744 McCullers, Carson
fer unrequited love for others who do not love them
in return, incomprehensible love whose reasons
cannot be grasped, and frustrated love for goals that
cannot be accomplished alone. In their own ways, all
are lovers and hunters for love.
Examples of unrequited love begin with the two
friends John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos. As
deaf mutes, the two men are prevented from com-
municating with a wider society, but find comfort
in a loving friendship. However, the two do not
really love the same things or on the same terms.
Antonapoulos’s primary love is for physical com-
forts, such as rich food and drink, where Singer take
his greatest joy in speaking to his friend after work.
Antonapoulos often appears to care and understand
little about what his friend tells him; nevertheless,
Singer seeks his happiness in his friend. Thus, one
friend’s love is almost inconsequential to the desires
of the other.
The owner of the New York Café, Biff Bran-
non, shares a less understandable love with his
wife, Alice. Running the café 24 hours a day, the
couple split 12-hour shifts and thus never see or
talk with each other for more than a few minutes
per day. Yet, Biff feels a deep love, which he cannot
express in words, for the wife he never sees. When
Alice dies, Biff feels that he is done with love and
lacks a clear idea of what else is left for him to do
with his life. He does not know what he seeks,
but only that he is still searching for something to
give his life meaning. Biff thus demonstrates the
extreme example of a lover for whom the search is
far stronger than the chance of finding a satisfying
object to love.
The young Bubber Kelly suffers from a similarly
inexpressible and tragic love. Fascinated at the sight
of the beautifully dolled-up Baby, Bubber pleads for
the little girl to cross the street so that he can touch
her hair. When she refuses, Bubber shoots her with
his gun without understanding what he does. His
desire to touch something beautiful, which causes
him unconsciously to pull the trigger, thus ends in
tragedy. He harms the object of his love as well as
the innocence of his own life. Captured when he
attempts to flee town, Bubber returns home lonely
and mean, even less able than before to seek love or
give it to others. The flawed attempt to express his
desires thus causes the young boy to be even more
greatly set apart from finding love.
The third kind of lonely love is that which sets
an individual on a quest to improve the lot of others.
The deeply flawed Roy Blount demonstrates this
kind of love in his zeal to organize the workers and
make socialist reforms for their benefit. When the
local tradesmen reject Blount’s political activism, he
continues to pursue his political theories in discus-
sion with others. Chief among his desired audience is
Dr. Copeland, whose own beliefs in Marxist revolu-
tion demonstrate his love for his family and the black
community, at the same time distancing him from
them because they do not agree with his politics.
While the men’s love for social justice and reform
give the two a reason to work together, they go their
separate ways after disagreeing about particulars on
how to proceed with real reforms. The search for the
ideal, just world thus seems more important to these
lovers of justice than accepting anything less.
McCullers’s novel demonstrates that the lonely
business of love can be unrequited, inexpressible, and
frustrating. One of the few instances of reciprocated
love is Mick’s love for her father. Mr. Kelly is himself
a lonely man, the head of a poor family struggling to
stay ahead financially and together emotionally. Yet,
the love shared by father and daughter is one of the
novel’s few instances of two lonely characters lov-
ing each other and recognizing in each other both
love and loneliness. It is this mutual recognition of
the nature of love that affirms the reasons why the
lonely heart continues its hunt.
Tim BryantWork in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Work can give purpose to life or stand as an obstacle
to pursuing one’s true desires. The characters of
McCullers’s novel face work’s dual potential for self-
expression and frustration. Workers’ lives are defined
in part by their jobs, even as individuals try in a
variety of ways to find purpose beyond their work-
ing lives. Work thus shapes identity both as a means
of self-expression and as a limitation to what an
individual can accomplish. The work that characters
do expresses both their hidden desires as well as the
circumstances that prevent them from fully realizing
their hearts’ desires in life.