loneliness in literature essay

Theme of Loneliness, Isolation, & Alienation in Literature with Examples

Humans are social creatures. Most of us enjoy communication and try to build relationships with others. It’s no wonder that the inability to be a part of society often leads to emotional turmoil.

World literature has numerous examples of characters who are disconnected from their loved ones or don’t fit into the social norms. Stories featuring themes of isolation and loneliness often describe a quest for happiness or explore the reasons behind these feelings.

In this article by Custom-Writing.org , we will:

• discuss isolation and loneliness in literary works;
• cite many excellent examples;
• provide relevant quotations.

🏝️ Isolation Theme in Literature

• 🏠 Theme of Loneliness
• 👽 Theme of Alienation
• Frankenstein
• The Metamorphosis
• Of Mice and Men
• ✍️ Essay Topics

🔍 References

Isolation is a state of being detached from other people, either physically or emotionally. It may have positive and negative connotations:

• In a positive sense, isolation can be a powerful source of creativity and independence.
• In negative terms , it can cause mental suffering and difficulties with interpersonal relationships.

Theme of Isolation and Loneliness: Difference

As you can see, isolation can be enjoyable in certain situations. That’s how it differs from loneliness : a negative state in which a person feels uncomfortable and emotionally down because of a lack of social interactions . In other words, isolated people are not necessarily lonely.

Isolation Theme Characteristics with Examples

Now, let’s examine isolation as a literary theme. It often appears in stories of different genres and has various shades of meaning. We’ll explain the different uses of this theme and provide examples from literature.

Forced vs. Voluntary Isolation in Literature

Isolation can be voluntary or happen for external reasons beyond the person’s control. The main difference lies in the agent who imposes isolation on the person:

• If someone decides to be alone and enjoys this state of solitude, it’s voluntary isolation . The poetry of Emily Dickinson is a prominent example.
• Forced isolation often acts as punishment and leads to detrimental emotional consequences. This form of isolation doesn’t depend on the character’s will, such as in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter .

Physical vs. Emotional Isolation in Literature

Aside from forced and voluntary, isolation can be physical or emotional:

• Isolation at the physical level makes the character unable to reach out to other people, such as Robinson Crusoe being stranded on an island.
• Emotional isolation is an inner state of separation from other people. It also involves unwillingness or inability to build quality relationships. A great example is Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye .

These two forms are often interlinked, like in A Rose for Emily . The story’s titular character is isolated from the others both physically and emotionally .

Symbols of Isolation in Literature

In literary works dedicated to emotional isolation, authors often use physical artifacts as symbols. For example, the moors in Wuthering Heights or the room in The Yellow Wallpaper are means of the characters’ physical isolation. They also symbolize a much deeper divide between the protagonists and the people around them.

🏠 Theme of Loneliness in Literature

Loneliness is often used as a theme in stories of people unable to build relationships with others. Their state of mind always comes with sadness and a low self-esteem. Naturally, it causes profound emotional suffering.

We will examine how the theme of loneliness functions in literature. But first, let’s see how it differs from its positive counterpart: solitude.

Solitude vs. Loneliness: The Difference

Loneliness Theme: History & Examples

The modern concept of loneliness is relatively new. It first emerged in the 16 th century and has undergone many transformations since then.

• The first formal mention of loneliness appeared in George Milton’s Paradise Lost in the 17 th century. There are also many references to loneliness in Shakespeare’s works.
• Later on, after the Industrial Revolution , the theme got more popular. During that time, people started moving to large cities. As a result, they were losing bonds with their families and hometowns. Illustrative examples of that period are Gothic novels and the works of Charles Dickens .
• According to The New Yorker , the 20 th century witnessed a broad spread of loneliness due to the rise of Capitalism. Philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus explored existential loneliness, influencing numerous authors. The absurdist writings of Kafka and Beckett also played an essential role in reflecting the isolation felt by people in Capitalist societies. Sylvia Plath has masterfully explored mental health struggles related to this condition in The Bell Jar (you can learn more about it in our The Bell Jar analysis .)

👽 Theme of Alienation in Literature

Another facet of being alone that is often explored in literature is alienation . Let’s see how this concept differs from those we discussed previously.

Alienation vs. Loneliness: Difference

While loneliness is more about being on your own and lacking connection, alienation means involuntary estrangement and a lack of sympathy from society. In other words, alienated people don’t fit their community, thus lacking a sense of belonging.

Isolation vs. Alienation: The Difference

Theme of Alienation vs. Identity in Literature

There is a prominent connection between alienation and a loss of identity. It often results from a character’s self-search in a hostile society with alien ideas and values. These characters often differ from the dominant majority, so the community treats them negatively. Such is the case with Mrs. Dalloway from Woolf’s eponymous novel.

Writers with unique, non-conforming identity are often alienated during their lifetime. Their distinct mindset sets them apart from their social circle. Naturally, it creates discomfort and relationship problems. These experiences are often reflected in their works, such as in James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .

Alienation in Modernism

Alienation as a theme is mainly associated with Modernism . It’s not surprising, considering that the 20 th century witnessed fundamental changes in people’s lifestyle. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution couldn’t help eroding the quality of human bonding and the depth of relationships.

It’s also vital to mention that the two World Wars introduced even greater changes in human relationships. People got more locked up emotionally in order to withstand the war trauma and avoid further turmoil. Consequently, the theme of alienation and comradeship found reflection in the works of Ernest Hemingway , Erich Maria Remarque , Norman Mailer, and Rebecca West, among others.

📚 Books about Loneliness and Isolation: Quotes & Examples

Loneliness and isolation themes are featured prominently in many of the world’s greatest literary works. Here we’ll analyze several well-known examples: Frankenstein, Of Mice and Men, and The Metamorphosis.

Theme of Isolation & Alienation in Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is among the earliest depictions of loneliness in modern literature. It shows the depth of emotional suffering that alienation can impose.

Victor Frankenstein , a talented scientist, creates a monster from the human body parts. The monster becomes the loneliest creature in the world. Seeing that his master hates him and wouldn’t become his friend, he ruined everything Victor held dear. He was driven by revenge, trying to drive him into the same despair.

The novel contains many references to emotional and physical alienation. It also explores the distinction between voluntary and involuntary isolation:

• The monster is involuntarily driven into an emotionally devastating state of alienation.
• Victor imposes voluntary isolation on himself after witnessing the crimes of his creature.

To learn more about the representation of loneliness and isolation in the novel, check out our article on themes in Frankenstein .

Frankenstein Quotes about Isolation

Here are a couple of quotes from Frankenstein directly related to the theme of isolation and loneliness:

How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow…I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend. Frankenstein , Letter 2

In this quote, Walton expresses his loneliness and desire for company. He uses frost and snow as symbols to refer to his isolation. Perhaps a heart-warming relationship could melt the ice surrounding him.

I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers. Frankenstein , Chapter 3

This quote is related to Victor’s inability to make friends and function as a regular member of society. He also misses his friends and relatives in Ingolstadt, which causes him further discomfort.

I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable companions, continually engaged in endeavouring to bestow mutual pleasure—I was now alone. Frankenstein , Chapter 3

In this quote, Victor shares his fear of loneliness. As a person who used to spend most of his time in social activity among people, Victor feared the solitude that awaited him in Ingolstadt.

Isolation & Alienation in The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis is an enigmatic masterpiece by Franz Kafka, telling a story of a young man Gregor. He is alienated at work and home by his demanding, disrespectful family. He lacks deep, rewarding relationships in his life. As a result, he feels profound loneliness.

Gregor’s family isolates him both as a human and an insect, refusing to recognize his personhood. Gregor’s stay in confinement is also a reflection of his broader alienation from society, resulting from his self-perception as a parasite.  To learn more about it, feel free to read our article on themes in The Metamorphosis .

The Metamorphosis: Isolation Quotes

Let’s analyze several quotes from The Metamorphosis to see how Kafka approached the theme of isolation.

The upset of doing business is much worse than the actual business in the home office, and, besides, I’ve got the torture of traveling, worrying about changing trains, eating miserable food at all hours, constantly seeing new faces, no relationships that last or get more intimate. The Metamorphosis , Part 1

In this fragment, Gregor’s lifestyle is described with a couple of strokes. It shows that he lived an empty, superficial life without meaningful relationships.

Well, leaving out the fact that the doors were locked, should he really call for help? In spite of all his miseries, he could not repress a smile at this thought. The Metamorphosis , Part 1

This quote shows how Gregor feels isolated even before anyone else can see him as an insect. He knows that being different will inevitably affect his life and his relationships with his family. So, he prefers to confine himself to voluntary isolation instead of seeking help.

He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister’s. The Metamorphosis , Part 3

This final paragraph of Kafka’s story reveals the human nature of Gregor. It also shows the depth of his suffering in isolation after turning into a vermin. He reconciles with his metamorphosis and agrees to disappear from this world. Eventually, he vanishes from his family’s troubled memories.

Theme of Loneliness in Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men is a touching novella by John Steinbeck examining the intricacies of laborers’ relationships on a ranch. It’s a snapshot of class and race relations that delves into the depths of human loneliness. Steinbeck shows how this feeling makes people mean, reckless, and cold.

Many characters in this story suffer from being alienated from the community:

• Crooks is ostracized because of his race, living in a separate shabby house as a misfit.
• George also suffers from forced alienation because he takes care of the mentally disabled Lennie.
• Curley’s wife is another character suffering from loneliness. This feeling drives her to despair. She seeks the warmth of human relationships in the hands of Lennie, which causes her accidental death.

Isolation Quotes: Of Mice and Men

Now, let’s analyze a couple of quotes from Of Mice and Men to see how the author approached the theme of loneliness.

Guys like us who work on ranches are the loneliest guys in the world, they ain’t got no family, they don’t belong no place. Of Mice and Men , Section 1

In this quote, Steinbeck describes several dimensions of isolation suffered by his characters:

• They are physically isolated , working on large farms where they may not meet a single person for weeks.
• They have no chances for social communication and relationship building, thus remaining emotionally isolated without a life partner.
• They can’t develop a sense of belonging to the place where they work; it’s another person’s property.

Candy looked for help from face to face. Of Mice and Men , Section 3

Candy’s loneliness on the ranch becomes highly pronounced during his conflict with Carlson. The reason is that he is an old man afraid of being “disposed of.” The episode is an in-depth look into a society that doesn’t cherish human relationships, focusing only on a person’s practical utility. 

I never get to talk to nobody. I get awful lonely. Of Mice and Men , Chapter 5

This quote expresses the depth of Curley’s wife’s loneliness. She doesn’t have anyone with whom she would be able to talk, aside from her husband. Curley is also not an appropriate companion, as he treats his wife rudely and carelessly. As a result of her loneliness, she falls into deeper frustration.

✍️ Essay on Loneliness and Isolation: Topics & Ideas

If you’ve got a task to write an essay about loneliness and isolation, it’s vital to pick the right topic. You can explore how these feelings are covered in literature or focus on their real-life manifestations. Here are some excellent topic suggestions for your inspiration:

• Cross-national comparisons of people’s experience of loneliness and isolation.
• Social isolation, loneliness, and all-cause mortality among the elderly.
• Public health consequences of extended social isolation .
• Impact of social isolation on young people’s mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Connections between social isolation and depression.
• Interventions for reducing social isolation and loneliness among older people.
• Loneliness and social isolation among rural area residents.
• The effect of social distancing rules on perceived loneliness.
• How does social isolation affect older people’s functional status?
• Video calls as a measure for reducing social isolation.
• Isolation, loneliness, and otherness in Frankenstein .
• The unique combination of addiction and isolation in Frankenstein .
• Exploration of solitude in Hernan Diaz’ In the Distance .
•  Artificial isolation and voluntary seclusion in Against Nature .
• Different layers of isolation in George Eliot’s Silas Marner .
• Celebration of self-imposed solitude in Emily Dickinson’s works.
• Buddhist aesthetics of solitude in Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude .
• Loneliness of childhood in Charles Dickens’s works.
• Moby-Dick : Loneliness in the struggle.
• Medieval literature about loneliness and social isolation.

Now you know everything about the themes of isolation, loneliness, and alienation in fiction and can correctly identify and interpret them. What is your favorite literary work focusing on any of these themes? Tell us in the comments!

❓ Themes of Loneliness and Isolation FAQs

Isolation is a popular theme in poetry. The speakers in such poems often reflect on their separation from others or being away from their loved ones. Metaphorically, isolation may mean hiding unshared emotions. The magnitude of the feeling can vary from light blues to depression.

In his masterpiece Of Mice and Men , John Steinbeck presents loneliness in many tragic ways. The most alienated characters in the book are Candy, Crooks, and Curley’s wife. Most of them were eventually destroyed by the negative consequences of their loneliness.

The Catcher in the Rye uses many symbols as manifestations of Holden’s loneliness. One prominent example is an image of his dead brother Allie. He’s the person Holden wants to bond with but can’t because he is gone. Holden also perceives other people as phony or corny, thus separating himself from his peers.

Beloved is a work about the deeply entrenched trauma of slavery that finds its manifestation in later generations. Characters of Beloved prefer self-isolation and alienation from others to avoid emotional pain.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , all people must conform to society’s rules to be accepted. Those who don’t fit in that established order and feel their individuality are erased from society.

• What Is Solitude?: Psychology Today
• Loneliness in Literature: Springer Link
• What Literature and Language Tell Us about the History of Loneliness: Scroll.in
• On Isolation and Literature: The Millions
• 10 Books About Loneliness: Publishers Weekly
• Alienation: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Isolation and Revenge: Where Victor Frankenstein Went Wrong: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• On Isolation: Gale
• Top 10 Books About Loneliness: The Guardian
• Emily Dickinson and the Creative “Solitude of Space:” Psyche
• Share to Facebook
• Share to LinkedIn
• Share to email

Have you ever loved? Even if you haven’t, you’ve seen it in countless movies, heard about it in songs, and read about it in some of the greatest books in world literature. If you want to find out more about love as a literary theme, you came to the right...

