The Heart: A Lonely Hunter Anonymous 10th Grade

Man’s search for spiritual fulfillment in their lifelong escape from emotional isolation has been a common theme in literature of all cultures. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, a feminist American writer, this spiritual search is reflected in the lives of four isolated, lonely people in the deep south of the 1940s through their search for self-expression and spiritual integration with something greater than themselves. With confusion towards God and animosity toward country, it is small wonder that McCullers creates a fictional world of characters that long for a “spiritual” home. McCullers’s deep understanding of true loneliness and the transience of life offer readers a greater scope into humanity, showing a paradoxical truth that man’s heart is trapped in a perennial chase for a pursuit greater than themselves, and that man fulfills this spiritual longing by seeking consolation from nonexistent illusions built from imagination. This human tendency of appeasing loneliness by filling the emptiness of ordinary, quotidian life through imagination is depicted in the characters Jake Blount and Mick Kelley, all visitors of the deaf-mute John Singer, in whom they find spiritual consolation by sharing their...