The tragically incapable of rendering the kind of love and understanding each of the others need and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a story of five lonely people each of them isolated, desperate for understanding from those around them. The respect that we might not expect to feel for grotesque and freaks and yet because of their painful struggles with an indifferent hostile environment these people often inspire the sympathy. Through the use of this
Contrapuntal form switching from character to character as each goes through similar alienating experiences. Mrs. McCullers preserves the separateness of each person even as she holds them all together in a lonely community of suspicion and misunderstanding. Their physical grotesquery merely makes visible and identifiable their isolation and
Anguish, normal people do not confront these on quite such immediate and inescapable terms perhaps but they are really no better off, no happier. The particular vision of Carson McCullers, shows the capacity for recognizing and portraying and sympathetically identifying with pain and loneliness. They arise only out of social situation in which the patterns and forms