Insights from a person of questionable sanity

Human loneliness

Oh boy, now there’s a topic we’re all experts at! We can all wax lyrical about loneliness. We’re all familiar with that feeling of being surrounded by people and yet still being alone. It is such a bizarre feeling for me, an absurd emotion and what better medium than a short story can express it so well? Loneliness is a recurring theme in short stories and due to the length-the brevity of a short story it hits the mark more than a novel on loneliness.

Frank O’Connor once remarked ‘the short story deals with human loneliness’. I think in a short story that feeling is more sharp and deep due to the structure of the short story: A does not come after B randomly. The author has deliberately structured it that way, chosen those words and phrases to heighten the emotion.

‘Elizabeth Bowen said that the short story more than the novel is able to place man alone on that “stage which, inwardly, every man is conscious of occupying alone, and that, exempt as it is from the novel’s often forced conclusiveness, the short story may more nearly approach aesthetic and moral truth” ’ (C. E. May, The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice. Twayne Publishers. p123)

The short story deals with the present moment. And the fact that ‘characters can depend only on the present moment, is precisely what makes them lonely- and this sense of loneliness is best manifested in a form that focuses only on the present moment’ (same source as above).

The most poignant characters for me are those who cannot articulate their feelings because…well, you can’t get more lonely than that can you? Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemmingway are two good examples for this. Its not that speech is absent in their stories, it’s there...but…it’s not working…it is not always the absence of speech but sometimes its failure to communicate the truth that makes characters lonely.


I for one like ‘ordinary’ characters. Their the real interesting people. Put them in strange situations and see how they react. I think most of us are just rather ordinary, we work, eat, sleep and so on. But we can still experience the philosophical question of meaning and life. You don’t need to be Rambo or Othello for that. That is part of the reason why I love short story writers like Carver, from the school of ‘realism’ or even ‘dirty realism’. His characters aren’t heroic, or grand or trying to bring about world peace. But they nevertheless move me in their attempt to just live their lives against all the odds and make meaning out of life and existence. Sometimes small little storms can be more damaging than an earthquake or tornado.