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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Miss Lonelyhearts, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Religion and Morality in Modern Society
The Illusion of the American Dream
The Limitations of Love
Isolation and Madness
Summary
Analysis
Miss Lonelyhearts returns home to the single-room apartment in which he lives alone. The walls have no decorations aside from an ivory figure of Jesus’s body, which Miss Lonelyhearts removed from its original cross and nailed directly into the wall. As he reads a philosophical novel before bed, Miss Lonelyhearts thinks back to his childhood as the son of a clergyman. As a child, Miss Lonelyhearts realized that if he shouted Jesus’s name, a powerful feeling would begin to stir inside him—but he never allowed himself to fully explore that feeling. Gazing upon the figure of Jesus nailed onto his wall, Miss Lonelyhearts begins to chant, “Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ.” Even now, he finds himself excited by the persona of Jesus but still afraid of the powerful feeling that comes after saying his name.
The image of Miss Lonelyhearts alone in his bare apartment paints a picture of him as an isolated character, and Miss Lonelyhearts’s home suggests that Shrike isn’t incorrect in saying that Jesus is Miss Lonelyhearts’s “only sweetheart.” However, the way that Miss Lonelyhearts interacts with the ivory Jesus figure in his home suggests that his interest in Jesus differs from that of a conventional Christian. For one, Miss Lonelyhearts notes that Jesus “excites” him, and this word choice comes with a sexual connotation. It’s also peculiar and noteworthy that Miss Lonelyhearts removes Jesus from the cross, which seems to suggest that he’s interested in Jesus as a figure but is not necessarily interested in the religious context of his crucifixion.
Themes
Miss Lonelyhearts falls asleep and dreams of his college friends, Steve and Jud. Together, they decide to buy a lamb to roast and eat, with Miss Lonelyhearts stating that they need to first sacrifice the lamb to God before killing it. In charge of conducting the sacrifice, Miss Lonelyhearts chants “Christ, Christ, Jesus Christ” over the lamb, but when he tries to pierce the lamb with a knife, he misses. The lamb begins to struggle, and Miss Lonelyhearts’s knife breaks. The wounded lamb ultimately escapes, and Miss Lonelyhearts and his friends run away, too. Only Miss Lonelyhearts returns to find the lamb and put it out of its misery, which he does by crushing its head with a stone.
This dream further emphasizes Miss Lonelyhearts’s isolation: he’s the only one of his friends who thinks to consider God during their killing of the lamb, and he alone experiences the violence of putting the lamb out of its misery. The lamb is also famously considered as a symbol for Jesus, and Miss Lonelyhearts’s failure to properly sacrifice to lamb to God seems to imply that his relationship to Jesus and Christianity is far more complicated than meets the eye and may even cause him pain in the long run.
Themes