Death is undoubtedly one of the most mysterious events in life. Literature is among the mediums that allow people to explore and gain knowledge of death—a topic that in everyday life is often seen as taboo.  This article by Custom-Writing.org will: 💀 Significance of Death in Literature Why is it...

Wouldn’t it be great if people of all genders could enjoy equal rights? When reading stories from the past, we can realize how far we’ve made since the dawn of feminism. Books that deal with the theme of gender inspire us to keep fighting for equality. In this article, our...

What makes a society see some categories of people as less than human? Throughout history, we can see how people divided themselves into groups and used violence to discriminate against each other. When groups of individuals are perceived as monstrous or demonic, it leads to dehumanization. Numerous literary masterpieces explore the meaning of monstrosity and show the dire consequences of dehumanization. This article by Custom-Writing.org will: 👾 Monstrosity:...

Revenge provides relief. Characters in many literary stories believe in this idea. Convinced that they were wronged, they are in the constant pursuit of revenge. But is it really the only way for them to find peace? This article by Custom-Writing.org is going to answer this and other questions related...

Is money really the root of all evil? Many writers and poets have tried to answer this question. Unsurprisingly, the theme of money is very prevalent in literature. It’s also connected to other concepts, such as greed, power, love, and corruption. In this article, our custom writing team will: explore...

Have you ever asked yourself why some books are so compelling that you keep thinking about them even after you have finished reading? Well, of course, it can be because of a unique plotline or complex characters. However, most of the time, it is the theme that compels you. A...

The American Dream theme encompasses crucial values, such as freedom, democracy, equal rights, and personal happiness. The concept’s definition varies from person to person. Yet, books by American authors can help us grasp it better. Many agree that American literature is so distinct from English literature because the concept of...

A fallen leaf, a raven, the color black… What connects all these images? That’s right: they can all symbolize death—one of literature’s most terrifying and mysterious concepts. It has been immensely popular throughout the ages, and it still fascinates readers. Numerous symbols are used to describe it, and if you...

The most ancient text preserved to our days raises more questions than there are answers. When was The Iliad written? What was the purpose of the epic poem? What is the subject of The Iliad? The Iliad Study Guide prepared by Custom-Writing.org experts explores the depths of the historical context...

The epic poem ends in a nostalgic and mournful way. The last book is about a father who lost his son and wishes to make an honorable funeral as the last thing he could give him. The book symbolizes the end of any war when sorrow replaces anger. Book 24,...

The main values glorified in The Iliad and The Odyssey are honor, courage, and eloquence. These three qualities were held as the best characteristics a person could have. Besides, they contributed to the heroic code and made up the Homeric character of a warrior. The Odyssey also promotes hospitality, although...

‘A painful absence all of the time’: the best descriptions of loneliness in literature

The last word, our series about emotions in books, focuses on depictions of isolation this month, from a memoir of grief to Sam Selvon’s Windrush chronicle

L onely, as words go, is a bit of a loner. As the critic Christopher Ricks writes, it pleasingly has “only” one rhyme, and no real synonyms. After all, being alone and being lonely are quite different things. For all this, poets and writers, from Audre Lorde to Philip Larkin, have made much of loneliness, drawn to the challenge of bringing us close to an emotion whose very nature is to stay at a distance.

Some lonely renderings turn out to be a bit of a sham. Records show that when Wordsworth “wandered lonely as a cloud”, his sister Dorothy was strolling companionably beside him, and she liked the daffodils too. Thoreau’s standing as the poster-boy of solitude, living “alone” and “Spartan like” by Walden Pond, starts to unravel when one actually reads his book, which contains a hefty chapter on “Visitors”. (The fact that Thoreau’s mum probably helped out with his laundry has also – maybe unfairly – raised a few eyebrows.)

It is, of course, perfectly possible to feel lonely in the company of others. “Loneliness”, as Olivia Laing writes, “doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection”. Her Lonely City is a powerful account of the loneliness explored and expressed by writers ranging from Alfred Hitchcock to Billie Holiday, combined with Laing’s own experience as a “citizen of loneliness”: “I often wished”, she writes, “I could find a way of losing myself altogether until the intensity diminished”.

Loneliness may be a condition that’s tricky to categorise but it is also, in Laing’s words, “difficult to confess”. Indeed, loneliness’s favourite companion seems to be shame. One of the many beauties of Kent Haruf’s small-town love story, Our Souls At Night, is the way in which his heroine breaks this seeming taboo, surprising her neighbour with an unconventional proposal, not of marriage, but of a kind of lo-fi pyjama party. “I’m lonely”, Addie candidly states. “I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk”.

after newsletter promotion

For some, such as Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant, loneliness is a lived atmosphere, a kind of chronic condition. For others, it comes from a tectonic shift – a sudden loss or bereavement. As Juliet Rosenfeld writes in her memoir, The State of Disbelief, the painful force of her husband’s death made her feel as if she’d been captured by an unseen captor: “I learnt quickly that to protest would make no difference, and choice-less, I submitted to this saboteur with no prospect at all of release or freedom. I believed for a long time that I would never feel differently. I felt a painful absence and loneliness all of the time .”

“We read to know we are not alone”, as C S Lewis famously didn’t say (the line belongs to his on-screen persona in Shadowlands). So it is a sad irony that books which might best provide company nearly didn’t see the light of day. Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness was banned, after its first publication, for more than 30 years, accused of promoting “unnatural practices between women”. Because of that judgment, many readers missed an encounter with the beauty of the novel’s prose, its tender account of the heroine as she reflects on her childhood home. She dreams of “the scent of damp rushes growing by water; the kind, slightly milky odour of cattle; the smell of dried rose-leaves and orris-root and violets”, and knew “what it was to feel terribly lonely, like a soul that wakes up to find itself wandering, unwanted, between the spheres”.

This sense of loneliness as a kind of between-ness, an uncharted territory, is movingly captured in Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel, The Lonely Londoners. This Windrush chronicle charts the trials of those arriving at Waterloo from the West Indies, as they struggle to navigate the “unrealness” of London. Selvon’s hero, Moses Aloetta, becomes, over time, the reluctant guide to this latter-day Waste Land. Selvon leaves us with Moses’s lyrical and allusive understanding of the city’s “great aimlessness”. Standing on the banks of the Thames, he conjures a vision of a world in which we are all, in the end, alone together:

As if … on the surface, things don’t look so bad, but when you go down a little, you bounce up a kind of misery and pathos and a frightening – what? He don’t know the right word, but he have the right feeling in his heart. As if the boys laughing, but they only laughing because they ’fraid to cry.

• The last word
• William Wordsworth
• Olivia Laing

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

• Essay Editor

The Theme of Loneliness in Life in Literature

1. introduction.

This is a classic work and includes a variety of aspects that aid our understanding of the issues surrounding the theme of loneliness. In order to understand fully the issues and the impact that loneliness has towards the ending of life, we have posed several questions about the nature of loneliness and its effects. This has been used as a guide, helping with our understanding of the themes in the book and answering these questions by providing possible solutions and examples of the impact towards the issue raised. This work acknowledges that to fully understand the issues of loneliness, one has to consider what loneliness actual is and its effects. Our understanding of loneliness is the state of the mind being isolated from others, mostly caused by the absence of a person in which a deep emotional bond has been formed i.e. a friend or relative. This is resolved and explained as, a state of being alone, or the feeling that one is alone, but it can be noted that to be alone, is not the same as feeling alone. From this it is possible to suggest that loneliness is purely a state of mind, a feeling, and at that the individual can endure the feeling of loneliness even when surrounded by others, for he may have lost someone he had a bond with, or the company of others does not substitute for that person. Throughout the book there are various types of loneliness that affect the characters and this has a large impact towards the issues of the character's and their quality of life. This aspect raised was something considered in our questions and was very well explained with responses and examples in the instance where the character Candy is deeply saddened by the loss of his life long friend and companion, a dog. This is the pet's absences that has cause a deep bond to be broken and has left him feeling that he has nothing to live for. Lennie, also experiences an intense form of loneliness, firstly by the separating from his close friend and companion George, who is his aid and guidance and secondly to the knowledge of the death of Curley's wife, where his fear and confusion ignites anger from the others and force him to run and hide from them. Lennie's fears for his life lead to the desperation and mirroring of George's situation of how he would cope alone. These are quite profound examples, which illustrate, the effects and the causes of loneliness, posing a view that some loneliness begins through loss and that it has the potential to be damaging to someone, especially if what is known as a cure, is unattainable.

1.1. Definition of loneliness

Seeing as loneliness is not simply a "state of being alone", it is necessary to explore the definition of loneliness. When reading through books, the typical definition of loneliness will be altered, as will with each individual who is asked. There are as many definitions as there are experiences of loneliness, for each person's experience is different. However, generally speaking, loneliness is "the unpleasant experience that occurs when a person's network of social relations is deficient in some important way, either quantitatively or qualitatively". This may occur for several different reasons: through isolation forced on an individual (i.e. as a punishment), by the person shunning society because they believe that they are not accepted, or it may occur despite a person being surrounded by others. This last point is important, for it must be made clear that loneliness is not the same as being alone. There are many situations in literature, particularly Shakespeare, where characters are thrust into circumstances where they are "alone", but this does not necessarily mean they are lonely. For example, there is a great misunderstanding in the final scene of Hamlet, where Gertrude speaks of Ophelia's death by saying that she climbed into a willow tree and the branch broke and "thus her absence is discover'd". This suggests that Ophelia was alone when in fact, she was surrounded by a King, two courtiers, and a Queen, but the manner of her death and burial was so ambiguous that nobody knew what had become of her. This situation was one of too much grief for Ophelia's loved ones, too embarrassing to attempt to resolve, and it led to them removing her from their thoughts and thus from their lives. Ophelia was psychologically cut off from the society she had known, despite the close proximity of others. This situation was the catalyst to Ophelia's loneliness, and it is possible to be any one of Ophelia's loved ones who feels such grief that they too become cut off from society, or even the modern-day individual who may undergo a change in career or move to a new city and lose contact with friends and relatives. There are many ways to become cut off from society, and it is not always through choice.

1.2. Importance of exploring loneliness in literature

Loneliness is a very important theme in literature. Regardless of what the actual situation of the author, a feeling of being alone has an effect on everyone. Those who are alone do not always feel lonely, and those who are lonely are not always alone. It is a feeling that can be felt during good times and bad, by rich and poor, young and old, in far off places or close to home. It is a feeling that has no true definition, but to the individual who feels it, it is all too real. And this is what often makes the theme of loneliness so consuming in many great works of writing. Because it is a feeling that can have many faces across all of humanity, there is a great depth of material that can be written on the subject. This is why this theme is often found at the center of the human condition, which is a main focus of "The Theme of Loneliness in International Literature". At this point, the reader may be wondering why read about the sadness of others when one could pick a more cheery topic to hold their interest? The answer is simple. Any person who reads for more than just the idle passing of time is always studying the same thing: themselves. And self-study cannot go very far without learning from others of their own kind. The stories and struggles of other human beings are a mirror to our own. If we look closely enough, we can always see some part of ourselves. And so, readers will often find strength in reading about another person who is in the same state as they are in at the present. This is why there is always an odd fascination with tragic stories of doom and gloom. This too is a form of self-study by learning what not to do by observing the mistakes of others. Often times in the study of the human condition, people wish to find out why others act the way they do. Global work is most often a product of its age and the mental state of its author. In reading the work and observing the artist's life, one often attempts to draw parallels between the two. Here is a good example of where one can have a deeper understanding of someone else through shared experiences. And so, a person who is learning about loneliness may find great comfort in reading about a single person who has conquered that same form of loneliness. They may then draw hope from a story and strive to find the same end. And so, through these methods of self-study, a person can learn a great deal from the written experiences of others. Any reader will undoubtedly find characters who are alone in their situation is a reflection of themselves, and this is one of the deepest roots of the human condition.

2. Loneliness in Classic Literature

Throughout the landscape of literature there have been innumerable works centered around the theme of loneliness. Many authors use this theme to better illustrate the emotions and workings of a character. This is the case with Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In each of these novels, the main character is so engulfed with a feeling of loneliness and alienation it affects the way they act and view the world around them. In Moby Dick, Ishmael is the only character that is developed throughout the novel. Ishmael is a lonely soul with a strong need for companionship. His feelings of despair started when his close friend Queequeg became very ill and Ishmael presumed he was going to die: "With much dealing, and so some light..." (Melville 393). Illness and the devils are vague terms that lead the reader to believe that Queequeg's bout with death was brought on by something darker than just a common illness. This greatly troubles Ishmael for he has no one else in the world to turn to for companionship at this time. He then starts to feel alone when aboard the Pequod. At the masthead, he ponders his reason for signing onto such a perilous journey and comes to the conclusion that: "...a mighty whaling mission was something wherein a number of men did a number of things comprehensive of the one purpose, in various relays and if revalves; which was done on the same thing, that thing was to kill whales..." (Melville 406). Ishmael feels that his noble aims and deeds failed because they were all done for different purposes, his being to get companionship through cooperation on a whaling voyage. His feeling of loneliness is a driving force that causes Ishmael to constantly question himself and his rationale for the situations he is in.

