Meun follows the typical course of the dream-vision in that he exposes his dreamer-narrator to the doctrines of various allegorical abstractions, but, atypically, he makes the hero seem increasingly stupid in his perverse rejection of good counsel for bad" (52).
There's no question about what Waugh, a convert to Roman Catholicism, thinks of the Dreamer, as he makes clear in the Forest Lawn article, e.g., "Dr. Eaton is the first man to offer eternal salvation at an inclusive charge as part of his undertaking service" (Essays 336). The question is what we are to think of Dennis, who neither achieves a higher understanding nor stupidly rejects it. Furthermore, although Dennis is a scoundrel, he is an outsider in both Hollywood and Whispering Glades and so doesn't represent what's wrong with them. Rather, he's impervious to the spiritual values that Southern Californian culture (presumably) gets wrong but not above exploiting those values, chiefly to seduce Aimée (much like the protagonist of the Romance of the Rose (Fleming 50)).
Waugh creates character here on the expedient principle that the enemy of an enemy is friend enough. Thus, unlike Basil Seal, whom Waugh always views dispassionately as a virulent symptom of a rampant condition, Waugh seems glad as not to have Dennis get away with Mr. Joyboy's savings. That is, Waugh suffers the embarrassment of identifying unironically with the scoundrel protagonist of The Loved One, who becomes a hero by default.
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