THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers, in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, addresses several themes throughout the story: loneliness, the desire for self-expression, politics, and religion. Her themes are woven seamlessly in the story through the characters, their conflicts and dreams, and the plot. Each of the main characters carries McCullers’ themes through the novel in their own unique and interesting ways.

Mr. Singer struggles with extreme isolation and loneliness, imposed in-part by his deafness and by the removal of his friend, Antonopoulos. All of the other main characters depend on Mr. Singer to give them a sense of connection, but despite their frequent visits and constant talking to him, he remains removed from them, unable to ever fully understand what they are saying to him. “They come up to my room and talk to me until I do not understand how a person can open and hut his or her mouth so much without being weary.” (p. 215), Singer writes in a letter to his friend. Ironically, the one true connection Singer feels, to Antonopoulos, is as much an illusion as the connections the others feel toward him. Singer comes to admit that Antonopoulos most likely does not understand anything he tells him: “The fact that Antonoploulos could not read did not prevent Singer from writing to him. He had always known that his friend was unable to make out the meaning of words on paper.” (p. 212).

Young Mick Kelly is searching for her place in life, feeling disconnected and out-cast from her family. Mick struggles to express herself and communicate through the songs that compose themselves in her mind. Her search for her music becomes her religion, her politics, and her dreams. Mick tries to express herself and share herself with her family, but always falls short and is left isolated. She divides her life into the “inside room” and the “outside room,” keeping her music, dreams, and admiration for Mr. Singer private and secure in her “inside room,” away from everyone else. But in the end, the pressure to help her family over takes her dreams, she takes a job at Woolworths, and ends up leaving her “inside room” behind, even if only temporarily.

Jake Blount is a drunk and a drifter, isolated because he is a stranger to the town, but also because of his erratic behavior and violent rants about socialism. Blount feels that he has connected with Singer, believing that Singer also “knows” and is a co-conspirator in his plans for a Socialist revolt. Blount also attempts to connect with Dr. Copeland, spending an entire evening talking ideals and philosophies and plans with Copeland, but in the end their differences cause the men to argue and blow up at each other, neither being able to see the similarities in their canons because of the extremes in their approaches. After Singer kills himself, Blount feels further persecuted, by the raging crowd at the carnival and by his own distrust for those around him, and he leaves the town.

Biff Brennan is like Singer in many ways. Although he isn’t a deaf mute, he is often a silent observer of the cast of characters that come into his café. Brennan is alone, even before his wife dies, as they are estranged and living completely opposite schedules to keep the café running: “… Biff made up the bed. Deftly he reversed the sheets in all possible ways, putting the top one on the bottom, and turning them over and upside down.” (p. 32). McCullers cleverly uses the bed to show the reader that Brennan’s and his wife’s lives are at odds in every way. Like Blount and Dr. Copeland, Brennan is aware of and concerned with society and the world around them. However, instead of preaching and spouting ideals and attempting to spread the word, Brennan hoards the news, filing newspapers carefully in a back room.

Dr. Copeland has a strong sense of obligation to his people, so much so that he has isolated himself from his family in his quest to find justice and equality for the black community. But he is also alienated from other black people in the community, because of his education and ideals. Like Blount, Dr. Copeland is a Marxist; however, instead of calling for a socialist revolt, Copeland longs to improve the plight of the black community through education. He remains disconnected from his family throughout the story, frustrated with their ready acceptance of society’s constraints and injustices forced on them. In the end, however, Copeland is pulled reluctantly back into the fold of the family, making him the only main character that is not alone at the end of the story.

There are times throughout the book, when McCullers may have gotten carried away with the political and social message. The ideals of social reform, the injustice of the racial divide, and the teachings of Karl Marx are repeated frequently throughout the novel, to the point where it becomes distracting in a few places and begins to sound more like the author speaking than the characters.

Carson McCullers unifies her central themes in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter through the character and plot development, making them consistent and compelling. As I read this book I couldn’t help but think of some of the themes and symbols that appear in fits-and-starts in my novel, and the importance of identifying them and making them consistent threads from beginning to end.