2.1. Loneliness portrayed in "Moby-Dick"

In "Moby-Dick", Ishmael is a very lonely character. His loneliness is a result of many things. He has lost faith in humanity, and it is also suggested that he has lost faith in God. Ishmael also feels separate from the greater masses of humanity, feeling that he is on a different plane of existence to the common man. Ishmael also feels isolated from the men that he is to serve with on the whaling ship, as he does not fit the typical image of a harpooner. The 30th chapter of "Moby-Dick" titled "The Pipe" gives an introduction into the loneliness of Ishmael. Ishmael has ascended into the main-top of the ship, a place where he is completely isolated from anyone else. At this point, Ishmael observes Queequeg through the lens of the main-top. He comments that Queequeg is "the savages of good nature" and wishes that he can be like him. He then gets onto the subject of humanity and his own place within mankind. This is the first indication of his loneliness, and it is a recurring theme throughout the book. Ishmael's feelings of loneliness often drive him to contemplate suicide, a method of escape from his loneliness. This is first hinted at in chapter 10 when Ishmael is examining Queequeg's collection of spears and decides against killing himself. The idea receives consideration again when the ship is away at sea and Ishmael decides whether or not it is better "To fly to others that we know not of" and to "drown" in the ocean. Ishmael's contemplation of suicide picks up pace when he is introduced to the gloomy and solemn first mate of the ship, Captain Ahab. Ishmael feels the darkness of Ahab and decides that it would be best if he "flies from the world's wisdom". This is a logical conclusion of his thoughts as Ishmael feels too wise to simply follow Ahab into what he feels is doom, and does not want his parting to be "drowned in a foul mist of fire". This progression eventually leads to Ishmael seeking an escape through joining a whaling ship as a means to break from the ever-tightening grip of his loneliness.

2.2. The theme of isolation in "Frankenstein"

Due to the remote circumstances of his creation, the being is left in isolation from society and his immediate surroundings. It is the isolation from society and the relationship with a creator that twists the hope that leads him through this trying time into an experience of increasing anger, vengeance, and eventually his downfall. This penchant for isolation is not exclusive to the being. Robert Walton shares a similar form of isolation that the being endures. Like the being, this isolation allows him to find solace in gaining knowledge, albeit the ice-entrapped ship is a more fitting place to gain knowledge than the pursuit of forbidden knowledge in the creation of life. Although the form of the isolation and the motivations to gaining knowledge differ, the parallel between the two instances allows the being to feel a somewhat affiliation with Walton, and it is this affiliation that leads him to agree to tell his story to the ship's captain. The methodology and personality differences between Walton and the being represent the two outcomes of being isolated from the rest of humanity in search of knowledge and companionship. Like the being, the pursuit of knowledge in solitude leads to an experience of sorrow and a loss of hope. This is exemplified by Walton's words at the end of the story when the being asks that he continue to strive for more, which he later admits was a great mistake.

2.3. The lonely existence of Jay Gatsby in "The Great Gatsby"

Gatsby's is the tale of a tortured man who threw away his one real chance at happiness and love of self to follow a meaningless dream. At his best, Gatsby is a kind of heroic figure: a man who has been through war and lived, through poverty, and has finally managed, through hard work and ingenuity, to achieve a level of material success unmatched by even those who had been born into American aristocracy. But Gatsby's passage to the world of the very rich is quick and easy; he is for instance able to support himself with no visible means of support, by the time he meets Daisy. He becomes a bootlegger to attain quick money; in Latham's term, a criminal entrepreneur. He buys the mansion solely to be near Daisy; even though she now lives just across the bay with her husband. Gatsby's fire of love is doused when he is unable to repeat the past, and the dream of love and happiness of he and Daisy being together dies, in accordance to Nick because Gatsby "had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so he could act at the moment, he f***d up an attempt that was unsuited to him". If the American dream is anything at all Gatsby's wish is a crude and hopeless effort to achieve it. He will stop at nothing in order to attain the love of Daisy, an apprehension best exemplified by Nick's recollections of a conversation with Gatsby in which he wanted to fix Nick up in a deal of "way you can pick up a little money on the side".

3. Loneliness in Contemporary Literature

The social isolation of today's individuals is a universal theme in contemporary literature. It is a literary effort to benchmark the social changes apparent in Western societies from the 1950s to the turn of the century. The increasing political and media emphasis on the family at this time has, according to Maxine Blyton in The Times, "pushed single people to the margins," resulting in social disconnectedness manifesting in unprecedented individualism, decreased concern for others, and increased loneliness and unhappiness. This is reflected in contemporary fiction through the exploration of individual alienation and its effect on mental states, and while such themes are not deemed exclusive to contemporary literature, it is the focus on the individual’s place in the world and sense of identity that distinguishes these works from their modern counterparts. Oliphant is a changed woman with strained social skills and a traumatic past. We learn of her university days where an event has ostracized her from her peers, and her dealings with her colleagues do little to end her isolation as she is socially awkward and perceived as strange. Throughout the novel, Eleanor feels a strong yearning to be "normal" and uses this as a reference to achieve a sense of belonging she has never known. Her chance meeting with Raymond is the catalyst for change in the novel, and though the relationship brings new experiences and feelings of joy to Eleanor, it is not without initial frustration and clashes due to their contrasting social skills and class. Through the character of Eleanor, Honeyman wonderfully portrays the sad and often confused state of those who suffer from long-term isolation. He exposes the harsh reality that, despite a genuine desire to connect with others, solitary individuals are often ill-equipped with social skills and subsequently act in ways that are not conducive to forming lasting relationships. This, in turn, leads to further rejection and deepens the alienation felt. Eleanor's feelings of inadequacy and despair are summed up in an insightful statement: "I suppose one of the reasons I'm on my own is that I have little idea of how to form relationships." In his novel, Honeyman sends a powerful message about the desperate effects of loneliness and the innate human desire to belong.

3.1. The exploration of loneliness in "Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine"

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman is a novel about a woman called Eleanor Oliphant who lives a life of loneliness. It covers her working hours and her time spent outside of her home. Honeyman explores the theme of severance through Eleanor's childhood-inflicted pain, her intrinsic barriers, and society's failure to assimilate with the unknown or atypical. Eleanor's childhood is revealed to have been a significant contributor to her state of loneliness and detachment from society. It alludes to several key incidents that have shaped her into the person she is in the present day. She explains to the reader that her father put her into care when she was young, as he claims he could not attend to her needs. This is one incident that has lasting repercussions on her current state. Though an innocent child, Eleanor was branded as an atypical and problematic figure. This separation from her family also serves as an origin for her feelings of severance, which become apparent in her later years. This abandonment had also led to Eleanor being brought up in care. Eleanor describes the experience as unpleasant and at times neglectful. This would contribute further to her feelings of loneliness, as she lacked significant contact with any loving figure, and she was further branded as atypical due to the fact she received "input" from a social worker. Overall, her father's decision and the fact he gave no logical explanation or apology serve as the foremost origin of her loneliness, for it was the point at which she was separated from her family and branded as a societal anomaly. This sense of loneliness continues throughout the novel, and Eleanor finds that she cannot identify with anyone and feels completely averse from others due to her strange upbringing.

3.2. The theme of solitude in "Norwegian Wood"

Set in the late 1960s, Norwegian Wood illustrates the story of Toru Watanabe, a young student in Tokyo. The novel is a reminiscence of his past, particularly his love life. One significant event that affected him greatly is the death of his close friend, Kizuki. They were both 17. Kizuki committed suicide for no apparent reason when they were in the third year of high school. The death drove Watanabe to befriend Kizuki's girlfriend, Naoko, and Nagasawa, the boyfriend of one of his high school classmates. This new group of friends decided to visit a reclusive farm in the countryside, where Naoko would subsequently choose to live in solitude due to her inability to cope with Kizuki's death. These events and a growing romance between Watanabe and Naoko lead to a sequence of situations and emotions that ultimately resulted in Watanabe's psychological transformation and the commencement of his adulthood. The theme of solitude is evident primarily through Naoko's character. Toru Watanabe often finds himself lost in thought about her, increasingly so as he finds out that her condition worsens. After Kizuki's death, she is unable to cope with his absence and soon begins losing her mental stability. Her move to the sanatorium represents her newfound state of mind: a blurred world in which she feels detached because she continues to think of living in a world with Kizuki at the meadow. The setting of the sanatorium and later a secluded mountain retreat represents her idea of finding a place to belong and a place that is cut off from the rest of the world. Her suicide at the end of the story and the metaphorical death of her character, in which she loses touch with Watanabe, the only one she truly loved, signifies the ultimate visual of Naoko's long journey in seeking a place where she feels at ease, finally reaching a point in which she seeks it in death. This is by no means a positive statement, but through Naoko, Murakami effectively illustrates the inner conflict that an individual faces when they are feeling detached and seeking a place to belong, often with contrasting results.

3.3. The isolated characters in "The Catcher in the Rye"

The novel "The Catcher in the Rye" has been described as one of the best novels of its time. Contrary to belief, it is not just an account of an unusual teenager in New York City but also considered a study of a teenager, an analysis of a boy who is lost in adolescence and literally on the edge. Through his red hunting hat, the ducks in the pond, the Museum of Natural History, and his wish to be the "catcher in the rye," Holden battles with the fear of change and the unknown. Throughout the novel, we see Holden Caulfield, the protagonist, demand the companionship of those he encounters. We also see him shying away from any opportunity of integrating into society and following the mainstream. This behavior can result from a fear of unknown territory. It has been said that this state of mind is due to his lack of confidence in himself and the world around him. Holden sets standards for his peers and categorizes them. This is a cause of the "phoniness" which he constantly refers to. He believes that everyone is out for themselves and can care less about him. One of the prime examples of his behavior is shown when Stradlater, Holden's dorm mate at Pencey Prep, is getting ready for a date with Jane Gallagher, an old friend of Holden's. He remarks, "You're playing the record too damn fast," I said. "That's a guy's jacket, not a goddamned tuxedo." I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but it was more than I could take. (p. 29) This comment leads to a fight sparked by Stradlater who does not appreciate Holden's attempt to critique and improve his appearance.

4. Conclusion

The enduring relevance of the theme of loneliness in literature has led in recent years to a plethora of critical attention from a broad range of theoretical stances. Whether the analysis has grown out of existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, feminist or post-modernist theory, a great deal of this material shares some of the very assumptions about the nature of loneliness and its human significance that literature itself puts forward. However, in one rather important sense, criticism has been unable to match the understanding of loneliness elaborated through great works of fiction, poetry or drama, because it has often had to approach the study of lonely states in ardour to decode their cultural, social, political or personal meanings, thus at times the singular experience of loneliness as such has been overlooked. It is true that deeper analysis of the lonely lifestyle can in certain instances yield important insights, for a narrative of loneliness is invariably a narrative of disjuncture, often between self and society, self and the natural world, or conflicting selves; and a full critical understanding of this disjuncture can only further our understanding of the human condition. Discussing loneliness in terms of "isolation" or "alienation" is the thematic criticism stock-in-trade. However, the literary representation of lonely states is itself often a tacit critique of such modes, for in giving literary form to what is in essence a wordless experience of longing or absence, it holds up to the fictional world and its readers a vision of the connectivity its protagonist has lost, or yearns for. At its best, this can act as an allegory for the disjuncture of the modern age or some part of the human situation as the inquiring reader recognizes the emptiness of a certain character’s place or senses that in constructing a brave new world, man has too often lost something precious. A case in point is Wordsworth's famous evocation of the solitary reaper "beholding her on solitary highland". The poet overhearing the girl's song finds it haunt him long after he has wandered away and can never again listen to a similar strain from the vales without an image of that one girl. It is a touching snapshot of a moment shared with an anonymous figure that has reverberated powerfully within the writer, and it has proved so evocative a scene that generations of English students have been asked to imagine just who the highland lass was. Yet the cold facts of the poem are that the poet no more speaks with the girl nor returns to that dale and in giving the episode this much poignancy Wordsworth has inadvertently created a sense of loss and absence.

4.1. The enduring relevance of the theme of loneliness in literature

In tackling the endurance of the theme of loneliness in literature, it is paramount that the analysis is not only restricted to texts penned decades or centuries ago. The enduring quality of literature has meant that older texts have never ceased to be re-read, but it has also created an impetus for the production of new texts which revisit old themes in the modern context. Through the exploration of both older and newer works, one can see that the theme of loneliness has not only endured, but evolved over time. In the modern globalised world, the melting away of previous social structures has given way to new types of loneliness. This is illustrated in Ben Okri's novel Astonishing the Gods, where the relocation of an African man to an unspecified megacity in which he is unable to converse the local language brings about a profound sense of alienation and loneliness. Literature criticism often focuses on an interpretation of a text in terms of its social and historical context. While such an approach invariably sheds light on the work in question, it is arguable that the critical value of a text can also be determined by its ability to transcend the context in which it was created. If we take the view that some themes are pertinent regardless of the date of their consideration, then the works which deal with these themes in a profound yet historically transcendent manner must be considered to have an enduring relevance. It can be argued that texts whose themes are only relevant to the period or context in which they were written are of limited critical value, as they will become increasingly difficult to understand for those without the necessary historical knowledge. An enduring theme, however, can be appreciated by readers from a wide variety of backgrounds and eras. The theme of loneliness is clearly transcendent: as long as humans exist, there will be the possibility for some to feel cut off from others.

