Music Symbol Analysis

While The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is not a particularly symbolic novel, one important symbol of the characters’ collective longing for self-expression, communication, and release from their respective isolation does emerge: music. Mick Kelly is the character most connected to the symbol of music, as she dreams of being a famous composer, conductor, and concert pianist renowned the world over for her symphonies. Music unlocks something profound in Mick—it drives her wild, releasing intense emotional and physical reactions to the beauty of the notes contained within the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and other orchestral compositions she hears on the radio. Mick doesn’t have a radio of her own and is instead forced to listen quietly to the radios of her parents’ boarders or to roam the streets of wealthier neighborhoods, searching for the sounds of another family’s radio wafting down to the lawn. Mick’s desire to compose music is intricately tied in with the enormous desire she has to express herself—a desire that is constantly thwarted by the bustling, chaotic environment of her parents’ boarding house.

While no other character in the novel loves music so well as Mick does, John Singer—the deaf and mute man who becomes a kind of sage figure to whom the book’s four major characters can vent—has a radio in spite of his inability to enjoy it. After John’s death, Mick inherits his radio, though she doesn’t get any joy out of listening to it any longer. Music, then, is also a symbol for the ways in which the desire to be seen, heard, known, and profoundly understood—a pressing want for Mick and Singer as well as Jake Blount, Biff Brannon, and Doctor Benedict Mady Copeland—dulls itself over time if one is unable to find that kind of connection and communion. Mick spends the entire book dreaming of music and longing for a way to make herself known to others, but by its end, she has resigned herself to the idea that both her concert-pianist dreams and her more ineffable, secret desire to be fully comprehended by another person may never be fulfilled.