Loneliness and Isolation
The central theme of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is contained within its title, which is itself taken from a William Sharp poem containing the lines “But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on / a lonely hill.” As the story of John Singer—a deaf and mute man who finds himself an object of fascination for four misfit residents of an unnamed mill town in the American South—unfolds, McCullers investigates how…
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Communication and Self-Expression
All of the characters in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter struggle with the desire not just for companionship, but for the feeling of being more deeply known. But even as all five of the novel’s central characters yearn to be seen, heard, and understood, they often find themselves unable to communicate with one another in the most basic of ways. As Carson McCullers’s characters battle their loneliness and isolation, she demonstrates how difficult true…
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Racism, Inequality, and Injustice
Set in the Deep South in the late 1930s, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter wrestles with the major social, political, and economic divisions that defined not only the region, but the world more largely during those years. Early reviews of the book, such as one in the August 1940 issue of The New Republic, lauded McCullers for her ability to “embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness”—and indeed…
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The Individual vs. Society
In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers investigates the forces of isolation and injustice—and then considers how those forces create animosity and distance between the individual and society. McCullers’s characters come up against apathy or even outright cruelty, and they also fight against the defeatist impulse to become apathetic or cruel themselves. Ultimately, McCullers argues that American society is engineered to suppress individual thought and action as a means of perpetuating the…
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The American South
Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is her first novel, published to widespread acclaim when she was only 23. The book is set in an unnamed mill town in the Deep South—while some contextual clues point to the novel’s setting being the state of Georgia, McCullers never directly names the place where her characters’ lives unfold. As a result, the novel transfigures a single town into an analogue of the larger American South—an…
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