4.2. The impact of loneliness on readers' understanding of the human condition

Introduction: When readers are exposed to the lonely characters that inhabit the world of literary fiction, there is an empathetic reaction which inspires the reader to not only feel for the character, but to also reflect on their own life and the world around them. This inevitably leads to an exploration of the human condition, and an inquiry into the true 'nature of things'. It is a difficult task to pinpoint the intrinsic understanding that is developed about the human condition through reading about lonely characters, but one can identify the various ways in which an understanding has been developed and the effect that it has had. Sympathy and Empathy for the Human Condition: When one is reading about a lonely character who is experiencing an emotional state which resonates with the reader's own emotional state, the reader will feel a sympathetic emotion. This sympathy often arises from an empathetic reaction to the emotions of the character. Empathy for another human being naturally leads to reflection on one's own self. The emotions experienced by the character become a mirror which reflects one's own life, and one's own emotion. In giving the reader a heightened self-awareness and understanding of their own emotions and the relationship between the two, empathy for a lonely character draws a strong parallel between the circumstances of the character and the circumstances of the reader. Futility: As the reader is challenged by the lonely characters of Steinbeck or the tragic isolation of Melville's Bartleby, there is often the realization that the characters' situation is without hope. It is here that one is exposed to the futility of the human condition and its struggle. This realization has a profound effect on many readers, leading to an understanding about the nature of life and some of its harsher realities.

Related articles

Análise da expressão "fica sobre" no contexto das relações de poder na literatura contemporânea.

1. Introdução A expressão "fica sobre" tem sido objeto de estudo no contexto das relações de poder na literatura contemporânea, devido à sua relevância na construção de significados e na representação de dinâmicas hierárquicas e submissão. Essa análise visa lançar luz sobre as diferentes interpretações e usos dessa expressão, bem como seu papel na negociação de poder entre personagens e grupos sociais. Ao compreender a complexidade desse fenômeno linguístico, espera-se contribuir para uma compr ...

Análisis de una bibliografía crítica sobre la evolución de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea

1. Introducción Este trabajo pretende ser una introducción al análisis de un campo nuevo dentro de la bibliografía general sobre la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea: los estudios comparativos. Dichos estudios resultan ser en realidad comparativos no exactamente porque procuren establecer categorías generales de análisis, sino porque en su gran mayoría recurren a las expresiones literarias de los distintos países latinoamericanos para "ilustrar" y a veces contrastar esos enunciados gener ...

Análisis de la bibliografía crítica sobre la obra de Gabriel García Márquez

1. Introducción a la obra de Gabriel García Márquez En el presente trabajo de tesis se analiza la figura de Gabriel García Márquez. Se realiza un recorrido por su vida y se examina la biografía crítica de su obra, siguiendo un planteamiento cronológico. El texto está estructurado en dos partes, correspondiendo la primera a la labor crítica realizada durante la vida del escritor. Se efectuará un análisis de sus relaciones con el ambiente literario y político colombiano y sudamericano, centrándos ...

Themes and Symbolism in Ivo Andric's Novel "Prokleta Avlija"

1. Introduction to Ivo Andric and His Work The life and work of Ivo Andric are certainly important for the study of literatures of the former Yugoslavia. His symbolic novel, Prokleta avlija, introduces both students and the wider public not only to his significant contribution to the multilingual Yugoslav literary world but also to the cultural tapestry of Adamant's Balkans. Traditionally, Andric is well known as an "observer of the Serbian people," and Prokleta avlija is his masterpiece, beaut ...

An analysis of Albert Camus' existentialist themes in the novel 'La Chute' (The Fall)

1. Introduction to Albert Camus and 'La Chute' The French-Algerian writer and Nobel Prize winner, Albert Camus (1913-1960), is one of the best-known and most widely read 20th-century authors. His novels, such as L'Étranger (The Outsider, also known as The Stranger), Lettres à un ami allemand (Letters to a German Friend, published posthumously), and La Peste (The Plague), have been translated into many languages, and his journalistic and philosophical essays have been included in over a hundred ...

The Importance and Impact of Bibliographic Research in Academic Studies

1. Introduction Bibliographic research is a decisive and indispensable factor for the writing of academic work. The very word "research" ends up orbiting a multitude of investigative possibilities, not necessarily related to the acquisition of previously known and treated information. Conceptually, it is taken to look for a relationship, factor, process, system, product or any other form of phenomenon investigated. Carrying out bibliographic research allows the student to develop critical and r ...

Análisis crítico sobre temas de justicia social en la literatura contemporánea

1. Introducción Durante el siglo XIX, la corriente más importante de la filosofía moral anglosajona, apenas ilustró un cambio científico, pronto llamado la teoría de la evolución. La misma mantenía estrechas relaciones con individuos selectos de la especie humana (Teoría de la Evolución Natural) y había adoptado esa teoría como solución a múltiples problemas políticos y sociales. Así, al considerar especialmente dignos de preservarse y reproducirse a aquellos que son mejor adaptados a las cambi ...

The Importance of Identifying Research Gaps in Academic Studies

1. Introduction Both students and faculty researchers are expected to engage in academic research that offers something demonstrably new and important to the body of literature investigating the subject matter at hand. The pressure to "say something new" often seems more urgent to academic researchers than it actually is, but the fact remains: all too often, important research gaps are overlooked. Academic research should contribute to the field by answering pressing questions. Therefore, this ...

The Stories Women Tell of Loneliness

E mily Dickinson is American literature’s famed recluse. “Silence is Infinity,” she wrote—and her solitude was generative. Loneliness, as she figured it , was “the Maker of the soul.” But what about women today? Are they relishing their solitude? In May 2021, preliminary research findings were presented at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology, Prevention, Lifestyle, and Cardiometabolic Health Conference that suggested social isolation and loneliness were each associated with a higher risk for cardiovascular disease in postmenopausal women.

As I scrolled past this news, I found my copy of Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel, Whereabouts , which follows an unnamed narrator through a period of quiet desperation. The novel, spread over 40-something chapters and translated by Lahiri from her own Italian, features the mundane, uninspiring, and domestic. We see the narrator go on walks with a friend, sit alone, look at other people, speculate about their relationships with one another, ponder the nature of loneliness, engage with her elderly mother.

A similar thread of loneliness weaves through another recent novel, Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt , which has been translated from the Japanese by Lucy North. Imamura’s is a tale of isolation punctuated by slapstick humor. The nameless narrator is a deeply confounded, lonely, aimless person. She is also a stalker. Seated at the fringes of society and her workplace, she obsessively watches a colleague in a purple skirt, betraying no hint of guilt at stalking this near stranger. That the narrator’s unnerving internal monologue also happens to be very funny at times only makes it more interesting.

I found the anonymity, obsession, and absurdity of Imamura’s novel and the peevish, circuitous, and perambulatory tone of Lahiri’s Whereabouts echoed in the BBC Three show Fleabag . As an angry and dazzlingly intelligent young woman, Fleabag ’s eponymous protagonist is certainly more glamorous and gregarious than Lahiri’s and Imamura’s central characters, but she, too, is a profoundly feminine portrait of bitter loneliness. “Women are born with pain built in,” a character asserts in Fleabag ’s Emmy-winning second season. “We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don’t. They have to seek it out.” We see the utter loneliness of the character Fleabag, whose two closest companions—her mother and her best friend—have died. She is suffering from a lack of attention.

Unlike Emily Dickinson, all three of these central characters are nameless (Imamura’s calls herself “the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan,” while Lahiri’s is at times addressed as “Signora”) and none of them has much appetite for being by themselves. Reading Whereabouts and The Woman in the Purple Skirt during the summer months, I found myself haunted by an old, familiar loneliness, made worse by my fears that it is a sadness particular to certain women.

For each of these three characters, one emotion is central: a kind of melancholy depicted as unique to women, transferred as if from centuries of repression, loneliness, and being thoroughly misunderstood. Sometimes the sadness takes second place to the unending drama of their lives, but mostly it is their primary experience. The three of them are restless, prone to snooping, and out of place wherever they are. They yearn to be noticed, known, and loved. Fleabag offers the best zingers (“I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, who to love, and how to tell them”), while the Signora and the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan carry their burdens quietly, marinating a soulful broth of melancholy in the face of their dejection.

By cataloging the variousness of loneliness, Lahiri captures the attention of readers living through yet another year of the pandemic, with most forms of usual communication circumscribed. Her narrator laments, “In spring I suffer. The season doesn’t invigorate me, I find it depleting.” Anyone who has been through a momentary dip in their lives will know what she is talking about. Similarly, on mortality: “For the past few days there’s been a strange sensation under the skin at my throat, something along the lines of an irregular palpitation. I only feel it when I’m sitting at home, reading on my couch. That is, when I’m most relaxed, when I’m expecting to feel at peace. It lasts for a few seconds, then passes.”

Beneath Lahiri’s prose lies the particular connection between her women characters and loneliness. The Signora is strung out and cut off from her cultural and historical milieu. As readers, we return to a familiar world in which the characters understand that loneliness is simultaneously a scourge as well as a blessing. If you get too much of it, you lose your mind; if you get very little of it, then, too, you lose your balance.

Lahiri employs stark imagery to evoke the Signora’s emotional state. Anyone who has ever been near the waters of depression knows what she is referring to. Her protagonist suffers from melancholy, is haunted by the burdens of seclusion, but is (secretly) hopeful for the future. When she is subjected to a litany of her mother’s aches and pains, she notes, “I fear I’m a terrible daughter who ignores her mother, whose fault is to be excessively alive.” Here, Lahiri gestures to existential angst, building on longing and loneliness as recurrent themes in her novels.

After a night out, Fleabag, played by the writer-actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge, sits on the stoop outside her father’s house. She looks him in the eye, telling him: “I have a horrible feeling I am a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.” He smiles. “You get all that from your mother,” he says, bringing the night and the conversation to an end. The feeling of feminine loneliness is intensified here—made clear in Fleabag’s despondency, then exacerbated by her father’s suggestion that she inherited her worst traits from her mother, motioning towards a generational form of suffering.

Imamura’s narrator, meanwhile, is bereft in ways that are mysterious and subliminal. She imposes her emotions on the object of her obsession. “The Woman in the Purple Skirt sat down on the bench, a lonely little figure, and enjoyed the last few sips of the sports drink. Then she looked down at her lap and examined her nails. She really did remind me of Meichan, my old friend from elementary school.”

In these poignant depictions of lack, we can perceive elements of the depression, mental illnesses, and misery (now exaggerated by the pandemic) affecting many across the world. Imamura captures the texture of this malaise precisely:

But when I looked carefully, it was clear that what she felt inwardly didn’t match what she projected outwardly. She wasn’t actually enjoying being a part of it all—not in her heart. Even if her lips were smiling, her eyes were not. All the other cleaners had animated expressions on their faces, but she alone had a touch of sadness about her. She was forcing herself, trying to appear to be having fun so as not to dampen the mood.

As artists, Waller-Bridge, Imamura, North, and Lahiri know how to combine naked confessionalism and comic artifice to tap veins of hungry emotion—anger, fear, and, particularly, deep sadness. They are not averse to having their protagonists walk into conventional, potentially sentimental situations, or trudge that thin line between sanity and berserk obsession. The emotionality of their characters plays out in abrupt, uncomfortable ways. These are headstrong, independent women who know better than to have an emotional breakdown—and they do everything that they can not to give in, until they can’t.

While men are, statistically, more prone to suicide, it seems that women are more likely to suffer from depression. A 2009 study in the US notes: “By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.” Building on this, studies by the WHO have highlighted that women disproportionately suffer from common mental disorders (depression, anxiety, and somatic complaints). Clinical depression—twice as common in women—was predicted to be the second leading factor in the global disability burden by 2020.

Loneliness contributes to, compounds, and pressurizes these burdens. Depression and sadness undercut connection, as we see in Whereabouts , when a restorative break at a friend’s vacant country house reinforces the loneliness of Lahiri’s narrator. The novel proffers a muted portrait of urban solitude marked by undercurrents of not-knowing, longing, and desolation.

The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan feels her isolation more sharply on her days off. The pace of Imamura’s fiction is sober but highlights a disquieting undertow even to the most slapstick of moments. With each passing chapter we see a new layer to the narrator’s loneliness, revealing how strangely isolated she is, creating a patina of distress.

These writers know how to combine naked confessionalism and comic artifice to tap veins of hungry emotion.

The narrator makes disconcerting asides, like:

I considered all the hotel shampoo she could have availed herself of at absolutely no charge. And not only shampoo: conditioner, body wash, bars of soap. … I knew that nearly all the cleaning staff had bottles of shampoo with the hotel crest on their bathroom shelf at home. Everybody’s hair smelled exactly the same, day after day. The only one who was any different was the Woman in the Purple Skirt.

The chilling display of too much interest in another woman’s life is deadpan and scary. A study in voyeurism, the book makes the reader uncomfortable about knowing so much, yet so little, about the narrator’s fixation with the Woman in the Purple Skirt.

In contrast to the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan’s stringent detachment, Fleabag’s unnamed protagonist is so desperately lonely that she hooks up with the first guy who shows interest in her. She breaks the fourth wall to tell the audience of her propensity for these kinds of self-centered, self-destructive antics, while Imamura’s and Lahiri’s character’s motivations are implicit, coiled inside themselves.

These women fill their lives with routines and rituals, some of which are embarrassingly devoid of meaning or circular exercises in theorizing loneliness. “Solitude: it’s become my trade,” Lahiri’s narrator writes. “As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect.” Talking of her dead mother, Fleabag says, “With all the love I have for her. I don’t know where to put it now.” The Woman in The Yellow Cardigan wastes her days looking for the familiar face of her estranged sister in a sea of strangers. In the geographies of their lives, in the way they spend their days and live out their obsessions, these women might be markedly different from one another, but loneliness threads through, stitching them together across time, narratives, geographies.

“Nomadland” Swerves from the Manly Road Movie

It is pertinent to note that both Whereabouts and The Woman in the Purple Skirt are works of clear-eyed translation. In an essay for Words Without Borders published in April 2021, Lahiri notes, “The responsibility of translation is as grave and as precarious as that of a surgeon who is trained to transplant organs, or to redirect the blood flow to our hearts, and I wavered at length over the question of who would perform the surgery.” Through these books, both North and Lahiri reveal themselves as quiet seekers of perverse pleasures, working silently into oblivious hours, helping something so grand and pithy in one language find resonance and form in another. In their translations, they render these stories as complex and deeply realized character studies, told with an ambition that would otherwise not be afforded the works in their original languages because of their limited reach.

