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Part 2, Chapter 11
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
The days have grown hot again as March has gone on, and the Sunny Dixie Show is always busy. Jake Blount hates the warm weather and is not looking forward to a long and stifling summer. He has not been feeling well of late, plagued by headaches and a bloating in his gut. He knows his troubles stem from alcohol, but he continues drinking heavily.
Though Jake Blount is a Southerner through and through, the heat perturbs him—and even serves as a kind of ill omen in this passage.
Themes
Jake has, at long last, met the man who chalked a Bible verse on the wall in his neighborhood. The scrawler is an elderly sidewalk preacher with “bright and crazy” eyes named Simms. Simms is desperate to convert Jake, and follows him around nonstop, often screaming at him about his sins. Jake is happy for any company at all, though, and often indulges Simms, sometimes even buying him snacks and drinks at the corner store.
Simms’s preaching—which is loud and incessant, though he gets through to no one—mirrors both Blount’s failed attempts to get his anti-capitalist message through to the townspeople as well as Doctor Copeland’s repeated attempts to get the black community to organize and stand up against oppression.
Themes
As March turns to April, the weather continues to heat up. Tensions at the Sunny Dixie, too, begin to escalate, and quarrels frequently break out between white and black customers. Jake even gets into a brawl with two of the other carnival operators after he overhears them disparaging his “Red Bolshevik” politics. After tussling with the men, Jake becomes paranoid, constantly afraid that others are making disparaging remarks about his appearance and his beliefs. He starts feeling horribly lonely—the only thing keeping him afloat is his friendship with Singer, whom he believes is the only person in the whole world who understands him. Jake’s behavior grows increasingly erratic. He takes to screaming his rants out his window at night, drawing the ire of his sleeping neighbors.
As Jake’s loneliness escalates and begins to calcify, he tries desperately to communicate with those around him—even though his attempted methods include screaming out a window into darkness and leaving cryptic notes on walls. Jake’s fatal flaw is that he simply doesn’t know how to effectively or kindly communicate with his neighbors, no matter how much he wants to. It makes sense that he feels Singer understands him—Singer is the perfect person for him to communicate with, since Singer’s silence mirrors the silence of the world all around Jake.
Themes
Throughout April, more and more disturbing and threatening happenings unfold. Jake finds the dead body of a young black man near the Sunny Dixie showgrounds, and frequent fights continue to break out at the park during operating hours. Simms takes to preaching in the middle of the showgrounds, and Jake begins chalking socialist messages on the walls around town and writing up pamphlets to distribute to the other townspeople.
Even as violence continues to escalate—demonstrating the white community’s failure to hear, respect, or even afford basic humanity to the black community—Jake and Simms continue shouting their beliefs into thin air. Their failures to communicate allegorize the larger failures in communication between the people of the Deep South.
Themes
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One afternoon, Jake goes up to Singer’s room to visit him, but finds that the room is empty. As he heads back downstairs, though, he runs into Singer, coming in from outside. Jake asks where Singer has been, and Singer writes on his pad that he has been to visit Doctor Copeland’s son Willie, who has returned from prison with his legs cut off. Jake becomes angry on Willie’s behalf and knows something must be done. He asks Singer to take him to visit the Copelands, and Singer agrees to bring him around later that evening.
When confronted with a tangible kind of violence that hits close to home, Jake Blount decides to get angry—and yet all of the strife that’s been occurring at the Sunny Dixie has seemed inevitable or unmotivating to him.
Themes
