Analysis Of Singer's 'Biff Brannon'

Yet along with the virtues of specification go the vaguer prompting of allegory. The symmetrical obsessions of Singer’s four admirers quickly make him a special case, more interesting as a catalyst than as a complex human being; and soon afterwards the admirers themselves take on generalized significance. Through the passion with which each constructs the god he needs, he bears ironical witness to the many and wayward forms of human mythmaking. Biff Brannon is introduced as a man with a rare gift for disinterested observation and described in such a way as to suggest that he should function as Mrs. McCullers’ raisonneur the one person to make objective sense of the action. As a café owner, he can see more of the drama than anyone else and he is sympathetic to
“We’ve never been lonely. We’ve been in a room. We’ve felt suicidal. We’ve been depressed. We’ve felt awful, awful beyond all, but we never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me, or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something we’ve never been bothered with because we’ve always had this terrible it such for solitude.”(Wikipedia). She sat down on the steps and laid her head on her knees. She went into the inside room.
With her it was like there were two places inside the room and the outside room. School and the family and the things that happened every day were in the outside room. Mister Singer was in both rooms. Foreign countries and plans and music were in the inside room. The songs she thought about were there, and the symphony. When The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published in 1940, the war had started in Europe. Here ‘preparedness’ was ending the long economic depression of the thirties. But certain feelings that had been kindled by the depression