Lahiri’s Whereabouts was first published in Italian, as Dove Mi Trovo (2018) . She translated it herself, making it the first book published by Knopf to be translated by its own author. Taking the austere, plotless story from Italian and rendering it in English was a task that both petrified and inspired her. And it shows. Lahiri is a meticulous observer of human behavior, good and bad. In the English translation, she loads the most stilted, banal observations with tension. The narrative of Whereabouts unfolds alongside the development of that skill: the narrator, though intensely lonely, is still only beginning to learn how to navigate life alone, to take in experiences and render them powerfully.

Imamura, in The Woman in the Purple Skirt , depicts the life of her narrator as broken, jagged, and abstract, a blend of not-so-youthful obsession with the urge to reach out for someone elusive. North’s translation into English from Imamura’s original Japanese creates a pressing sense that the narrator is grappling with her life. North creates a portrait that shows how certain human traits transcend cultural boundaries. The elements of society, workplace, and general economic downturn are familiar, but there will always be that someone who exists outside these strict peripheries. Towards the end of the novel, the protagonist asks her boss for a loan. He is shocked:

Do you have any idea how many complaints have been made about you by the other staff, saying that even when you do come to work, you often just take off somewhere and disappear? … Usually … you are quiet as a mouse, and now, the first time you open your mouth, it’s to pester me for a loan? What’s the matter with you? Do you have no shame? Someone at your stage in life. Don’t you think you should be a little more restrained in the requests you make of others?

There is poetry to be found in these women’s loneliness, quirk in the slapstick drama, and poignancy in their ways of handling life—but we all know what’s in store for them. No matter how far or wide they cast their net, melancholy will always be a heartbeat away. One extra martini, one more sullen evening alone, one wayward night spent with the wrong guy—anything could send them tipping into a rabbit hole of ceaseless depression. It’s only they who can save themselves. In the face of this truth, what matters is how they keep their bodies and spirits intact, no matter how daunting the obsessions.

As I powerlessly glare at the screen in front of me, a glass of wine waits at the dinner table. It’s only 2 p.m. and I ought to know better. But it’s a Saturday, and I am completely alone. I have no one to talk to, so I give in to the unceasing, animal pleasures of loneliness.

You Might Also Like

Modes of Witness: On “The Singularity” and “The Simple Art of ...

Phantoms of Patriarchy: On Ditlevsen & Bachmann

Fighting Discrimination and Sexual Violence in Women’s Prisons

Lahiri’s Metamorphoses

Tracing Women: Haitian and Black Cuban Women Archivists

On Our Nightstands: July 2024

Loneliness in Literature

Cite this chapter.

• Hamilton B. Gibson 2  

133 Accesses

1 Citations

The subject of loneliness in literature is so vast that it is difficult to know how to approach it within the limits of one chapter. It has been a theme treated so often throughout the ages that all that can be done here is to call attention to its use in different periods, and to see how society has regarded loneliness according to the changing Zeitgeist Sometimes writers have concentrated on loneliness associated with old age, as in the Book of Ecclesiastes, which has been mentioned in a previous chapter, and in more modern times loneliness is treated as a problem throughout adult life. Occasionally the loneliness of childhood is dealt with, as in a number of Charles Dickens’s books which refer to his own childhood. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn said, ‘I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead’ and his remedy for his lonely fits was to fall asleep; Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye experienced it more or less as a permanent problem, and he too regarded death as the final solution for loneliness: ‘I felt so lonesome, all of a sudden, I almost wished I was dead.’ The present book is about loneliness in later life, but it is important to realize that the things that make people lonely are really the same in childhood, mid-adulthood and old age. We are really the same people in our later life, although we have to cope with new problems that come with our age.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Unable to display preview.  Download preview PDF.

Robert Potter, The English Morality Play , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.

Google Scholar  

G. Cooper and C. Worthan (eds), The Summoning of Everyman , Nederlands, W.A.: Western Australian Press, 1980.

St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia , quoted in Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart , London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979.

Francesco Petrarca, De Vita Solitaria , Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden, 1990.

William Shakespeare, ‘As You Like It’, III.2, in The Works of William Shakespeare , London: Basil Blackwell, 1947.

Hardin Craig, ‘Morality Plays and Elizabethan Drama’, Shakespeare Quarterly , 1950, Vol. 1, pp. 64–72.

Article   Google Scholar  

Ernest Jones, The Problem of Hamlet and the Oedipus Complex , London: Vision Press, 1947.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mains Sales , London: Routledge, 1988.

M.E. Novak, ‘Swift and Defoe, or how Contempt Breeds Familiarity and a Degree of Influence’, in H.J. Reed and H.I. Vienken (eds), Proceedings of the 1st Munster Symposium of Jonathan Swift , Munchen: Verlag, 1985.

Martin Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story , University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Press, 1990.

Quoted in Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, p. 33.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels , Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967, p. 258.

Alfred Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’, in The Poems of Tennyson , Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991.

L. McPike, Dostoevsky and Dickens , London: George Prior and Sons, 1981.

Franz Kafka, The Trial , tr. W. and E. Muir, London: Secker and Warburg, 1956.

Charles Dickens, ‘Autobiographical Note’ quoted in Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph , New York: Simon Schuster, 1952, p. 44.

Natalie McKnight, Idiots, Madmen and Other Prisoners in Dickens , New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993, p. 23.

Bill Bytheway, Ageism , Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995.

Adam Gillon, Joseph Conrad , Boston: Twain Publishers, 1982.

Joseph Conrad, Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology and Literature , Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1979.

Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust , London: Chapman and Hall, 1964.

Roland Reinart, Evelyn Waugh: ‘A Handful of Dust’ , Harlow: Longman York Press, 1984, p. 104.

Roger Tennant, Joseph Conrad: a Biography , London: Sheldon Press, 1981.

Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell , Vol. 1, London: Allen and Unwin, 1967, pp. 207–8.

Joseph Conrad, ‘Amy Foster’, in Cedric Watts (ed.), Typhoon and Other Tales , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Graham Greene, In Search of a Character: Two African Journals , London: Bodley Head, 1961.

Joseph Conrad, Victory: an Island Tale , Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994.

Adam Gillon, Joseph Conrad , Boston: Twain Publications, 1992, p. 141.

Jeffrey Myers, Homosexuality in Literature , Montreal: McGill-Queens University, 1977.

Robert Hedges, ‘Deep Fellowship: Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Life and Fiction of Joseph Conrad’, Journal of Homosexuality , 1979, Vol. 4, pp. 379–93.

Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness , London: Hutchinson, 1986.

Tom Wakefield, Mates , London: Hutchinson, 1996.

George Orwell, Animal Farm: a Fairy Story , London: Secker and Warburg, 1945.

Frederic Warburg, ‘Review of Nineteen Eighty-Four ’, quoted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: a Life , London: Secker and Warburg, 1980, p. 396.

Patrick Reilly, George Orwell: the Age’s Adversary , London: Macmillan, 1986.

Peter Davison, George Orwell: a Literary Life , London: Macmillan, 1996.

Book   Google Scholar  

The two post-Orwellian Utopias are Aldous Huxley, Island , London: Flamingo, 1964

B.F. Skinner, Waiden Two , New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Hertfordshire, UK

Hamilton B. Gibson ( Honorary Senior Research Fellow )

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2000 H. B. Gibson

About this chapter

Gibson, H.B. (2000). Loneliness in Literature. In: Loneliness in Later Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510203_4

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510203_4

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, London

Print ISBN : 978-0-333-92018-3

Online ISBN : 978-0-230-51020-3

eBook Packages : Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies Collection Social Sciences (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

The Theme of Loneliness in Life in Literature Research Paper

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Belongingness is necessary to avoid loneliness, being alone despite being surrounded, loneliness is a product of our own design, works cited.

When I look at stories like “The Immortals”, “Evermore”, “The Prospect from the Silver Hills”, “A Family Super” and “Intimacy”, one common theme I noticed from all the stories is the concept of being alone and how it affects how people view themselves, their lives and the place they are in. It is the view of this paper that loneliness in life comes about not through outside circumstances; rather, it is a result of a personal choice.

In the case of the story, “The Immortals”, we see how the isolation of a group of survivors has changed their view of reality to the point that they believe that they are actually immortal. In fact, I read that the narrator of the story believed that he has been an observer of mankind from the very start and will continue to observe the world when mankind is no longer around. However it is hinted in one section that this is far from the truth when the narrator states:

“ Sometimes I have this weird idea that I am just a second rate New Zealand schoolmaster who never did anything or went anywhere and is now noisily dying of solar radiation along with everyone else.”

From this statement, it can be thought that the narrator could simply be making stuff up due to his/her loneliness. For instance, towards the end of the story it is shown that the narrator is part of a population in New Zealand that has been poisoned by water from a well. Evidence of this apparent loneliness can be seen in his/her views of the world around him/her as humanity slowly evolves and develops, yet, these views are strangely lacking in relation to feelings of association, friendship or even feelings of “belongingness” (Koger 126). What exists is instead an outside view of humanity that examines it from the perspective of someone that is outside of its norms, limitations and boundaries as opposed to someone that has examined human nature by being human themselves (Koger 126).

It seems as if despite the experiences of the narrator, there is no one that he is able to relate to, no one that he can talk to as an equal, and the end result is that he merely observes since that is all he can do (Lipsky 60). Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that the narrator does not seem to establish any form of long term relationships with the people he interacts with, he just drifts based on what interests him at that particular moment in time.

From this story, it is hinted that loneliness is often caused not by being alone, rather, it is often the case that it manifests simply because someone does not feel like they belong to the group that they find themselves in or that they cannot relate to anyone that they talk to (Lipsky 60).

One example of this can be seen in the case of the story “Evermore” where the main character of the story is sad about the death of her brother and the fact that many people have forgotten the sacrifices of the past. This can be seen in the following quote where the main character is sad over the arc of triumph in France and how it symbolizes the triumph of death rather than the triumph of humanity over death:

“An arch of triumph, yes, but of what kind, she wondered: the triumph over death, or the triumph of death.” (Evermore 78)

Yet, such actions are merely an excuse since the main reason behind her sadness is the fact that there is no one that can relate with her since not only has her brother died but many of the people that she knew have passed away due to old age (Hoffert 98).

In the story, “Intimacy” by Hanif Kureishi, we see that the main character is sad about his relationship and how in the end he leaves his wife for his mistress (Chalupský 61-62). What is interesting about this story is how it shows the concept of being alone despite being surrounded by people that you know. This can clearly be seen in the way in which the main character shows his dislike at being unable to find a sense of fulfillment when interacting with his wife yet finds what he seeks in the arms of another woman (Chalupský 61-62).

From this viewpoint, it can be seen that loneliness is not the absence of people; rather, it is the absence of relations. Relations in this case can include a variety of possible reasons such as the ability to understand the needs and wants of the other person, the ability to show care and compassion for the person that you are with, the desire to make them happy as well as the capacity to understand them and who they are (Chalupský 64). From this viewpoint, relations refer to the connection that one feels when they are with another person and does not necessarily include connections such as family, friendships or knowing someone. For instance, the author states in the book:

“Love cannot be measured by its duration….” (Chalupský 63)

This is a good statement to use when it comes to examining loneliness since it shows that just because you are with a person for an extended period of time does not mean that you are deeply in love with them. A man could be married to a woman and not actually love her, nor have any deep affection for her. Examples of this can be seen in various examples in the Middle East where arranged marriages used to be a normal custom between families in order to establish proper business relations. In most cases, the bride and the groom could have never met until the very day of the wedding and most likely have no affection whatsoever for each other.

Taking such an example into consideration, it can be seen that the main character in “Intimacy” is also feeling the same lack of connection wherein he is married to his wife simply to maintain the relationship and not because he loves her (Chalupský 61). Based on this, it can be stated that people feel lonely when they lack the capacity to connect with other people and feel isolated because they feel the need to stick to social norms (i.e. staying married) despite the fact that such a relationship merely makes them more miserable in the end. Evidence of this can be seen in the follow quote which showcases the inherent problems found in a relationship where there is a lack of connection:

“Both he and mother were frustrated, neither being able to find a way to get what they wanted, whatever that was. Nevertheless they were loyal and faithful to one another. Disloyal and unfaithful to themselves.”

While it may be true that people fall in love, they tend to fall out of love as well. It comes to a point that there is nothing new in a relationship where everything that is done is nothing more than a series of repeated events that are meant to conform to an established routine yet, deep down inside, people want something more (Katona 1). People want to feel special, to feel loved and to have some sort of connection with someone that shares their feelings and enhances it in their own way.

The problem when it comes to long term relationships as shown in the story is that love tends to disappear due to a lack of effort on the part of both parties. The end result is that the married couple just stays together for the sake of staying together without any true love between them (Katona 1). It would be the same as being alone since love is usually what holds a couple together, when it is gone all that is left is a sense of responsibility towards having the relationship. This can clearly be seen in the novel “Intimacy” where one of the major reasons why the main character has difficulty leaving his wife is due to his sense of responsibility towards her.

In the story “The Prospect from the Silver Hill” the very beginning of the story shows the very essence of loneliness when it states:

“The company agent – friendless, single, far from home – passed most days alone in a cabin at Ibela-hoy, the Hill Without a Hat.” (Crace 33)

It is immediately obvious to all the readers from the very first passage that the main character in the story is definitely lonely since he is friendless, single and far from the familiar groups of individuals from his home region. Yet, after going over the entire story, it seems to become a metaphor for the main character where his search for the value in the rocks he collects is almost the same with his own life that is relatively hard, cold, lifeless and lacking any company whatsoever. Thus, the search for value in rocks seems to be a metaphor for that person’s search for value in their own life where every rock can be considered an event that occurred (Ernst 1).

