The reading of McCullers’ work provides the reader with a dynamic intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic experience. Her gifts are manifold, intense and varied. For one thing, she is a masterful portrayer of character as she gives simultaneously the essence of each individual and his idiosyncratic particularities. Her range of as portrayer of character is very wide. Her black men and women never become mere stereotypes moving in the background. Her adolescent figures remain memorable as she treats them with humorous tolerance and sympathetic understanding in their awkwardness, frustration, bitterness, confusion and feelings of isolation. If her ordinary characters are memorable, the oddities of some others arrest, amuse or shock. Such personages function symbolically or metaphorically, as well as realistically. In the few years in which she created her first four novels, her first play and short stories, McCullers built a diverse world and f
Ultimately, the universality of music more pervasively informs metaphor and background in her work than does a sense of geographical region. One who reads McCullers finds so impressive the genius of her early work ands so impressive the courage and endurance demanded of her throughout most of her career.
It is a region where white workers, as well as black, in textile mills become “lint heads” who refuse to follow radical union organizers and are dehumanized by the monotonous work.
A master of realistic narrative, she could move easily onto the symbolic, allegorical and philosophical dimensions of her art. Her exploitation of the grotesque for dramatic or comic effect or to emphasize the isolation of the human being led her beyond realism to an experimentation of the gothic mode. Her ongoing sense of the evil to be found in human nature and in a regimented society found expression in fiction which had symbolic and allegorical im
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