Lawler Literature: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Mick sat on the steps a long time. Miss Brown did not turn on her radio and there was nothing but the noises that people made. She thought a long time and kept hitting her thighs with her firsts. Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want--I want--I want--was all that she could think about--but just what this real want was she did not know. (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers. P 52)

Man, Carson McCullers really had an appreciation for what it's like to be in that chaotic intermediary place between childhood and teenagerdom. For that matter, she had an appreciation for what it's like to be an unfulfilled human being. And what human being isn't unfulfilled?

McCullers herself had a huge interest in Freud and psychoanalytic theories. Quite intentionally, I think, the above passage illustrates unconscious motivations and the youthful, barely bridled id.

It seems that each character in A Heart is a Lonely Hunter, adult and child alike, displays similarly Freudian characteristics, from the sexually frustrated diner owner to the orally-fixated deaf-mute locked up in the mental ward.

So, say what you will about Freud as a sexist, grandiose, unscientific theorist, but the guy's whacked out explanations for human behavior did improve literature. We otherwise might never have met Biff Brannon: a grown man in love with a preteen, an obsessive collector of old newspapers, whose soul ambition is to be a real mother to the lonely children of the world. Or, of course, John Singer, another deaf-mute, who suffers in silent psychic agony, though he is surrounded by admirers.