The lifelessness, the lack of feeling, the cold chill that descends on his fingers as he picks up a rock after a rock is similar to what a person who has lived a life with no companionship would do as they remember how they have lived (Ernst 1).

Through this story, we see how people who suffer from loneliness attempt to evaluate or even justify their choices in life by trying to find some hope, some meaning or even a shred of value in what they have done. This story is similar to cases where people are sad over the lack of company in their lives, how they have no one to be with, talk to, or share their lives with. However, in the end, they fail to realize that the source of their loneliness is their own selves.

Just as the choice of the main character was to be a company agent that evaluated stones ceaselessly, people tend to create for themselves personalities that are bare and lacking. They tend to imagine that companionship will come to them if they just sit there and wait, that merely spending the time living and waiting will bring the love they desire.

In the end, such actions are useless since companionship is only given when you seek it and become open towards potential possibilities. To put yourself out there, to interact with people, to make yourself vulnerable by exposing more of your true self is the only way people tend to open up and join you in your life. It is not enough that you act like the agent in the story, making for himself a delusion of a family and companionship; rather, it is important to understand the necessity of being open to new situations, new people and new events.

As seen in the story “The Family Supper”, people such as the man who committed suicide in the story, get so caught up in their work that when a potential alternative for liveliness and happiness is presented to them, they tend to be hesitant, even scared of change and do all that they can to avoid what could potentially be exactly what they truly wanted out of life (Ishiguro 136).

“ My father lowered his eyes and nodded. For some moments he seemed deep in thought. ‘Watanabe was very devoted to his work,’ he said at last. ‘The collapse of the firm was a great blow to him. I fear it must have weakened his judgement.”

For example, despite the fact that the company miners were able to find silver, the agent attempted to hide the fact, since he foresaw the potential influx of activity into the general area that finding silver and other precious ores would bring.

From the company agent’s perspective, despite the fact that having more interactions with people was exactly what he wanted; his delusion of the rocks being his family had supplanted his desire to interact with people to the extent that he acted irrationally in order to preserve “his world”. The same can be said in cases where loners and shut-ins (ex: the person who committed suicide in the last supper) tend to isolate themselves from everyone that they encounter despite people trying to reach out to them.

The fact is that just like the company agent and the person who committed suicide, loneliness and isolation are all they know and all to what they are used. If you attempt to bring a person out of their comfort zone, it is usually followed by considerable resistance and even violence (Lewis 1-2). Loneliness in such cases becomes an ever present feeling that they simply cannot live without and it becomes a part of them despite the fact that being lonely is something that they do not truly want.

Based on what has been presented in this paper, it can be seen that loneliness in life comes about not through outside circumstances; rather, it is a result of a personal choice. The main characters in the stories simply got so wrapped up in their isolation that they neglected to put themselves out there in order to experience the full level of possible experiences they could receive by interacting with people. They stayed in their sadness to such an extent that sadness was the only thing they knew. Yet, the saddest part is that the despair that ruled their lives was a product of a personal choice that they failed to see.

Chalupský, Petr. “Prick Lit Or Naked Hope? Self-Exposure In Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy.” Brno Studies In English 37.2 (2011): 61-78. Print

Crace, Jim. “The Prospect from the Silver Hills.” The Art of the Story . Ed. Daniel Halpern. New York City: Penguin Group, 1999. 33-41. Print.

Ernst, Stephanie A. “Jim Crace.” Guide To Literary Masters & Their Works (2007): 1. Print

Hoffert, Barbarqa. “Book Reviews: Fiction.” Library Journal 121.5 (1996): 98. Print

Katona, Cynthia Lee. “Intimacy.” Magill’s Book Reviews (2000): 1. Print

Koger, Grove. “Einstein’s Monsters (Book).” Library Journal 112.10 (1987): 126. Print

Lewis, Leon. “A Family Supper.” Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition (2004): 1-3. Print

Lipsky, David. “Martin’s Monster.” National Review 39.22 (1987): 60-61. Print

• Language, Identity and Constructions in Childrens' Literature
• Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Literature Analysis
• Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
• Intimacy and Media Technologies
• Loneliness and Solitude in the Western Literary Tradition
• "The Baron in the Tree" by Italo Calvino Literature Analysis
• The Prince' by Niccolo Machiavelli Literature Analysis
• "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry Literature Analysis
• “Araby” by James Joyce Literature Analysis
• Selected Works of Lu Hsun
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, May 1). The Theme of Loneliness in Life in Literature. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-theme-of-loneliness-in-life-in-literature/

"The Theme of Loneliness in Life in Literature." IvyPanda , 1 May 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/the-theme-of-loneliness-in-life-in-literature/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'The Theme of Loneliness in Life in Literature'. 1 May.

IvyPanda . 2020. "The Theme of Loneliness in Life in Literature." May 1, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-theme-of-loneliness-in-life-in-literature/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Theme of Loneliness in Life in Literature." May 1, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-theme-of-loneliness-in-life-in-literature/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Theme of Loneliness in Life in Literature." May 1, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-theme-of-loneliness-in-life-in-literature/.

• Skip to main content
• Skip to primary sidebar

Writing Tips Oasis - A website dedicated to helping writers to write and publish books.

How to Describe Loneliness in a Story

By Isobel Coughlan

There are many ways you can write a lonely character in your book. In this post, we share some tips on how to describe loneliness in a story. Read on to learn more!

Something that is intense, serious , or difficult to deal with.

“His heavy loneliness followed him everywhere, even when he was in a room full of people.”

“She was determined to shed her heavy lonely feelings, but it was proving easier said than done.”

How it Adds Description

“Heavy” shows that the feelings of loneliness are so strong that they’re weighing the character down. This adjective is usually reserved for extra powerful feelings, and it can imply characters have been suffering for a while. If a character experiences “heavy” loneliness, they might struggle to connect with others or have a fear that keeps them from reaching out for help.

Something that’s clear or easy to notice.

“She blushed as she entered the classroom alone. Her lack of companionship and loneliness was evident to everyone.”

“Though his secret feelings of loneliness weren’t evident , he was scared his peers knew he felt different.”

If you want to show a character’s feelings are clear or obvious, “evident” is an apt adjective. This shows that everyone in the story can see the character is lonely, perhaps because of their mood or actions. Some characters might try to befriend them if their loneliness is “evident,” but others may use this to tease them.

3. Fictitious

Something that doesn’t exist or is false.

“Quit this fictitious loner act! You have so many friends and admirers.”

“He says he’s lonely, but we think his feelings are rather fictitious . Don’t you?”

Some characters might feign loneliness for sympathy or attention. In these cases, the feelings are “fictitious” because the character is lying. Characters that create “fictitious” emotions are likely to annoy others. They’re also usually manipulative and want to gain something from their fake loneliness act.

4. Agonizing

Something that causes extreme mental or physical pain.

“His agonizing loneliness left him bedridden for weeks. He could feel his isolation deep in his bones.”

“The prisoner was left alone for weeks, and his solitude was so agonizing that he wailed in the evenings.”

Though loneliness is an emotion, in severe cases, some people complain that it causes physical pain. “Agonizing” signifies that a character feels so alone that it hurts, and this could be a call for help or a sign of desperation. “Agonizing” loneliness may also debilitate the character, leaving them depressed or difficult to be around.

5. Constant

Something that’s always there or occurs all the time.

“His constant loneliness felt like a friend now. He couldn’t imagine life without eternal solitude.”

“Though she surrounded herself with friends and family, the loneliness in her heart was constant .”

If the feelings of loneliness never leave your character, “constant” is an excellent description of the situation. This shows that the character is always burdened by their feelings, and it could show they’re a more emotional or tortured soul.

6. Embarrassing

Something that leaves you ashamed or shy.

“When he thought about it, his lack of companions was embarrassing . A pink tint spread across his cheeks as he dwelled on his lonely life.”

“It’s rather embarrassing to be lonely in this day and age. Why doesn’t he make friends online?”

“Embarrassing” describes a character’s shame caused by their loneliness. This also implies they care how others perceive them, and therefore they might be a quiet or anxious character. Nasty characters or bullies might make lonely characters feel “embarrassed” by highlighting their solitary nature.

Something that’s hidden or only known by a few people.

“His secret loneliness was hidden in the day, but at night he allowed himself to feel the sadness.”

“Only her sister knew about her secret loneliness, and she didn’t dare tell anyone else.”

You can use the adjective “secret” to show how your character hides their feelings from others in the story. This could be because they’re embarrassed of feeling alone, or it could be because they want to look brave and fit in. Characters who keep their loneliness “secret” might struggle when opening up to others or when showing their true personality.

8. Intricate

Something that features many details or small parts.

“She realized her loneliness was intricate , and there was no way she could describe it to another soul.”

“Loneliness is such an intricate emotion. You wouldn’t understand it unless you’ve felt it.”

If you want to add depth or complexity to your character’s suffering, “intricate” can signify the many causes of their loneliness. “Intricate” also implies that there’s a greater level of suffering, as the causes are more complicated than a simple lonely feeling. If a character suffers from “intricate” loneliness, others may try to help them but won’t be able to grasp the layers of the problem.

9. Comforting

Something that makes you happier and less anxious.

“At this point, the lady’s loneliness was comforting to her. It was simply all she had.”

“His comforting solitude was all he needed. He’d never complained about being lonely; it was normal to him.”

Some characters might be at ease when alone, and their loneliness might feel ”comforting” to them. This can indicate that they’re an independent character and happiest when alone. Other characters might find this strange and see them as a loner or standoffish.

Something gentle, kind, and harmless .

“Despite his complaints, his feelings of loneliness were benign, and he’d forgotten about them by the morning.”

“I wish my isolation was benign ! But this loneliness eats away at me every day.”

The adjective “benign” shows that the character’s loneliness is harmless, meaning it won’t damage their mental or physical health. Characters with “benign” loneliness will likely get over their feelings quickly, especially with the help of others. Other characters might feel pity for them, but in some cases, they may think that the lonely character is being over dramatic.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• HHS Author Manuscripts

Loneliness Matters: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Consequences and Mechanisms

Louise c. hawkley.

Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 940 E. 57th St, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

John T. Cacioppo

Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

As a social species, humans rely on a safe, secure social surround to survive and thrive. Perceptions of social isolation, or loneliness, increase vigilance for threat and heighten feelings of vulnerability while also raising the desire to reconnect. Implicit hypervigilance for social threat alters psychological processes that influence physiological functioning, diminish sleep quality, and increase morbidity and mortality. The purpose of this paper is to review the features and consequences of loneliness within a comprehensive theoretical framework that informs interventions to reduce loneliness. We review physical and mental health consequences of loneliness, mechanisms for its effects, and effectiveness of extant interventions. Features of a loneliness regulatory loop are employed to explain cognitive, behavioral, and physiological consequences of loneliness and to discuss interventions to reduce loneliness. Loneliness is not simply being alone. Interventions to reduce loneliness and its health consequences may need to take into account its attentional, confirmatory, and memorial biases as well as its social and behavioral effects.

Introduction

Loneliness is a common experience; as many as 80% of those under 18 years of age and 40% of adults over 65 years of age report being lonely at least sometimes [ 1 – 3 ], with levels of loneliness gradually diminishing through the middle adult years, and then increasing in old age (i.e., ≥70 years) [ 2 ]. Loneliness is synonymous with perceived social isolation, not with objective social isolation. People can live relatively solitary lives and not feel lonely, and conversely, they can live an ostensibly rich social life and feel lonely nevertheless. Loneliness is defined as a distressing feeling that accompanies the perception that one’s social needs are not being met by the quantity or especially the quality of one’s social relationships [ 2 , 4 – 6 ]. Loneliness is typically measured by asking individuals to respond to items such as those on the frequently used UCLA Loneliness Scale [ 7 ]: “I feel isolated,” “There are people I can talk to,” and “I feel part of a group of friends.” The result is a continuum of scores that range from highly socially connected to highly lonely.

Each of us is capable of feeling lonely, and loneliness is an equal opportunity tenant for good reason. We have posited that loneliness is the social equivalent of physical pain, hunger, and thirst; the pain of social disconnection and the hunger and thirst for social connection motivate the maintenance and formation of social connections necessary for the survival of our genes [ 8 , 9 ]. Feelings of loneliness generally succeed in motivating connection or reconnection with others following geographic relocation or bereavement, for instance, thereby diminishing or abolishing feelings of social isolation. For as many as 15–30% of the general population, however, loneliness is a chronic state [ 10 , 11 ]. Left untended, loneliness has serious consequences for cognition, emotion, behavior, and health. Here, we review physical and mental health consequences of perceived social isolation and then introduce mechanisms for these outcomes in the context of a model that takes into consideration the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics of loneliness.

