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 the forces of loneliness and isolation affect people all along the spectrums of race, class, age, and ability. Ultimately, McCullers suggests that feelings of loneliness and isolation are universal and perhaps the sole forces which unite humanity.
Over the course of the novel, McCullers paints a portrait of what loneliness and isolation look like from several different angles: spiritual, psychological, ideological, racial, and existential. As Mick Kelly, Jake Blount, Biff Brannon, and Doctor Benedict Mady Copeland individually seek companionship and validation from John Singer, they never realize or even stop to consider the fact that they are not alone in their feelings of remoteness and seclusion. They are each obsessed with their own loneliness, unable to break or even see through it—yet unaware that it is the only thing uniting them with their seemingly distant, disparate fellow townspeople. Many of the characters in the novel are dealing with a deep, existential kind of loneliness—a loneliness born of feeling profoundly out of place and unable to connect even with those they should be closest to. John Singer is perhaps the most lonely and isolated character in the novel. Though he is its central character, he is also its greatest mystery. Unable to communicate with those around him very easily, he instead shoulders an unusual role amongst the townspeople: he becomes a kind of silent cipher to whom others vent their problems and frustrations.
Singer’s visitors include Mick Kelly, a lonely tomboy; Jake Blount, a belligerent but intelligent drunk; Biff Brannon, a lonely and grieving barkeep; and Doctor Copeland, a black doctor frustrated by the ills and injustices facing his community. All of these characters are facing isolation both profound and quotidian. Mick Kelly has four siblings and lives in a bustling boarding house—yet she feels unable to really connect with anyone other than her younger brother, George, and even seems to enjoy her own isolation. She makes an attempt at giving a party for her school friends, but winds up spending the end of the evening as she spends most other nights: alone on a neighbor’s lawn, listening to the distant sounds of music on the neighbor’s radio. Jake Blount is wrestling with social isolation brought on by his frequent drunkenness—and resultant bad reputation—but he also feels a deeper kind of loneliness. Blount is a radical who believes capitalism is evil and doomed—and his intense, far-left beliefs make him an anomaly and indeed a kind of threat in his sleepy Southern mill town. Biff Brannon longs for children and a family, but after his wife Alice dies, he finds himself unsure of whether he’ll ever be able to give the love he has in his heart to another person. His fascination with his niece, Baby, and his neighbor Mick veers toward the inappropriate—but McCullers suggests that Biff isn’t sexually interested in the young girls, but rather simply so saddened by the thought he might never have children that he becomes obsessed with daughter figures. Doctor Copeland is respected and well-loved in his community—he is the only medical professional who treats the black community in the mill town, and as such holds a position of high honor. Even as he takes pride in his work, however, Doctor Copeland finds himself feeling isolated from his community and his family, most acutely his daughter, Portia. He feels he wants better for the black citizens of his town than they want for themselves, and is uncertain of how to instill revolutionary politics and the desire for justice in his people. Doctor Copeland is both ideologically and socially isolated, and, furthermore, has strained relationships with most of his children.
Loneliness is the only thing that bonds these very different characters together. Age, race, politics, and personality separate them from one another profoundly. However, McCullers suggests that their loneliness is a kind of gift: it binds these four individuals’ fates, giving them the opportunity to find the connections for which they’re so desperately searching. Whether they will be able to make good on that gift and use it, however, is a different story—and McCullers suggests that, in some cases, preserving one’s loneliness can become more important than finding a cure for it. As these four individuals make repeated visits to Singer’s rooms at the Kelly boarding house, they lament their troubles, but rarely ask about Singer’s own life—and they are, until very late in the book, each unaware that the others undertake visits similar to their own. These four individuals are ships passing in the night, too obsessed with their own sadness and isolation to realize that there are other people, right there in their community, looking for friendship, help, and solidarity. McCullers uses dramatic irony to highlight the unnecessary suffering of her characters, suggesting that, perhaps, if they were to open themselves up to broader friendships, their loneliness might be diminished. At the same time, however, there exists an undercurrent of cynicism and even defeat within the book: McCullers’ characters all end up just as lonely—if not even lonelier—than they were at its start. They have failed to recognize loneliness as a central part of the human experience, and in being unable to recognize that fact, they are unable to use it to bond with those around them.
Loneliness perpetuates itself, Carson McCullers suggests through The Heart is a Lonely Hunter—and because of this fact, it is the one experience which unites all of humanity regardless of race, class, or creed. People are doomed to “hunt” for connection and absolution alone, McCullers argues, ironically unable to see that the feeling which plagues them and makes them feel so isolated from those around them is actually the force bonding them, unknowingly, to others.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Loneliness and Isolation ThemeTracker
Loneliness and Isolation Quotes in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The next week was full of feverish activity. He talked and talked. And although his hands never paused to rest he could not tell all that he had to say. He wanted to talk to Antonapoulos of all the thoughts that had ever been in his mind and heart, but there was not time. His gray eyes glittered and his quick, intelligent face expressed great strain. Antonapoulos watched him drowsily, and his friend did not know just what he really understood.
