Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers is a representative of 20th-century American critical realist literature, representing "Heart is a Lonely Hunter", "Song of a Sad Cafe", and "Reflection of Golden Eyes".
Like William Faulkner, she was a representative of Southern literature. Her life was very short, that is, this short fifty years, and she was still suffering from illness. A series of diseases severely devastated her body, so her works are mostly about lonely people, and the themes of loneliness, isolation and alienation are always throughout all her works. For example, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter".
"The Heart is a Lonely Hunter"
Published in 1940 at the age of 23, Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the book still made her famous and established her status as a literary artist, telling the story of a pair of deaf and mute people and four small characters.
The protagonists, Singer and Antonopalos, are a pair of deaf-mute friends with a special way of communicating. Singer is a masculine male figure known as a bisexual person. In appearance, he pays attention to dressing up like a woman. The two had no other friends, and they lived alone in a silent world separated from the outside world.
Surrounded by Mick, a little girl who loves music, Biefe, a middle-aged widowed coffee shop owner, Jack, a homeless man who is passionate about the workers' movement, and Capeland, a Marxist black doctor, all use Singer as the object of their spiritual communication, chasing their dreams. In the end, Antonipalos dies in a mental hospital, Singer commits suicide, and four lonely individuals return to their respective realities.
"The Song of the Sad Cafe"
"The Song of the Sad Cafe" is one of the novels that we are most familiar with and the most widely circulated. The story is a flashback story that takes place in a small southern town where a strangely ugly woman, Emilia, and two men are in love-hate love-hate love.
Miss Emilia is an eccentric and withdrawn person who inherited her father's inheritance and is very business-minded, the richest woman in town. When her father died, she not only inherited his legacy and business, but also inherited his reclusive and unsociable personality. She became a more lonely and mysterious figure.
Amelia refuses to recognize herself as an adult woman. Thus, contradictory behaviors occurred in her. She can successfully manage the business and provide the best alcohol and daily necessities to the townspeople, but she does not know how to maintain good relationships with others. As a reclusive character, Emilia lacks any experience communicating with men or women. She never cared about men or had any conversations with women.
Marvin Massey is the little rogue of this town, he spends his days doing nothing, he is not doing business, he is very handsome and cunning. Relying on his handsome appearance and seduction skills, he can easily win the favor of the small-town girls, and when the girls fall in love with him, he does not care to dump them.
However, Marvin Marcy planted a heel in Emilia's place, and although he married Emilia, Emilia refused to live with him and kicked her out of the house on her wedding night. Desperate, Marvin Massey had to leave the town and live a life of debauchery again. He ended up in jail for committing a crime.
During this time, a man named Li Meng appeared in emilia's life, Li Meng looked ugly and had a lewd personality, but made Emilia willing to do anything for him. Similarly, Li Meng failed to live up to Emilia's affection, and Marvin, who followed after his release from prison, defeated Emilia and finally disappeared.
In this triangle of love, each character plays the dual role of the lover and the beloved. As lovers, they act caringly, docile and humble. Unfortunately, the lover cannot get the same rewards as the beloved, he can only become the target of another person's love. People are not loved by the people they love, and a sharp sense of loneliness will naturally arise in their hearts. Emilia, Lemon, and Marvin Marcy all felt this sadness of loneliness in love.
Through this story, Carson McCullers truly shows the loneliness, pain and despair of modern people, and their spiritual and emotional dislocation is the inevitable result of the value heterogeneity of the transformation of the times. So, what era is this?
Story backdrop
It's a time of chaos, an era of despair. Carson McCullers's creative peak was after World War II, and she grew up during the Great Depression and the war years.
During the Great Depression, the Great Depression dealt a heavy blow to the always optimistic and confident Americans, and pessimistic and desperate decadence pervaded all corners of American society. Marriage rates have fallen dramatically, birth rates have reached historic lows, and suicide rates have risen. Soon, ordinary people began to worry that the entire political economy might collapse, people suddenly lost confidence in the future, faced a deep existential crisis, and felt great loneliness, depression and fear.
This loneliness and depression did not disappear with the end of the war, but became more and more intense.
After the end of World War II, the United States has experienced unprecedented prosperity, the material world has developed rapidly, post-war industrialization, urbanization, and modernization have greatly increased material wealth, and people's lives have become more and more abundant, but industrialization, urbanization, and modernization have brought a serious sense of crisis to people's survival, stifled people's personalities, suppressed people's emotions, corroded people's souls, and also caused the barrenness and emptiness of people's spiritual world.
Mercenarism was the universal value of people at that time, and materialism led to people's inner closure and inability to communicate normally between people. External violence, deception and other immoral phenomena also make people feel bitter, contradictory, and wandering in their thinking. The relationship between people is numb and merciless, and the distance between hearts is far away.