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THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER gives us a day, a year, and a day in the lives of five distinct characters: Singer, Mick, Brannon, Blount, and Dr. Copeland. Their lives are shot through with frustration and discouragement and the intense privacy of their inner lives gives the reader the impression that they are isolated, lonely beings. However, the frustrations they experience are most often a product of their very passionate attempts to follow their desires or convictions. Moreover, McCullers employs several devices which work against the sense of loneliness and which lend a tenuous sense of unity, an echoing of sensibility, to the discrete voices of the characters.
The very real ambiguities which structure our perception of the lives of the characters of Lonely Hunter have given rise to vastly differing opinions on the novel's meaning and on Carson McCullers's conclusions concerning human relationships: Oliver Evans, for example, suggests that what "[McCullers] conceives to be the truth about human nature is a melancholy truth: each man is surrounded by a 'zone of loneliness,' serving a life sentence of solitary confinement" (Clark 126). L. D. Rubin.Jr. offers the same view in the form of a complaint: "[One would think] that so rare a talent for observing and understanding and feeling compassion for others would produce something other than the anguished conviction of emptiness and solitude" (Clark 117). At the same time, many readers of Lonely Hunterhave expressed a sense of the beauty of the experience of reading the novel, a feeling which the trajectories of the characters, and the events of the story, cannot account for. Early reviewers such as Richard Wright wrote of the novel's "sheen of weird tenderness" (Clark 17), and stated that one puts the novel down "with a feeling of having been nourished by the truth" (Clark 20). Julian Symons offers the view that McCullers's "poetic vision" allows her to transform "our common loneliness into something rich and strange" (Clark 22).
The unifying elements of the novel which constitute this "poetic vision" do not, I would argue, exist at the level of individual characterization, but are deployed in terms of symbolic representation, structure, and narrative voice. They are disseminated, not within the diegesis, but within the narration taken as a whole,...