Sucker

There is a significant theme that appears in most of Carson McCullers' stories. It is best summarized in the fifth paragraph of the very first story she ever wrote. The story is called Sucker and she wrote it shortly after graduating from high school.

"There is one thing I have learned, but it makes me feel guilty and is hard to figure out. If a person admires you a lot you despise him and don't care—and it is the person who doesn't notice you that you are apt to admire. This is not easy to realize."

This unrequited love is a little more pathetic than the garden variety kind. You can't feel a martyr for your admiration of the person who doesn't notice you because of the guilt you harbor for despising the one who does admire you. This strange kind of unrequited love is why I like McCullers' stories.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

This is a very strange story about a very unlikely pair of companions. The characters are grotesque, but somehow when it's over you still feel sad at the outcome.

"First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world—a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring—this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

"Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else—but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

"It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain."

I like this. However, I think she leaves something out that explains this enigmatic relationship. It's true that the lover thinks of himself as a giver. But he gives his beloved a basket. And it is an empty basket that the beloved is expected to fill. The lover's motives are really selfish. And the beloved is often reticent to accept the great obligation. The Wizard of Oz was right. The size of one's heart is not measured by how much one loves, but by how much one is loved by others. Hardly anyone knows this.

The Member of the Wedding

The Member of the Wedding is my favorite story by McCullers. It's a look into the mind of a young girl in a coming of age story. I love stories of this genre.

"'Listen,' F. Jasmine said. 'What I've been trying to say is this. Doesn't it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can't ever be anything else but me, and you can't ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange?'"

She continues:

"'This,' she said. 'I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the color you see as green the same color I see as green? Or say we both call a color black. But how do we know that what you see as black is the same color I see as black?'"

Clock Without Hands

"The whole earth from a great distance means less than one long look into a pair of human eyes."

Reflections In A Golden Eye

"Three words were in the captain's heart. He shaped them soundlessly with his trembling lips, as he had not breath to spare for a whisper: 'I am lost.' And, having given up life, the captain suddenly began to live."

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

I found this short description of myself in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

"He was the sort of fellow that kids laughed at and dogs wanted to bite."

This novel is her best known work. It was made into a movie with Alan Arkin as the deaf-mute. Unfortunately, the deaf-mute's Greek friend isn't given much attention in the movie and so McCullers' peculiar unrequited love theme is lost.