Essay Questions

The real name of Miss Lonelyhearts is never mentioned; he is ever only referred to by his journalistic nom-de-plume. Why might the author have made this decision?

For a full understanding of the novel, it is important to realize that at heart—no pun intended—it is an allegorical undertaking. The writer of the advice to the lovelorn column is clearly and unmistakably intended to be a Christ figure. Jesus is referenced by name or as Christ around fifty times in the text and one of the chapters is explicitly titled “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Lamb.” It is not as if the author is trying to subtly disguise his allegorical intention. At one point in the early on in the composition of the book, the story was to be narrated in the first person by the title character and he actually did have a name. The subsequent decision to tell the story from the third-person made the decision to drop the identifier much easier, no doubt, while also better facilitating the idea of the story as a metaphorical rather than the more literal implication naturally inherent in a personal narrative.

Miss Lonelyhearts seems an unlikely choice to enter into the disorderly world of romantic advice to strangers considering his mania for order. How do mandolins fit as symbols of disorder within his philosophy?

In the chapter title “Miss Lonelyhearts in the Dismal Swamp” the advice columnist falls into one his frenzied dream visions. This time he finds himself in a pawnshop surrounding by “the paraphernalia of suffering” which includes the immediately obvious like shotguns and fishing tackle, the somewhat less obvious like watches and diamond rings and mandolins. If his dream were a picture game, it would be “what’s wrong this picture.” Mandolins? A symbol of suffering? What gives? Fortunately, the narrator offers insight into mind which considers order a “tropism of man.” Order does not exist in nature; man must supply it through such often overlooked but instantly recognizable means as keeping coins in one pocket and keys in another. But nature—inherently immune to such precise ordering—abides in the long term and inevitably when one reaches for their keys, their fingers will bring out coins. Mandolins must be made to succumb to man’s desire to confer order and this is accomplished by tuning the strings: G D A E. But just like shotguns that don’t always work as intended and watches which wind down and make you late for an important appointment, mandolins bring suffering to man as well. Mandolins are made to get out of tune as a result of the very act of being played. Miss Lonelyhearts…he is deep, or possibly not quite sane.

Miss Lonelyhearts is often cited as an example of the literature of the grotesque. What specific concrete examples facilitate the metaphorical grotesqueries of the story?

Grotesque is fundamentally defined—that is to say one of its multiple connotations—as anything which diverges remarkably from the norm in a way that is unexpected and unnatural in a way that is at least unpleasant and potentially frightening. Metaphorically, this definition covers the basic idea of a male journalist being “Miss Lonelyhearts.” It also covers the territory of Shrike’s deviant torture of his employee as well as Lonelyheart’s messianic complex. But the grotesque also shows up in less figurative ways. The primary mechanism is, not surprisingly, the problems experienced by those writing to the newspaper columnist for advice. For instance, there is the singularly horrific condition of teenager who writes under the name “Desperate” who is considering suicide as a result of the living emotional hell that compounds the physical hell of being born without a nose. And then there’s fifteen-year-old Harold writing in a state of terror over the worry that his younger deaf-mute sister who was raped two weeks earlier might wind up pregnant. Just these two examples of the many letters from equally distraught and despondent readers would be more than enough to qualify the novel as belonging to the literature of the grotesque.