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Part 3, Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Loneliness and Isolation
Communication and Self-Expression
Racism, Inequality, and Injustice
The Individual vs. Society
The American South
Summary
Analysis
Several months into her job at Woolworth’s, Mick is feeling despondent and hopeless. She fears that all the plans she dreamed and all the songs she wrote in the “inside room” are worth nothing—she has been caught in the “trap” of work. This evening, after working an overtime shift, she doesn’t feel like going home. She decides to go to the New York Café to have an ice cream and a cigarette. She heads to the back and sits in a booth, where she removes her uncomfortable earrings and tries to get her face—pinched from hours of smiling at customers—to feel normal again. Brannon comes over, greets Mick, and offers to take her order. She asks for a chocolate sundae and a beer.
This passage shows Mick, now a cog in the machine of work and capitalism, reckoning with the changes that have come into her life recently. This scene ties in with the novel’s theme of the individual versus society as Mick realizes that she’s been swept up—perhaps forever—in the unending loop of labor and exhaustion that defines much of adult life.
Themes
Mick sits and thinks about the loss both of John Singer and of her own youth and innocence. She was the one to find Singer’s body after sneaking into his room to play his radio. Mick has become unfeeling and robotic in the weeks following Singer’s death—she goes to work, smiles through her shifts, then comes home and sleeps like a log until the next day.
Even though Mick is dealing with pain, grief, and trauma, she’s forced to push it aside and focus on remaining sunny and employable—she’s left school, and work (which requires her false enthusiasm) is all that’s available to her now.
Themes
Brannon brings Mick her sundae and her beer, and she pretends to be absorbed in cleaning her fingernails so that she doesn’t have to talk to him. As she drinks, she reflects on how she’s been feeling “shut out from the inside room” lately—she barely ever hears music in her head anymore, and wonders if it’s because the store has taken all her energy. She is always tired now, and even though she has Singer’s radio for herself, she barely has any interest in playing it. She still dreams dully of saving up for a piano, but now her dreams are tempered by fears of worrying how she’d pay for the instrument and where she’d keep it.
The trauma of discovering Singer’s body while trying to listen to his radio has bound music up with fear and grief inside of Mick’s mind. Over the course of the novel, she’s chipped away at her childhood in ways small and large, voluntary and involuntary—but this final blow to her youth and innocence has barred her from the inside room and forever changed her. Even her favorite fantasy of the piano is now marred by dull, adult concerns.
Themes
Mick beats her forehead with her fist. She hates that she is “mad all the time” in a way very different from the childish bouts of anger he used to feel. She feels “cheated” by her job at the store. She tries to stay positive about her prospects and stoke her dream of one day owning a real piano—but can’t shake the feeling that all the time spent in her “inside room” has ultimately done her no good at all.
Mick’s dreams are still alive, but they are just barely flickers when they used to be all-consuming flames. She realizes that her childhood has evaporated, and that the road ahead of her will be long, hard, and lonely.
Themes
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