(Page numbers based on the Mariner Books, 2000, paperback edition.)

THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison not only captures the unique and compelling voices of her characters, but captures the voice of a race at a specific point in time. The narrative voice and voice of the main characters, as well as the voices of secondary characters are authentic, believable, and full of texture.

The narrative voice of this story is that of the young Claudia. Her voice and character reflect the circumstances of the people around her, the events of the time and story, and the racial issues of the time. “I could not love it. But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable. Break off the tiny fingers, bend the flat feet, loosen the hair, twist the head around, and the thing made one sound…” (p. 21). “If I pinched them, their eyes – unlike the crazed glint of the baby doll’s eyes – would fold in pain, and their cry would not be the sound of an icebox door, but a fascinating cry of pain.” (p. 23). Claudia makes clear, her feelings of revulsion toward the pretty white baby dolls she is expected to love and toward the white girls that they replicate. “We were sinking under the wisdom, accuracy, and relevance of Maureen’s last words. If she was cute – and if anything could be believed, she was – then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser.” (p. 74). The narrative voice is reflective and intuitive, honest, and more educated than most of the other characters’ voices.

Pauline Breedlove’s voice comes to life near the middle of the story in several long passages told from her point-of-view. Morrison uses a distinct style of speech and language to capture Mrs. Breedlove’s voice in a way that is unique. “Cholly commenced to getting meaner and meaner and wanted to fight me all of the time. I gave him as good as I got. Had to. Look like working for that woman and fighting Cholly was all I did. Tiresome.” (p. 118). The strength of Mrs. Breedlove, her love for Cholly, and her twisted sense of how life is supposed to work all come through in the voice that Morrison has created for her.

The voice of Elihue Micah Whitcomb, illustrated in a letter he writes to God, is perhaps one of the most unique that Morrison creates in The Bluest Eye. “I, I have caused a miracle. I gave her the eyes. I gave her the blue, blue, two blue eyes. Cobalt blue. A streak of it right out of your own blue heaven. No one else will see her blue eyes. But she will.” (p. 182). Whitcomb’s voice is more educated and sophisticated than the other characters, carrying with it an arrogance and disconnect from reality.

Even the voices of the secondary and background characters maintain a style of speech that is authentic to the race, timeframe, and setting.

“‘What she gone do? The mama?’

‘Keep on like she been, I reckon. He taken off.’

‘County ain’t gone let her keep that baby, is they?’

‘Don’t know.’” (p. 189).

There’s also a rhythm to the language and dialogue that pulls the reader into the conversation and helps to make it compelling.

Toward the end of the novel, Morrison beautifully portrays the voice of Pecola, having lost her mind and talking to herself, believing that she does in fact have the most beautiful blue eyes.

“Where do you live?

I told you once.

What is your mother’s name?

Why are you so busy meddling me?

I just wondered. You don’t talk to anybody. You don’t go to school. And nobody talks to you.

How do you know nobody talks to me?

They don’t. When you’re in the house with me, even Mrs. Breedlove doesn’t say anything to you. Ever. Sometimes I wonder if she even sees you.

Why wouldn’t she see me?” (p. 198).

The reader is not entirely sure who Pecola is talking to in the beginning, but it becomes clear and heartbreaking by the end of this section.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison expertly uses a number of rich and authentic character voices, as well as a compelling narrative voice to reveal and carry the reader through the story of Pecola Breedlove. With the use of realistic speech styles and language choices, as well as some use of dialect, and remaining true to the individual characters in what they would (or wouldn’t) say and how, Morrison weaves a compelling, enthralling story that engages the reader from the beginning through the end. It is clear from Morrison’s work that any writer can create a compelling, authentic narrative by paying particular attention to language and dialect, and by keeping the voice true to the setting and characters.

