Religious Allegory In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

On the other hand it never becomes a mere sequence of neurotic images. It is a work which reveals a strong, courageous and independent imagination. There are other writers in the contemporary field who are of more importance than Carson McCullers. Then too, there is the problem of how to make the inner world and the outer world conjoin the problem immediately faced by Frankie, an anarchist in an old baseball cap. These three people, Frankie, John Henry, and Bernice sit around the kitchen table talking most musically while the green summer heat grows more and more oppressive around them. Carson McCullers is as consistent and thorough going as in creating a sustained body of work. This underlying unity is partly the result of her prevailing

But Biff does have something and Singer is not quite sure what it is the others hate and love. At any rate, here is the religious allegory which seems to underlie and to reinforce the theme of loneliness in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. A typical modern Gothic theme involves rites of passage for the innocent into a violent world. The hero often is an individual who feels persecuted and inferior and who withdraws from the actual world into a world of magnified fears and nightmares. This withdrawal results in a state of personal dissociation from society, a state of gnawing loneliness. Frequently frustrated in love the hero either lives out his days in terrible isolation or becomes in one way or another sexually perverted. It results in the search for a sexless dim ideal, a manifestation of the hero’s avoidance and fear of

They appear too restrictive in terms of the theme of isolation. Considerable evidence, however suggests the probability that politics was a motivating factor in the genesis of the novel. The theme but also to the tight construction McCullers claimed and reviewers have so often questioned in that the parable is a key not to broader implications. The situation and setting and dramatized through character and action in the thematic patterns are delineated. The parable’s theme is an affirmation of the democratic process, but its implications are the universal problems of illusion versus reality and the nature of man himself. It is not only supports but also greatly strengthens the theme of isolation or