the heart is a lonely hunter
... and her daughter Baby, and then watches as Singer and Jake and Mick talk. At Mick’s house, thinks have become worse than ever. They have to pay for Baby Wilson’s medical expenses and have lost the house. They now rent it and the children often go hungry. Mick has lately begun to develop a friendship with Harry Minowitz, her next door neighbor. In Doctor Copeland’s life, he finds Portia one day in his kitchen drunk. She tells him that Willie has been tortured by white prison guards and his feet amputated as a result of his injuries. When Doctor Copeland tries to go to see a judge, he is beaten and jailed by a white sheriff’s deputy. At the Kelly house, Mick has had to start sleeping in the living room since her sister Etta has gotten sick. She cannot stop thinking of what has happened to Willie. One day she and Harry Minowitz bicycle out of town to go swimming in a creek and they have sex. Harry feels so guilty that he runs away. In Jake Blount’s life, he has been plagued with headaches and bad dreams. He is always having to stop fights at the carnival. His fellow workers laugh at him for his ideas and his short stature. He visits Singer and learns of what happens to Willie. He insists on meeting Willie. Singer takes him to Doctor Copeland’s house and Willie tells him the story of the cause of the guards’ torturing him and two of his fellow worker-inmates. Jake is rebuffed when he tells Willie he wants to help him. He goes into Doctor Copeland’s room and gets into a heated argument with the doctor. Sometimes they agree, but then fall into a dispute immediately afterward. Finally Doctor Copeland collapses and Jake leaves. In Mick’s life, she finds that she can no longer stay in her thoughts about music. She is so often distracted. When the opportunity comes up, she decides to take a job to help with the family’s expenses. She feels trapped and hopeless. Singer goes to see Antonapoulos and finds that he has died. He returns home and kills himself. Part III resolves the lives of the remaining characters. Doctor Copeland is taken to his father-in-law’s farm to recover from tuberculosis, Jake escapes a riot and leaves town, Mick continues working at Woolworth’s and tries to keep her dream alive of being a musician, and Biff continues watching people come into his cafe, feeling love for all of them. THEMES Main Theme The main theme of the novel is announced in its title The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Each of the main characters of the novel is looking for someone who will give them perfect understanding and the peace that comes with that. Each (with he possible exception of Biff Brannon) is tragically isolated and desperate for the satisfactory shift out of isolation and into social contact. Such a shift would mean that they would be heard, they would be loved, and they would not be forced to accept the stifling norm. Minor Theme The minor theme of the novel is the development of the poverty- stricken artist. In this subplot, McCullers draws attention to one of the less recognized victims of poverty--art. MOOD The mood of the novel is brooding and melancholy. Since the characters are so sharply and poignantly isolated, most of the action takes place inside their heads. There are some moments of exuberance, but most of their interior lives are filled with angst and sadness. OVERALL ANALYSES CHARACTERS Mick Kelly Mick Kelly is the artist figure of the novel, making the novel a sort of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl" (a play on James Joyce’s famous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Mick is characterized by obsessiveness she is obsessive about music and about people. As an artist figure, Mick defines the artist as intensely personal and private. She puts all her private things in a big hat box and guards it jealously from her siblings, who seem to care very little about what she has in it. She divides her life and her thoughts into an outside room and an inside room. In the inside room, she composes her music and thinks about the people who affect her life. She can be sitting in the midst of a group of people talking and go to her inside room and be perfectly clear in her thinking about music. In both of these areas, the artist is then private. Yet Mick is also intensely affected in the development of her art by her family’s poverty and by the fact that she is a girl. Her family cannot pay of music lessons, so Mick cannot learn how to read and write music. Her family cannot pay for a piano or even a radio, so Mick has to use the piano in he school’s gymnasium and listen outside the windows of strangers to the radio. The novel opens with Mick attempting to make a broken ukulele into a violin for composing her music. In the end of the novel, it seems almost certainty hat Mick’s dreams of becoming a famous composer and conductor will be thwarted by her poverty as she has to take a job at Woolworth’s and is so exhausted at the end of the day, that she cannot think of music. Mick’s other obsession is people. She has had a series of obsessions in her life and her latest is Mr. Singer. Mick