Loneliness Matters for Physical Health and Mortality

A growing body of longitudinal research indicates that loneliness predicts increased morbidity and mortality [ 12 – 19 ]. The effects of loneliness seem to accrue over time to accelerate physiological aging [ 20 ]. For instance, loneliness has been shown to exhibit a dose–response relationship with cardiovascular health risk in young adulthood [ 12 ]. The greater the number of measurement occasions at which participants were lonely (i.e., childhood, adolescence, and at 26 years of age), the greater their number of cardiovascular health risks (i.e., BMI, systolic blood pressure (SBP), total, and HDL cholesterol levels, glycated hemoglobin concentration, maximum oxygen consumption). Similarly, loneliness was associated with increased systolic blood pressure in a population-based sample of middle-aged adults [ 21 ], and a follow-up study of these same individuals showed that a persistent trait-like aspect of loneliness accelerated the rate of blood pressure increase over a 4-year follow-up period [ 22 ]. Loneliness accrual effects are also evident in a study of mortality in the Health and Retirement Study; all-cause mortality over a 4-year follow-up was predicted by loneliness, and the effect was greater in chronically than situationally lonely adults [ 17 ]. Penninx et al. [ 15 ] showed that loneliness predicted all-cause mortality during a 29-month follow-up after controlling for age, sex, chronic diseases, alcohol use, smoking, self-rated health, and functional limitations. Sugisawa et al. [ 18 ] also found a significant effect of loneliness on mortality over a 3-year period, and this effect was explained by chronic diseases, functional status, and self-rated health. Among women in the National Health and Nutrition Survey, chronic high frequency loneliness (>3 days/week at each of two measurement occasions about 8 years apart) was prospectively associated with incident coronary heart disease (CHD) over a 19-year follow-up in analyses that adjusted for age, race, socioeconomic status, marital status, and cardiovascular risk factors [ 19 ]. Depressive symptoms have been associated with loneliness and with adverse health outcomes, but loneliness continued to predict CHD in these women after also controlling for depressive symptoms. Finally, loneliness has also been shown to increase risk for cardiovascular mortality; individuals who reported often being lonely exhibited significantly greater risk than those who reported never being lonely [ 14 ]. In sum, feelings of loneliness mark increased risk for morbidity and mortality, a phenomenon that arguably reflects the social essence of our species.

Loneliness Matters for Mental Health and Cognitive Functioning

The impact of loneliness on cognition was assessed in a recent review of the literature [ 9 ]. Perhaps, the most striking finding in this literature is the breadth of emotional and cognitive processes and outcomes that seem susceptible to the influence of loneliness. Loneliness has been associated with personality disorders and psychoses [ 23 – 25 ], suicide [ 26 ], impaired cognitive performance and cognitive decline over time [ 27 – 29 ], increased risk of Alzheimer’s Disease [ 29 ], diminished executive control [ 30 , 31 ], and increases in depressive symptoms [ 32 – 35 ]. The causal nature of the association between loneliness and depressive symptoms appears to be reciprocal [ 32 ], but more recent analyses of five consecutive annual assessments of loneliness and depressive symptoms have shown that loneliness predicts increases in depressive symptoms over 1-year intervals, but depressive symptoms do not predict increases in loneliness over those same intervals [ 36 ]. In addition, experimental evidence, in which feelings of loneliness (and social connectedness) were hypnotically induced, indicates that loneliness not only increases depressive symptoms but also increases perceived stress, fear of negative evaluation, anxiety, and anger, and diminishes optimism and self-esteem [ 8 ]. These data suggest that a perceived sense of social connectedness serves as a scaffold for the self—damage the scaffold and the rest of the self begins to crumble.

A particularly devastating consequence of feeling socially isolated is cognitive decline and dementia. Feelings of loneliness at age 79 predicted “lifetime cognitive change” as indicated by lower IQ at age 79 adjusting for IQ at age 11, living arrangements at age 11 and at age 79, sex, marital status, and ideal level of social support [ 27 ]. This finding does not rule out a reverse causal direction; cognitive impairments may hamper social interactions, prompt social withdrawal, and thus lead to loneliness. Other studies, however, have indicated that loneliness is a precursor of cognitive decline. For instance, the cognitive functioning of 75–85-year-olds (as assessed by the Mini-Mental State Examination) did not differ as a function of loneliness at baseline but diminished to a greater extent among those high than low in loneliness over a 10-year follow-up [ 28 ]. In a prospective study by Wilson et al. [ 29 ], loneliness was inversely associated with performance on a battery of cognitive measures in a sample of 823 initially dementia-free older adults. Moreover, loneliness at baseline was associated with a faster decline in cognitive performance on most of these measures over a 4-year follow-up. This was not true of the converse: cognitive status at baseline did not predict changes in loneliness. In addition, incidence of Alzheimer’s disease (76 individuals) was predicted by degree of baseline loneliness after adjusting for age, sex, and education; those in the top decile of loneliness scores were 2.1 times as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than those in the bottom decile of loneliness scores. Depressive symptoms had a modest effect on Alzheimer’s disease risk, but loneliness continued to exert a significant and much larger influence on Alzheimer’s disease than depressive symptoms when depressive symptoms were included in the model [ 29 ]. Overall, it appears that something about our sense of connectedness with others penetrates the physical organism and compromises the integrity of physical and mental health and well-being. What that “something” might be is the topic to which we next turn.

How Loneliness Matters: Mechanisms

The loneliness model.

Our model of loneliness [ 8 , 9 ] posits that perceived social isolation is tantamount to feeling unsafe, and this sets off implicit hypervigilance for (additional) social threat in the environment. Unconscious surveillance for social threat produces cognitive biases: relative to nonlonely people, lonely individuals see the social world as a more threatening place, expect more negative social interactions, and remember more negative social information. Negative social expectations tend to elicit behaviors from others that confirm the lonely persons’ expectations, thereby setting in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy in which lonely people actively distance themselves from would-be social partners even as they believe that the cause of the social distance is attributable to others and is beyond their own control [ 37 ]. This self-reinforcing loneliness loop is accompanied by feelings of hostility, stress, pessimism, anxiety, and low self-esteem [ 8 ] and represents a dispositional tendency that activates neurobiological and behavioral mechanisms that contribute to adverse health outcomes.

Health behaviors

One of the consequences of loneliness and implicit vigilance for social threat is a diminished capacity for self-regulation. The ability to regulate one’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior is critical to accomplish personal goals or to comply with social norms. Feeling socially isolated impairs the capacity to self-regulate, and these effects are so automatic as to seem outside of awareness. In a dichotic listening task, for instance, right-handed individuals quickly and automatically attend preferentially to the pre-potent right ear. Latency to respond to stimuli presented to the non-dominant ear can be enhanced, however, by instructing participants to attend to their left ear. Among young adults who were administered this task, the lonely and nonlonely groups did not differ in performance when directed to attend to their pre-potent right ear, but the lonely group performed significantly worse than the nonlonely group when directed to shift attention to their non-prepotent left ear [ 30 ]. In other words, automatic attentional processes may be unimpaired, but effortful attentional processes are compromised in lonely relative to socially connected individuals.

Of relevance for health is the capacity for self-regulation in the arena of lifestyle behaviors. Regulation of emotion can enhance the ability to regulate other self-control behaviors [ 38 ], as is evident from research showing that positive affect predicts increased physical activity [ 39 ]. In middle-aged and older adults, greater loneliness was associated with less effort applied to the maintenance and optimization of positive emotions [ 31 ]. Compromised regulation of emotion in lonely individuals explained their diminished likelihood of performing any physical activity, and loneliness also predicted a decrease in physical activity over time [ 31 ]. Physical activity is a well-known protective factor for physical health, mental health, and cognitive functioning [ 40 ], suggesting that poorer self-regulation may contribute to the greater health risk associated with loneliness via diminished likelihood of engaging in health-promoting behaviors. A related literature shows that loneliness is also a risk factor for obesity [ 41 ] and health-compromising behavior, including a greater propensity to abuse alcohol [ 42 ]. To the extent that self-regulation accounts for poorer health behaviors in lonely people, better health behaviors may be more easily accomplished in the actual or perceived company of others. Interestingly, animal research has shown that social isolation dampens the beneficial effects of exercise on neurogenesis [ 43 ], implying that health behaviors may better serve their purpose or have greater effect among those who feel socially connected than those who feel lonely. This hypothesis remains to be tested, but research on the restorative effects of sleep is consistent with this notion.

Countering the physiological effects of the challenge of daily emotional, cognitive, and behavioral experiences, sleep offers physiological restoration. Experimental sleep deprivation has adverse effects on cardiovascular functioning, inflammatory status, and metabolic risk factors [ 44 ]. In addition, short sleep duration has been associated with risk for hypertension [ 45 ], incident coronary artery calcification [ 46 ], and mortality [ 47 ].

What is less appreciated is that sleep quality may also be important in accomplishing sleep’s restorative effects. Nonrestorative sleep (i.e., sleep that is non-refreshing despite normal sleep duration) results in daytime impairments such as physical and intellectual fatigue, role impairments, and cognitive and memory problems [ 48 ]. We have noted that loneliness heightens feelings of vulnerability and unconscious vigilance for social threat, implicit cognitions that are antithetical to relaxation and sound sleep. Indeed, loneliness and poor quality social relationships have been associated with self-reported poor sleep quality and daytime dysfunction (i.e., low energy, fatigue), but not with sleep duration [ 49 – 52 ]. In young adults, greater daytime dysfunction, a marker of poor sleep quality, was accompanied by more nightly micro-awakenings, an objective index of sleep continuity obtained from Sleep-Caps worn by participants during one night in the hospital and seven nights in their own beds at home [ 53 ]. The conjunction of daytime dysfunction and micro-awakenings is consistent with polysomnography studies showing a conjunction, essentially an equivalence, between subjective sleep quality and sleep continuity [ 54 ], and substantiates the hypothesis that loneliness impairs sleep quality.

In an extension of these findings, loneliness was associated with greater daytime dysfunction in a 3-day diary study of middle-age adults, an association that was independent of age, gender, race/ethnicity, household income, health behaviors, BMI, chronic health conditions, daily illness symptom severity, and related feelings of stress, hostility, poor social support, and depressive symptoms. Cross-lagged panel analyses of the three consecutive days indicated potentially reciprocal causal roles for loneliness and daytime dysfunction: lonely feelings predicted daytime dysfunction the following day, and daytime dysfunction exerted a small but significant effect on lonely feelings the following day [ 55 ], effects that were independent of sleep duration. In other words, the same amount of sleep is less salubrious in individuals who feel more socially isolated and, ironically, less salubrious sleep feeds forward to further exacerbate feelings of social isolation. This recursive loop operates outside of consciousness and speaks to the relative impenetrability of loneliness to intervention.

Physiological functioning

The association between loneliness and cardiovascular disease and mortality [ 13 , 14 , 19 ] may have its roots in physiological changes that begin early in life. As noted earlier, chronic social isolation, rejection, and/or feelings of loneliness in early childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood cumulated in a dose–response fashion to predict cardiovascular health risk factors in young adulthood (26 years old), including elevated blood pressure [ 12 ]. In our study of young adults, loneliness was associated with elevated levels of total peripheral resistance (TPR [ 49 , 56 ]). TPR is the primary determinant of SBP until at least 50 years of age [ 57 ], which suggests that loneliness-related elevations in TPR in early to middle-adulthood may lead to higher blood pressure in middle and older age. Consistent with this hypothesis, loneliness was associated with elevated SBP in an elderly convenience sample [ 49 ], and in a population-based sample of 50–68-year-old adults in the Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study [ 21 ]. The association between loneliness and elevated SBP was exaggerated in older relative to younger lonely adults in this sample [ 21 ], suggesting an accelerated physiological decline in lonely relative to nonlonely individuals. Our recent study of loneliness and SBP in these same individuals over five annual assessments supported this hypothesis. Short-term (i.e., 1 year) fluctuations in loneliness were not significant predictors of SBP changes over 1-year intervals, but a trait-like component of loneliness present at study onset contributed to greater increases in SBP over 2-, 3-, and 4-year intervals [ 22 ]. These increases were cumulative such that higher initial levels of loneliness were associated with greater increases in SBP over a 4-year period. The prospective effect of loneliness on SBP was independent of age, gender, race/ethnicity, cardiovascular risk factors, medications, health conditions, and the effects of depressive symptoms, social support, perceived stress, and hostility [ 22 ]. Elevated SBP is a well-known risk factor for chronic cardiovascular disease, and these data suggest that the effects of loneliness accrue to accelerate movement along a trajectory toward serious health consequences [ 20 ].

The physiological determinants responsible for the cumulative effect of loneliness on blood pressure have yet to be elucidated. TPR plays a critical role in determining SBP in early to mid-adulthood, but other mechanisms come into play with increasing age. Candidate mechanisms include age-related changes in vascular physiology, including increased arterial stiffness [ 58 ], diminished endothelial cell release of nitric oxide, enhanced vascular responsivity to endothelial constriction factors, increases in circulating catecholamines, and attenuated vasodilator responses to circulating epinephrine due to decreased beta-adrenergic sensitivity in vascular smooth muscle [ 59 – 61 ]. In turn, many of these mechanisms are influenced by lifestyle factors such as diet, physical inactivity, and obesity—factors that alter blood lipids and inflammatory processes that have known consequences for vascular health and functioning [ 62 , 63 ].

Neuroendocrine Effects

Changes in TPR levels are themselves influenced by a variety of physiological processes, including activity of the autonomic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary adrenocortical (HPA) axis. The sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system plays a major role in maintaining basal vascular tone and TPR [ 64 , 65 ] and elevated sympathetic tone is responsible for the development and maintenance of many forms of hypertension [ 66 ]. To date, loneliness has not been shown to correlate with SNS activity at the myocardium (i.e., pre-ejection period [ 21 , 56 ]) but was associated with a greater concentration of epinephrine in overnight urine samples in a middle-aged and older adult sample [ 21 ]. At high concentrations, circulating epinephrine binds α-1 receptors on vascular smooth muscle cells to elicit vasoconstriction and could thereby serve as a mechanism for increased SBP in lonely individuals.

