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Chapter 4
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
After visiting Betty, Miss Lonelyhearts still feels restless and afraid, so he goes to Delehanty’s speakeasy for a drink. He runs into a group of his friends, who are in the middle of complaining about how too many women are writers. When Miss Lonelyhearts doesn’t participate in the conversation, his friends begin to talk about him. They call him an “escapist” and agree that even if he were to have a true religious experience, it’d be “meaningless” to everyone else aside from a psychologist. Nonetheless, Miss Lonelyhearts continues enjoying his drink, smiling like “an anarchist sitting in the movies with a bomb in his pocket.”
Much like Shrike, the friends that Miss Lonelyhearts encounters at the speakeasy express problematic ideas and are cruel, creating an image of Depression-era New York as overrun by troubling characters. Interestingly, Miss Lonelyhearts’s “friends” aren’t kind to him either, further isolating him as they critique his religious beliefs and imply that he may need medical attention. Ignoring their malicious intent, however, Miss Lonelyhearts’s friends may be right, as the description of Miss Lonelyhearts as “an anarchist sitting in the movies with a bomb in his pocket” urges the reader to understand that he’s succumbed to some level of madness.
Themes
When Miss Lonelyhearts moves away from the bar, he accidentally bumps into a man holding a glass of beer. In response, the man punches Miss Lonelyhearts in the mouth so hard that a tooth comes loose. Angry and frustrated, Miss Lonelyhearts thinks about asking Shrike to transfer him to the sports department. His friend Ned Gates comes over to check on him, and they head outside together and discover that it’s snowing. They walk to the park, where they come across an old man named George in the bathroom. Gates sings that if he can’t get a woman, he can at least get “a clean old man.”
As Miss Lonelyhearts’s night continues, the portrait that the novella creates of New York City grows more soiled and immoral. Various abusive acts happen in quick succession, and despite Miss Lonelyhearts’s belief that he’s a Christ figure, he can’t escape the violence of his world. Similarly, while the appearance of Ned Gates could have led to a moment of friendship and care between Gates and Miss Lonelyhearts, it leads to the opposite, as Gates has ill intentions toward the old man they come across.
Themes
Miss Lonelyhearts hesitates at first but helps Gates bring the old man to an Italian cellar, where they continue drinking. Gates asks George for his life stories and asks when he first realized his homosexual tendencies, telling him that he and Miss Lonelyhearts are psychologists who want to help him. George becomes offended, and Miss Lonelyhearts joins in, pestering him for his life story. George refuses to share, and Miss Lonelyhearts twists his arm, thinking of all the people who write to him for advice in the paper. George begins to scream, and a bystander hits Miss Lonelyhearts with a chair.
In addition to Miss Lonelyhearts being unable to avoid experiencing the immorality and violence of his environment, he becomes implicated in perpetuating abuse as he joins Gates in tormenting the old man. This is deeply ironic considering that Miss Lonelyhearts so recently self-identified with Jesus in his conversation with Betty, and it becomes clear to the reader that Miss Lonelyhearts’s identification with Jesus is merely aspirational. He does, however, remember the Lonelyhearts letter-writers as he torments the old man, suggesting that he hasn’t completely lost sight of New Yorkers’ suffering.
Themes