(Page numbers are based on Alfred Knopf, 2000 edition)

THE BELL JAR by Sylvia Plath

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath convincingly portrays a woman, Esther Greenwood, who is slipping into madness. Plath exposes Esther’s fragile grip on her life in an understated way, with unique descriptions and metaphors, so that the reader is lulled into Esther’s insanity with her. Plath’s masterful characterization allows Esther to develop three dimensionally for the reader, while remaining sympathetic.

From the beginning, Plath establishes Esther’s character as a normal college student like her friends, “There were twelve of us at the hotel. We had all won a fashion magazine contest, by writing essays and stories and poems and fashion blurbs…” (p. 3), but at the same time different, with something dark and destructive running inside her, “… I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.” (p. 1).

We see Esther as a simple girl, brought up with little money, out of her element among all the glitz and glamour of the New York fashion industry, because Plath shows the reader this through Esther’s experiences and reactions: “The city had faded my tan, though…. Ordinarily, I would have been nervous about my dress and my odd color…” (p. 8), “My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us ever since my father died, and secretly she hated it…” (p. 39), “Before I came to New York I’d never eaten out in a proper restaurant.” (p. 24).

As the story develops, Esther is on a quest for connection with other people, through her search for a lover and friends, but remains somehow isolated within herself, so that even the most tenuous connection with another person seems bigger than it is. Plath illustrates this uniquely when Esther and Hilda discuss the impending electrocution of the Rosenbergs: “‘Yes!’ Hilda said, and at last I felt I had touched a human string in the cat’s cradle of her heart.” The connection is short lived, when Esther is disappointed by Hilda, as she is by most of her relationships.

The reader begins to experience the unraveling of Esther’s sanity when she goes to the roof of the Amazon hotel, standing on a chair at the edge of the wall. It is the specific details of the scene and Esther’s actions that pull the reader into the scene so that s/he fears for Esther’s life – the “cornflower-sprigged bathrobe,” the “stiff breeze,” the “city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.” (p. 111). When Esther releases her clothes into the wind the reader is relieved that she has not killed herself, while simultaneously feeling anxious that she’s not well, and in fact this is the beginning of Esther’s rapid descent. Plath show’s the reader Esther’s state of mind when Esther says of herself “The face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian.” (p. 112).

Esther’s depression is beautifully illustrated with “I saw the years of my life spaced along the road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three … nineteen poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.” (p. 123). Using the unique metaphor of an ordinary line of telephone poles, Plath clearly shows Esther’s inability to imagine her own future.

Plath continues to characterize Esther’s decline through a series of events or situations. Esther is unable to write, she stops sleeping, stops showering, and doesn’t change her clothes. These actions are believable because Plath has already set up Esther’s fragile state and slowly deteriorating grasp on reality.

The reader begins to fear for Esther’s life as she begins an obsession with methods of suicide, fantasizing about Japanese disemboweling, “It must take a lot of courage to die like that. My trouble was I hated the sight of blood.” (p. 138). Esther practices and plans for cutting herself, “Then I thought maybe I ought to spill a little blood for practice…” (p. 148), considers drowning in the ocean, attempts to hang herself, and then attempts to drown herself.

Plath illustrates Esther’s state of mind with a look at the items in her pocketbook, “… paper scraps and the compact and the peanut shells and the dimes and nickels and the blue jiffy box containing nineteen Gillette blades…” (p. 146), ordinary items although not necessarily found in pocketbooks, with the most detailed description for the razor blades. And when Esther is remembering a play that a friend had told her about, “The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.” (p. 155).

After Esther makes an earnest attempt to kill herself, by taking sleeping pills and hiding in a crawl space under the house, Plath does not let the reader easily off the hook. Esther is admitted to a series of asylums and the reader watches uncomfortably as Esther slowly improves, but always with the feeling that Esther may not ever recover. “I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome…” (p. 182).

When her friend Joan shows Esther the newspaper clippings of her disappearance, attempted suicide, and rescue, Esther is disassociated from it, distanced, referring to “this girl” (p. 198) rather than herself. In this very subtle way, Plath shows the reader that Esther is still not fully aware of or connected to her own situation, actions, and consequences.

