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 capitalist status quo, denying black Americans justice and dignity, and securing the dominion of the ultra-wealthy few over the oppressed masses.
Over the course of the novel, McCullers uses the trajectories of her major characters to illustrate how society suppresses individuality, forcing its individual members—struggle as they might against the status quo—to resign themselves to lives as cogs in a racist, capitalist machine. Jake Blount is an aggressive, belligerent drunk who comes to town looking for work at the start of the novel. Jake, an anti-capitalist, believes the South is suffering at the hands of the North and longs for a revolution which will bring about the end of capitalism in America. McCullers presents Jake as not just anti-establishment, but as fundamentally incapable of living in society. His drunken rants and brawls are frightening to behold—in the novel’s first part, he bloodies his head and hands against a brick wall while intoxicated. Even once Jake secures a job at an amusement park, Sunny Dixie, he finds himself sparring verbally and even physically with his patrons. Even though McCullers presents Jake as unstable and unpredictable, she is obviously invested in his unorthodox ideas and sympathetically portrays his inability to get people to see his point of view. Jake is a traveler who has been all over the South and has witnessed the suffering of the American proletariat. He longs to share the truth about society with the people he meets—and in showing them how the deck is stacked against them, inspire them toward revolution. Ultimately, however, Jake is unable to fulfill his purpose: after a riot rips through Sunny Dixie at the end of the novel, he decides to leave town and resume his wandering. Though Jake aspires to revolution, he’s doomed to wander from place to place, scrounging up work where he can get it and using alcohol to dull the pain of his fate as a pawn of capitalism.
Doctor Benedict Mady Copeland is another character who stands alone against the larger society of which he’s a part. As a black man living in the Deep South, Doctor Copeland must wrestle daily with prejudice, cruelty, and violence aimed at him, his family, and his community. Doctor Copeland believes that there are ways in which black Americans can rise up and change the way others perceive them, and hopes that through adherence to Marxism and the pursuit of education, the black community in his town will be able to prosper. However, Doctor Copeland’s hopes for an end to racism and injustice in his community are dashed again and again. After his son Willie is arrested, jailed, and brutalized by the police, Doctor Copeland goes to the courthouse to pursue justice. But when Copeland himself is attacked, beaten, and jailed by the police, his tuberculosis worsens and he finds himself, upon release from jail, bedridden and unable to work or visit with his patients. Doctor Copeland harbored hopes of being a beacon of change in his community—but by the end of the novel, his society has forsaken and forgotten him. Doctor Copeland’s daughter, Portia, concerned for his health, moves him to her grandfather’s farm. As Doctor Copeland rides away toward the country with his father-in-law, McCullers illustrates how Copeland has failed to change society: he is just another old man bound to his bed, incapable of standing tall and strong any longer against the relentless forces of racism and injustice.
Mick Kelly—seen by many critics and scholars as a character inspired by McCullers herself—is the third major character in the novel who pushes back against the role society dictates for her. Mick is a tomboy who rejects the traditional femininity that her older sisters Hazel and Etta embody. Mick is obsessed with music, finding solace in the work of Mozart (whom she calls “Motsart”) and Beethoven rather than popular tunes on the radio. Mick is a loner at school, and while she throws a successful prom party to gather all her classmates, she finds herself feeling awkward and uncertain of herself throughout the festivities; she ultimately ends the night alone, back in her trademark shorts after having abandoned her party dress and stripped off her makeup, listening to a neighbor’s radio alone from the dark of their lawn. Mick, like Jake Blount and Doctor Copeland, is only able to resist the pressure to conform to society to a certain point. At the end of the novel, Mick takes a job at a nearby department store, Woolworth’s, in order to help provide for her family. Mick works at the costume jewelry counter, and for her job, she must dress in fancy clothing and adorn herself with makeup and jewelry. Most crushingly of all, she must drop out of school and abandon her music in order to devote all her time to work. Mick stood against society for as long as she could—but in the end, she, too, was forced to either become a part of society’s machine or watch her family suffer in poverty. McCullers uses the plights of these major characters to illustrate the unfairness of society and the compulsory nature of capitalism. McCullers demonstrates the ways in which individuals are often powerless to change their societies—a sentiment born of the frustration and desperation of the Great Depression, and one that, in spite of the progress American society ostensibly made over the course of the 20th century, is still echoed by many today.
The revolutionary politics espoused by many of the characters within The Heart is a Lonely Hunter are yet another facet of the book’s central concern with social and spiritual loneliness. The individuals who populate the novel are lonely on an existential level—and they stand alone, out of choice or due to forces beyond their control, when it comes to their politics, their hopes, and their uneasiness about the very society in which they live.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Individual vs. Society ThemeTracker
The Individual vs. Society Quotes in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
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.
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.”
“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.”
The next morning the sun came out. The strange Southern winter was at its end. Doctor Copeland was released. A little group waited outside the jail for him. Mr. Singer was there. Portia and Highboy and Marshall Nicolls were present also. Their faces were confused and he could not see them clearly. The sun was very bright.
“Father, don’t you know that ain’t no way to help out Willie? Messing around at a white folks’ courthouse? Best thing us can do is keep our mouth shut and wait.”
“This the way it is,” Willie said. “I feel like my feets is still hurting. I got this here terrible misery down in my toes. Yet the hurt in my feets is down where my feets should be if they were on my l-l-legs. And not where my feets is now. It a hard thing to understand. My feets hurt me so bad all the time and I don’t know where they is. They never given them back to me. They s-somewhere more than a hundred m-miles from here.”
“But if you was to ask me to point out the most uncivilized are on the face of this globe I would point here—” […] Jake turned the globe again and pressed his blunt, grimy thumb on a carefully selected spot. “Here. These thirteen states. I know what I’m talking about. I read books and I go around. I been in every damn one of these thirteen states. […] And here in these thirteen states the exploitation of human beings is so that—that it’s a thing you got to take in with your own eyes.”
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.
