The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 743displays itself as the paradox of physical closeness
but emotional distance. The repeated juxtaposition
of physical proximity with emotional detachment
highlights the novel’s theme of alienation as a con-
sequence of one-sided communication and unequal
relationships throughout the novel.
After Antonapoulos’s cousin has him taken away
to a sanitarium, Singer makes two changes in his life
that cause him to become physically, if not emotion-
ally, closer to several other people in town. Moving
into the Kelly household as a boarder, he attracts the
attention of the young girl Mick Kelly, who believes
that he knows about music, her own passion, even
though Singer is deaf. Second, Singer starts taking
his three daily meals at the New York Café, where
he attracts the attention of the owner, Biff Brannon,
and one of his customers, Jake Blount. The two men
separately visit Singer in his room at the Kellys’,
where Brannon asks Singer philosophical questions
and Blount drunkenly rails about political inequali-
ties that consume his life. Each of these visitors is
alienated from any sense of community and so seeks
out Singer, who is also an outsider. Yet, alienation
persists in these unequal relationships based on one-
sided communication. Singer listens, but gives little
response to his visitors’ communications, ironically
filling the role that Antonapoulos had filled for him.
That is, while his visitors speak of their innermost
thoughts and assume that he understands them
perfectly, they do not really know what Singer is
thinking. The act of communicating deeply personal
thoughts leads to alienation, rather than relation-
ship, in these similarly one-sided examples.
The difficulty of resolving the problem of alien-
ation is demonstrated by the scene in which several
of Singer’s visitors arrive at his lodging all at the
same time. Although they know each other from
town, Mick, Biff, and Jake have nothing to say to
each other and so leave Singer’s room when it is
clear they cannot speak to him alone. Another of
Singer’s visitors, Dr. Copeland, demonstrates this
persistent alienation from society, where the individ-
ual finds himself unable to communicate personal
beliefs and feelings to a wider group. As a father,
Junius Copeland attempted early in life to teach his
four children to be leaders of the African-American
people. Instead, his passion for political and social
uplift has alienated him from his children, who fear
his passionate outbursts about politics so much that
they seldom visit him in his old age. As is the case
with Singer’s other visitors, Copeland’s very passion
about life is, paradoxically, what alienates him from
others and prevents him from sharing that passion
in a meaningful way.
As indicated by the fact that Dr. Copeland
names one of his children Karl Marx, there is a
political dimension of alienation at play in the
novel. As the historical Karl Marx argued, workers
are alienated from a meaningful existence because
they do not have control over their working lives.
Mick’s passion for music subsides after she acquires
a full-time job to support her family. Biff spends his
days at the café, his life dominated by the cycle of
his business, which never closes. Blount tries to rally
local workers to unionize, but they laugh at him as
an outsider. Copeland himself decides to leave town
and spend his remaining days on the family farm,
having exhausted himself in service to a people from
whom his political consciousness has alienated him.
In these various ways, characters come to be alien-
ated from their communities, their aspirations, and
their beliefs.
Consequently, Singer does not become a figure
around which the variously alienated characters
overcome their loneliness, but rather the means by
which the terms of isolation are defined. Although
Biff cares for Mick, she avoids him, believing that
he hates her. Blount and Copeland both obsess
over political injustices and revolution, but they
fail to discuss their ideas productively and part in
anger. The ultimate consequence of this incurable
alienation is Singer’s suicide near the novel’s end.
McCullers’s novel affirms the strength of the human
spirit, which can feel most passionately, but reminds
the reader that the cost of such passionate insight is
often loneliness and alienation.
Tim Bryantlove in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
As suggested by the title of McCullers’s novel, love
is a solitary, difficult search for fulfillment. The cause
of this difficulty is not that characters do not love,
but that they feel love too strongly for objects they
cannot obtain. Consequently, lonely characters suf-