Singer is deaf and struggles his way out in order to live happily. John Singer a character in the novel is one of the isolated people in a small town in the state of Georgia.
Mick for example who is a character in the book strives to fight their loneliness by searching for beauty (McCullers 25). Worse still other individuals fell into addiction of hard drugs such as heroine.
Other individuals go to an extent of manifesting depravity and violent means to get their lives going. Some of these characters fight loneliness by engaging themselves in heavy drinking prostitution, use of drugs and sex. This group of people according to the novel represents the isolated individuals, who have to fight against their boredom and loneliness in various ways that are not morally upright. The main characters in the novel represent a wide variety of people comprising of the rejected, the damned, and the voiceless individuals of the society. The novel is based on a town to the south of USA called Georgia, which has a cosmopolitan setting.
Singer experiences the agony of isolation because the one person he cares for has been taken away, but his infinite gentleness somehow consoles the other four as he becomes their confidant.The story through its well selected characters is able to clearly make the reader to acknowledge how the characters are isolated by the society and how they struggle against the isolated nature that the society subjects them to. They are all estranged from family and community and alienated by their thwarted desires and ambitions. The four are cafe-owner Biff Brannon political radical Jake Blount, a heavy drinker Benedict Copeland, a black doctor and Mick Kelly, a 12-year-old tomboyish and inquiring girl with unattainable dreams of a musical career. When Singer moves into the Kelly family boarding house, he becomes the focus of four lonely people who create in him the image of their own desires. It centres on the enigmatic John Singer, a 32-year-old deaf mute who finds himself alone after sharing 10 years of a routine with his only friend and fellow mute, Spiros, who has been confined in a mental hospital after increasingly unstable behaviour. The novel is set in a town in the US south, probably similar to the one in which the author herself grew up. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter must rank as one of the most impressive of debut novels, all the more remarkable when one considers that it was published when McCullers was only 23. Carson McCullers is buried in the same cemetery in Nyack, New York, as the painter Edward Hopper – surely fitting, as they have been well-described as “two of America’s most penetrating mediums of loneliness”.
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