SOURCE: Bradshaw, Charles. “Language and Responsibility: The Failure of Discourse in Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Southern Quarterly 37, no. 2 (winter 1999): 118-26.

In the following essay, Bradshaw analyzes John Singer's relationship with the other main characters in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, focusing on how Singer's status as a deaf-mute affects their concept of Self.

I distrust the compromised word “love,” but the responsibility for the Other, being-for-the-other, seemed to me … to stop the anonymous and senseless rumbling of being.

—Emmanuel Levinas

Primary to Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy is his assertion that there exists an “Other” prior to and absolutely different than the being of the “Self.” Indeed, the Self depends upon the Other as a referent for its existence, making this Self-Other dichotomy the fundamental relationship in determining identity. Yet, in its attempts to internalize and make meaning of this relationship, the Self naturally...