In some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons—throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.
What would Portia say if she knew that always there had been one person after another? And every time it was like some part of her would bust in a hundred pieces. […]
Mick sat on the steps a long time. […] Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for dinner, yet it was like that. I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know.
[Mick] wondered what kind of music [Singer] heard in his mind that his ears couldn’t hear. Nobody knew. And what kind of things he would say if he could talk. Nobody knew that either.
It was good to talk. The sound of his voice gave him pleasure. The tones seemed to echo and hang on the air so that each word sounded twice. He swallowed and moistened his mouth to speak again. He wanted suddenly to return to the mute’s quiet room and tell him of the thoughts that were in his mind. It was a queer thing to want to talk with a deaf-mute. But he was lonesome.
“A person can’t pick up they children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they wants them to be. Whether it hurt them or not. Whether it right or wrong. You done tried that hard as any man could try. And now I the only one of us that would come in this here house and sit with you like this.”
Singer was always the same to everyone. He sat in a straight chair by the window with his hands stuffed tight into his pockets, and nodded or smiled to show his guests that he understood.
The music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony… […] Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
The radio and the lights in the house were turned off. [...] Suddenly Mick began hitting her thigh with her fists. […] But she could not feel this hard enough. The rocks under the bush were sharp. She grabbed a handful of them and began scraping them up and down on the same spot until her hand was bloody. Then she fell back to the ground and lay looking up at the night. With the fiery hurt in her leg she felt better. She was limp on the wet grass, and after a while her breath came slow and easy again.
“I go around,” Blount said. He leaned earnestly across the table and kept his eyes on the mute’s face. “I go all around and try to tell them. And they laugh. I can’t make them understand anything. No matter what I say I can’t seem to make them see the truth.”
Singer nodded… […] His dinner had got cold because he couldn’t look down to eat, but he was so polite that he let Blount go on talking.
[Mick] went into the inside room. […] School and the family and the things that happened every day were in the outside room. Mister Singer was in both rooms. Foreign countries and plans and music were in the inside room. […] The inside room was a very private place. She could be in the middle of a house full of people and still feel like she was locked up by herself.
“And we are not alone in this slavery. There are millions of others throughout the world, of all colors and races and creeds. […] The people in this town living by the river who work in the mills. People who are almost as much in need as we are ourselves. This hatred is a great evil, and no good can ever come from it. We must remember the words of Karl Marx and see the truth according to his teachings. The injustice of need must bring us all together and not separate us.” […]
Doctor Copeland loosened the collar of his shirt, for in his throat there was a choked feeling. The grievous love he felt within him was too much.
During the moonlit January nights Singer continued to walk about the streets of town each evening when he was not engaged. The rumors about him grew bolder. […] The rich thought that he was rich and the poor considered him a poor man like themselves. And as there was no way to disprove these rumors they grew marvelous and very real. Each man described the mute as he wished him to be.
“They hollered there for three days and three nights and nobody come.”
“I am deaf,” said Doctor Copeland. “I cannot understand.”
“They put our Willie and them boys in this here ice-cold room. There were a rope hanging down from the ceiling. They taken their shoes off and tied their bare feets to this rope […] and their feets swolled up and they struggle on the floor and holler out. […] Their feets swolled up and they hollered for three nights and three days. And nobody come.”
Doctor Copeland pressed his head with his hands, but still the steady trembling would not stop. “I cannot hear what you say.”
There were three mutes inside and they were talking with their hands together. […] There was a certain brotherly resemblance between them.
Singer went inside. For a moment he had trouble taking his hand from his pocket. Then clumsily he formed a word of greeting. He was clapped on the shoulder. A cold drink was ordered. They surrounded him and the fingers of their hands shot out like pistons as they questioned him.
He told his own name and the name of the town where he lived. After that he could think of nothing else to tell about himself. He asked if they knew Spiros Antonapoulos. They did not know him. Singer stood with his hands dangling loose. […] He was so listless and cold that the three mutes in the bowler hats looked at him queerly. After a while they left him out of their conversation.
The road ahead lay to the north and slightly to the west. But he would not go too far away. He would not leave the South. That was one clear thing.
But now no music was in her mind. […] It was like she was shut out from the inside room. Sometimes a quick little tune would come and go—but she never went into the inside room with music like she used to do. It was like she was too tense. Or maybe because it was like the store took all her energy and time. […] When she used to come home from school she felt good and was ready to start working on the music. But now she was always tired.
And why? What was the reason for keeping the place open all through the night when every other cafe in the town was closed? He was often asked that question and could never speak the answer out in words.