thinks the deaf man can understand her and can understand music. For Mick, the attraction to Mr. Singer seems to be based on his non- interference in her psychic life; that is, since he is deaf and dumb, he doesn’t try to tell her what to think or feel. He looks at her with understanding and acceptance. Since she is something of a misfit, being a girl who doesn’t want to follow in the footsteps of her sisters who define girlhood as primping and fantasizing about being movie stars, she needs someone who will accept her as she is. Mr. Singer does that for her. Jake Blount McCullers uses Jake Blount as the ideologue (the person who speaks an idea or stands for a kind of thinking) of the discourse of economic justice that was so very central to the 1930s in the U.S.A. Yet, unlike most of the people on the left during the economic crisis of the 1930s who worked diligently for economic justice, Jake is unbalanced. He is so caught up in his theory that he is among a few elite people who know the truth that he can never take people on their own merits and respect the integrity of their thinking and their choices in life. He thinks of them as the "Don’t knows" and treats them accordingly. As McCullers’ Jake is an alcoholic and a drifter. He ran from his poverty sticken family when he was still a child and his only education is what he has picked up from scattered reading. His ideas are therefore without logical constraints. Even his vocabulary demonstrates his inadequate education. he uses big words, it seems, to impress himself ad others, but the big words only confuse his listeners and, often, they are not even real words. It is not a coincidence that Jake started out as a sort of missionary. The fervor of his ideas that it is his duty to spread the word comes straight out of the fervor of born again evangelists to spread the word of God to the non-believers. In this and in Jake’s near insanity, McCullers discredits the ideas of those one the left who argue for a more equitable distribution of wealth than capitalism provides. Doctor Copeland He is a man who parallel’s Jake Blount in many ways. McCullers has them meet three times before they finally get together for a disputatious conversation. Doctor Copeland shares Jake’s ideas about economic injustice, but clearly has a more formal education and so thinks more clearly. He has worked out a social theory which combines the ideas of Karl Marx on the redistribution of wealth with the ideas of African-American philosophers like W.E.B. Dubois on the best way to improve the condition of African Americans. While his theory is more sound than Jake’s, he shares with Jake a central flaw--he doesn’t take other people’s integrity into account. Doctor Copeland’s treatment of his family is the best illustration of his inability to see things from other people’s point of view. Happily married as a young man after his return to the south, he soon poisons the relationship by trying to make his young wife into a different sort of person, more reserved, more stately, less flamboyant. Moreover, he tries to make his wife give up the beliefs she has been raised on. When she continues in her own way, he uses violence against her and she leaves him, taking his children. He does the same to his children. He thinks of them as instruments of his will and he loses them as a result. Both Doctor Copeland and Jake Blount find in Mr. Singer a listener who doesn’t interfere with their rambling thoughts, who doesn’t disagree with them, and who seems to understand them. In their intense attachment to Mr. Singer, McCullers shows their need for human contact, their need for love. Biff Brannon Biff Brannon is the watcher of the novel. He doesn’t attach emotionally to Mr. Singer as the other characters do; he just watches as Mr. Singer gains one satellite after another. Unlike many of the spectator figures in fiction who tend to be the representatives of the social norm, Biff Brannon has his own eccentricities. He loves to take care of people who are different or hurt. He says he loves freaks and his wife Alice says he himself is a freak. Perhaps Biff’s own distance from the norm makes him so attracted to the people of the night. He thinks of himself as a conservative, but he is attracted to those who are quite distant from the norm. In Biff, McCullers develops an character who finds himself and accepts himself. Before his wife’s death, Biff seems to be a hounded man. He doesn’t want to argue, but finds himself arguing with his wife every time they encounter each other. When she dies, he begins to wear her perfume, he redecorates his bedroom with great care, he takes an interest in window display of his cafe, and he indulges in fantasies about the past and his place in it. McCullers makes of Biff a figure who crosses gender boundaries. In this sense, he is something like Mick Kelly. McCullers handles Biff’s attraction for Mick Kelly with great subtlety and understanding. He is aware that his attraction for Mick, a girl who is more than half his age and who hasn’t even left puberty yet, is inappropriate and he doesn’t act on it. However, Mick seems to sense it. She...