Even as Esther recovers, the reader is not permitted to get comfortable with the recovery or fully believe it. “I decided to practice my new, normal personality on this man …” (p. 226). The reader knows that Esther is pretending and practicing to behave in a socially normal way, though she may have not changed or recovered to that degree. When her mother says that they will forget the incident like a bad dream, Esther thinks “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.” (p. 237).

Sylvia Plath, in The Bell Jar, uses subtlety through description, simile, and metaphor, to develop the character of Esther Greenwood and show the reader her illness. In doing so, Plath establishes Esther as a sympathetic character that the reader can connect to and route for. The reader is not turned off by Esther’s struggles, though s/he is made uncomfortable in places. This approach is important because it would be easy for the reader to lose patience with Esther for not taking charge and improving her situation, and lose concern for her spiraling deterioration.

I am fascinated by Plath’s ability to create a character that could easily be less than sympathetic in a way that keeps the reader attached to both the character and her story. I am also intrigued with her ability to show the character’s madness through subtle details, description, and metaphor, without over writing or directly telling the reader what the character’s mental state is. This is an aspect of The Bell Jar and Plath’s writing that I would very much like to accomplish in my own writing. I would like to go back through my story and look for places where the ordinary can be described in new and different ways that develop the characters.

(Page numbers based on Harper Perennial, 2005, paperback edition)

ELLEN FOSTER by Kaye Gibbons

In Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons uses stylistic writing to create a narrative voice that is distinctive and memorable. To establish her unique style, and subsequently create an authentic narrative voice, Gibbons plays with grammar and punctuation, sentence structure, and language.

One of the most notable stylistic decisions that Gibbons employs is around dialogue. There is no clear, apparent dialogue in the book, though on occasion there is the illusion of dialogue. This is achieved in part because Gibbons uses no quotation marks to signal and set off dialogue, and no dialogue tags. But this ambiguity in dialogue also comes from the sentence structure and what is being said. The reader has the feeling that the dialogue is being retold to them as a part of the story rather than bearing witness to the actual dialogue as it has occurred.

Gibbons omits other customary punctuation, such as a lack of commas, to further effect the narrative voice. For example: “Her art room is in the back apart from the rest of the school so she had not seen the time but she pulled my head to her stomach and said to let’s go home.” (p. 54) and “They put her in a box too and him in a box oh shut the lid down hard on this one and nail it nail it with the strongest nails.” (p. 70). The lack of punctuation creates a particular mode of speech which fits the narrator’s character perfectly.

One of the most interesting and textural style choices is in Gibbon’s use of unique language and phrases, sometimes using incorrect words to further flavor the narrator’s voice. There are many examples of this throughout the book, including “right much” (p. 30), “her time was what all that I needed” (p. 57), “drawed” (p. 58), “easedropping” (p. 67), and “growed” (p. 98).

The sum of these style choices, establishes a strong sense that this story is being told verbally, by Ellen Foster herself, to an unknown, unseen audience, or perhaps directly to the reader him/herself. This sense of listening to the story is made stronger by the occasional use of the word “you.” For example: “When or if you come to my house now after church you will smell all the things that have been simmering on low.” (p. 58) and “Then you go to the girls department and tell the lady you need the sizes bigger than the ones you have in your hand.” (p. 97). The reader has the feeling that s/he is hearing and receiving the story first hand from the narrator.

Through the particular stylistic choices that Kaye Gibbons makes in Ellen Foster, the reader resides in Ellen’s head, becomes a part of Ellen, as she tells her story. The style and narrative voice pull the reader into the story and hold him/her there until the end. Gibbons could have chosen any number of styles for writing this story, but none would have brought the reader as close to the narrator as the style Gibbons used. The style and voice are ideally suited to the character of Ellen Foster, a young girl from the rural south who has suffered a great deal of grief, dislocation, and disconnection in her short life.

(Page numbers are based on Vintage Books, 1990, paperback edition)