Fionnuala's Reviews > The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

I've been reading Carson McCullers for the last month. I started with this book and then picked up each of her five other books one after the other, leaving myself no time in between to think about what I've read or consider writing a review. Today, I'm glad that I didn't attempt a review of this one because I just came across a piece in the sixth book, The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings, entitled Author's Outline of 'The Mute' (later published as 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter').

Her own words describe her intentions for this book so clearly that I'm going to use them in lieu of a review:
....The general outline of this work can be expressed very simply. It is the story of five isolated, lonely people in their search for expression and spiritual integration with something greater than themselves. One of these five is a deaf man, John Singer - and it is around him that the whole book pivots. Because of their loneliness these other four people see in the mute a certain mystic superiority and he becomes in a sense their ideal. Because of Singer's infirmity his outward character is vague and unlimited. His friends are able to impute to him all the qualities which they would wish for him to have. Each of the these four people creates his understanding of the mute from his own desires...In his eternal silence there is something compelling. Each one of these persons makes the mute the repository for his most personal feelings and ideas...
This situation between the four people and the mute has an exact parallel in the relation between Singer and his deaf-mute friend, Antonopoulos. Singer is the only person who could attribute to Antonopoulos dignity and a certain wisdom...
About this central idea there is much of the quality of a legend. All the parts dealing directly with Singer are written in the simple style of a parable.
Before the reasons why this situation came about can be fully understood it is necessary to know each of the principal characters in some detail. But the characters cannot be described adequately without the events which happen to them being involved. Nearly all the happenings in the book spring directly from the characters. During the space of this book each person is shown in his strongest and most typical actions.
Of course it must be understood that none of these personal characteristics are told in the didactic manner in which they are set down here. They are implied in one successive scene after another - and it is only at the end, when the sum of of these implications is considered, that the real characters are understood in all of their deeper aspects....

Carson McCullers then goes on to describe her plot and characters in great detail before finishing with some notes about time, place and structure. I was very interested to see that she had a musical structure in mind because I'd experienced the book in musical terms even as I was reading it. This is how she describes the structure: The form is contrapuntal throughout. Like a voice in a fugue each one of the main characters is an entirety in himself - but his personality takes on a new richness when contrasted and woven in with the other characters in the book.

One of the other interesting things that emerged for me is the amount of material she eventually left out of this novel. Because I've read all of her novels and most of her stories at this point, I realise that she recycled some of those deleted scenes. Characters' names and circumstances have also been recycled which makes reading all of her work together extra rewarding. The reader begins to see the entire cast of characters as part of one big family and all of her themes as being connected. She is always writing, in one way or another, about inner isolation and the battle to overcome it.