Theme of Loneliness in the Writings of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway - A Comparative Study

Loneliness is not an exclusively modern or American experience. It is al old as man and as pervasive and intractable as feelings of joy and sorrow. Marlow, Shakespeare, Browne, Pascal and many others had known loneliness as a frightening malady of the soul. Nothing in contemporary literature surpasses the loneliness of Coleridge's ancient Mariner. The twentieth century writer's concern with loneliness is not tangential but total. Family, the most primitive unit of communal life was threatened with extinction. Success was given the status of religion and for increasing number of people traditional religion became irrelevant. Man labored not for personal fulfillment or in pursuance of personality viable goals but of those set by others, by the anonymous authority called society or time or history. That is to say the individual is no more an integral part of the society or human organization. Loneliness, worthlessness, anxiety, emptiness, boredom and fear of love and life are related experiences. Two powerful factors behind man's isolation and dismemberment are industrialization and war. Sherwood Anderson shows in his fiction how man is rendered impotent by his absorption in artificial life. Hemingway explores the possibility of coming to terms with man's loneliness through a series of fictional characters all of whom have experienced in one form or another the violence symbolized by war.