Activation of the HPA axis involves a cascade of signals that results in release of ACTH from the pituitary and cortisol from the adrenal cortex. Vascular integrity and functioning are beholden, in part, to well-regulated activity of the HPA axis. Dysregulation of the HPA axis contributes to inflammatory processes that play a role in hypertension, atherosclerosis, and coronary heart disease [ 67 – 69 ]. Loneliness has been associated with urinary excretion of significantly higher concentrations of cortisol [ 70 ], and, in more recent studies, with higher levels of salivary or plasma cortisol [ 71 , 72 ]. Pressman et al. [ 72 ] found that loneliness was associated with higher early morning and late night levels of circulating cortisol in young adult university students, and Steptoe et al. [ 71 ] found that chronically high levels of trait loneliness in middle-aged adults (M=52.4 years) predicted greater increases in salivary cortisol during the first 30 min after awakening (i.e., cortisol awakening response) such that the cortisol awakening response in individuals in the highest loneliness tertile was 21% greater than that in the lowest tertile. In our study of middle-aged and older adults, day-today fluctuations in feelings of loneliness were associated with individual differences in the cortisol awakening response. For this study, diary reports of daily psychosocial, emotional, and physical states were completed at bedtime on each of three consecutive days, and salivary cortisol levels were measured at wakeup, 30 min after awakening, and at bedtime each day. Parallel multilevel causal models revealed that prior-day feelings of loneliness and related feelings of sadness, threat, and lack of control were associated with a higher cortisol awakening response the next day, but morning cortisol awakening response did not predict experiences of these psychosocial states later the same day [ 73 ]. Social evaluative threat is known to be a potent elicitor of cortisol [ 74 ], and our theory that loneliness is characterized by chronic threat of and hypervigilance for negative social evaluation [ 9 ] is consistent with the finding that loneliness predicts increased cortisol awakening response. The relevance of the association between loneliness and HPA regulation is particularly noteworthy given recent evidence that loneliness-related alterations in HPA activity may occur at the level of the gene, a topic to which we turn next.

Gene Effects

Cortisol regulates a wide variety of physiological processes via nuclear hormone receptor-mediated control of gene transcription. Cortisol activation of the glucocorticoid receptor, for instance, exerts broad anti-inflammatory effects by inhibiting pro-inflammatory signaling pathways. Given that loneliness is associated with elevated cortisol levels, loneliness might be expected to reduce risk for inflammatory diseases. However, as we have noted above, feelings of loneliness and social isolation are associated with increased risk for inflammatory disease. This finding may be attributable to impaired glucocorticoid receptor-mediated signal transduction; failure of the cellular genome to “hear” the anti-inflammatory signal sent by circulating glucocorticoids permits inflammatory processes to continue relatively unchecked. We found evidence consistent with glucocorticoid insensitivity in our examination of gene expression rates in chronically lonely versus socially connected older adults [ 75 ]. Genome-wide microarray analyses revealed that 209 transcripts, representing 144 distinct genes, were differentially expressed in these two groups. Markers of immune activation and inflammation (e.g., pro-inflammatory cytokines and inflammatory mediators) were over-expressed in genes of the lonely relative to the socially connected group (37% of the 209 differentially expressed transcripts). Markers of cell cycle inhibitors and an inhibitor of the potent pro-inflammatory NF–κB transcript were under-expressed in genes of the lonely relative to the socially connected group (63% of the differentially expressed transcripts). The net functional implication of the differential gene transcription favored increased cell cycling and inflammation in the lonely group [ 75 ].

Subsequent bioinformatic analyses indicated that loneliness-associated differences in gene expression could be attributable to increased activity of the NF–κB transcription factor. NF–κB is known to up-regulate inflammation-related genes, and its activity is antagonized by the glucocorticoid receptor. Bioinformatic analyses also indicated a possible decrease in glucocorticoid receptor-mediated transcription in the lonely group, despite the fact that there were no group differences in circulating glucocorticoid levels. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that adverse social conditions result in functional desensitization of the glucocorticoid receptor, which permits increased NF–κB activity and thereby induces a pro-inflammatory bias in gene expression. Group differences in NF–κB/glucocorticoid receptor-mediated transcription activity were not attributable to objective indices of social isolation, nor were they explained by demographic, psychosocial (i.e., perceived stress, depression, hostility), or medical risk factors [ 75 ]. These results suggest that feelings of loneliness may exert a unique transcriptional influence that has potential relevance for health.

In an extension of this work, a recent study showed that feelings of social isolation were associated with a proxy measure of functional glucocorticoid insensitivity [ 76 ]. The composition of the leukocyte population in circulation is subject to the regulatory influence of glucocorticoids; high cortisol levels increase circulating concentrations of neutrophils and simultaneously decrease concentrations of lymphocytes and monocytes. In a study of older Taiwanese adults, this relationship was reflected in a positive correlation between cortisol levels and the ratio of neutrophil percentages relative to lymphocyte or monocyte percentages. However, in lonely individuals, this correlation was attenuated and nonsignificant, consistent with a diminished effect of cortisol at the level of leukocytes.

The precise molecular site of glucocorticoid insensitivity in the pro-inflammatory transcription cascade has yet to be identified, and additional longitudinal and experimental research are needed to determine the degree to which chronic feelings of social isolation play a causal role in differential gene expression. However, the association between subjective social isolation and gene expression corresponds well to gene expression differences in animal models of social isolation (e.g., [ 77 – 79 ]), suggesting that a subjective sense of social connectedness is important for genomic expression and normal immunoregulation in humans. Impaired transcription of glucocorticoid response genes and increased activity of pro-inflammatory transcription control pathways provide a functional genomic explanation for elevated risk of inflammatory disease in individuals who experience chronically high levels of loneliness.

Immune Functioning

Loneliness differences in immunoregulation extend beyond inflammation processes. Loneliness has been associated with impaired cellular immunity as reflected in lower natural killer (NK) cell activity and higher antibody titers to the Epstein Barr Virus and human herpes viruses [ 70 , 80 – 82 ]. In addition, loneliness among middle-age adults has been associated with a smaller increase in NK cell numbers in response to the acute stress of a Stroop task and a mirror tracing task [ 71 ]. In young adults, loneliness was associated with poorer antibody response to a component of the flu vaccine [ 72 ], suggesting that the humoral immune response may also be impaired in lonely individuals. Among HIV-positive men without AIDS, loneliness was associated with a lower count of CD4 T-lymphocytes in one study [ 83 ] but was not associated with the CD4 count in another study [ 84 ]. However, in the latter study, loneliness predicted a slower rate of decline in levels of CD4 T-lymphocytes over a 3-year period [ 84 ]. These data suggest that loneliness protects against disease progression, but no association was observed between loneliness and time to AIDS diagnosis or AIDS-related mortality [ 84 ]. Additional research is needed to examine the role of loneliness chronicity, age, life stress context, genetic predispositions, and interactions among these factors to determine when and how loneliness operates to impair immune functioning.

Future Loneliness Matters

Interventions for loneliness.

Six qualitative reviews of the loneliness intervention literature have been published since 1984 [ 85 – 90 ], and all explicitly or implicitly addressed four main types of interventions: (1) enhancing social skills, (2) providing social support, (3) increasing opportunities for social interaction, and (4) addressing maladaptive social cognition. All but one of these reviews concluded that loneliness interventions have met with success, particularly interventions which targeted opportunities for social interaction. Findlay [ 87 ] was more cautious in his review, noting that only six of the 17 intervention studies in his review employed a randomized group comparison design, with the remaining 11 studies subject to the shortcomings and flaws of pre-post and nonrandomized group comparison designs.

We recently completed a meta-analysis of loneliness intervention studies published between 1970 and September 2009 to test the magnitude of the intervention effects within each type of study design and to determine whether the intervention target moderated effect sizes (Masi et al., unpublished). Of the 50 studies eligible for inclusion in the meta-analysis, 12 were pre-post studies, 18 were non-randomized group comparison studies, and 20 were randomized group comparison studies. Effect sizes were significantly different from zero within each study design group, but randomized group comparison studies produced the smallest effect overall (pre-post=−0.37, 95% CI −.55, −.18; non-randomized control=−0.46, 95% CI −0.72, −0.20; randomized control=−0.20, 95% CI −0.32, −0.08).

Our model of loneliness holds that implicit hypervigilance for social threat exerts a powerful influence on perceptions, cognitions, and behaviors, and that loneliness may be diminished by reducing automatic perceptual and cognitive biases that favor over-attention to negative social information in the environment. Accordingly, we posited that interventions that targeted maladaptive social cognition (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy that involved training to identify automatic negative thoughts and look for disconfirming evidence, to decrease biased cognitions, and/or to reframe perceptions of loneliness and personal control) would be more effective than interventions that targeted social support, social skills, or social access. Moderational analyses of the randomized group comparison studies supported our hypothesis: the effect size for social cognition interventions (−0.60, 95% CI −0.96, −0.23, N = 4) was significantly larger than the effect size for social support (−0.16, 95% CI −0.27, −0.06, N =12), social skills (0.02, 95% CI −0.24, 0.28, N =2), and social access (−0.06, 95% CI −0.35, 0.22, N =2); the latter three types of interventions did not differ significantly from each other. The results for social cognitive therapy are promising, but this intervention type appears not to have been widely employed to date relative to other types of loneliness therapy. Moreover, existing social cognitive therapies have had a small effect overall (0.20) relative to the meta-analytic mean effect of over 300 other interventions in the social and behavioral domains (0.50) [ 91 ]. A social cognitive approach to loneliness reduction outlined in a recent book [ 92 ] may encourage therapists to develop a treatment that focuses on the specific affective, cognitive, and behavioral propensities that afflict lonely individuals.

Implications for Health

Reducing feelings of loneliness and enhancing a sense of connectedness and social adhesion are laudable goals in their own right, but a critical question is whether modifying perceptions of social isolation or connectedness have any impact on health. VanderWeele et al. (unpublished) recently examined the reduction in depressive symptoms that could be expected if loneliness were successfully reduced and found there would be significant benefits that would accrue for as long as two years following the intervention. Would a successful intervention to lower loneliness produce corresponding benefits in physiological mechanisms and physical health outcomes? The only extant data to address this question comes from a recent study in which 235 lonely home-dwelling older adults (>74 years) were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group. In the treatment arm of the study, closed small groups of seven to eight individuals met with two professional facilitators once a week for 3 months to participate in group activities in art, exercise, or therapeutic writing. The control group continued to receive usual community care. Relative to the control group, individuals in the treatment group became more socially active, found new friends, and experienced an increase in feeling needed [ 93 ]. This was accompanied by a significant improvement in self-rated health, fewer health care services and lower costs, and greater survival at 2-year follow-up [ 94 ]. Feelings of loneliness did not differ between the groups, however [ 93 ], indicating that changes in loneliness were not responsible for improvements in health. According to our theory of loneliness, the interventions targeted by the treatment study would not be expected to influence loneliness dramatically because they fail to address the hypervigilance to social threat and the related cognitive biases that characterize lonely individuals. That is, group activities such as those introduced in this intervention provide new social opportunities but do not alter how individuals approach and think about their social relationships more generally. An intervention study of loneliness and health has yet to be designed that addresses the maladaptive social cognitions that make loneliness the health risk factor it increasingly appears to be. Beyond that, additional research is needed to determine the mechanisms through which successful loneliness interventions enhance health and survival, and to examine whether the type of loneliness intervention moderates its health benefits.

Conclusions

Human beings are thoroughly social creatures. Indeed, human survival in difficult physical environments seems to have selected for social group living [ 95 ]. Consider that the reproductive success of the human species hinges on offspring surviving to reproductive age. Social connections with a mate, a family, and a tribe foster social affiliative behaviors (e.g., altruism, cooperation) that enhance the likelihood that utterly dependent offspring reach reproductive age, and connections with others at the individual and collective levels improve our chances of survival in difficult or hostile environments. These behaviors co-evolved with supporting genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms to ensure that humans survived, reproduced, and cared for offspring sufficiently long that they, too, could reproduce [ 96 – 98 ]. Human sociality is prominent even in contemporary individualistic societies. Almost 80% of our waking hours are spent with others, and on average, time spent with friends, relatives, spouse, children, and coworkers is rated more inherently rewarding than time spent alone [ 99 , 100 ]. Humans are such meaning-making creatures that we perceive social relationships where no objectifiable relationship exists (e.g., between author and reader, between an individual and God) or where no reciprocity is possible (e.g., in parasocial relationships with television characters). Conversely, we perceive social isolation when social opportunities and relationships do exist but we lack the capacity to harness the power of social connectedness in everyday life. Chronic perceived isolation (i.e., loneliness) is characterized by impairments in attention, cognition, affect, and behavior that take a toll on morbidity and mortality through their impact on genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms that evolved as part and parcel of what it means to be human. Future interventions to alleviate the health burden of loneliness will do well to take into account our evolutionary design as a social species.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant R01-AG036433-01 and R01-AG034052 from the National Institute on Aging and by the John Templeton Foundation.

Contributor Information

Louise C. Hawkley, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 940 E. 57th St, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

John T. Cacioppo, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The History of Loneliness

The female chimpanzee at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden died of complications from a cold early in the morning of December 27, 1878. “Miss Chimpanzee,” according to news reports, died “while receiving the attentions of her companion.” Both she and that companion, a four-year-old male, had been born near the Gabon River, in West Africa; they had arrived in Philadelphia in April, together. “These Apes can be captured only when young,” the zoo superintendent, Arthur E. Brown, explained, and they are generally taken only one or two at a time. In the wild, “they live together in small bands of half a dozen and build platforms among the branches, out of boughs and leaves, on which they sleep.” But in Philadelphia, in the monkey house, where it was just the two of them, they had become “accustomed to sleep at night in each other’s arms on a blanket on the floor,” clutching each other, desperately, achingly, through the long, cold night.

The Philadelphia Zoological Garden was the first zoo in the United States. It opened in 1874, two years after Charles Darwin published “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” in which he related what he had learned about the social attachments of primates from Abraham Bartlett, the superintendent of the Zoological Society of London:

Many kinds of monkeys, as I am assured by the keepers in the Zoological Gardens, delight in fondling and being fondled by each other, and by persons to whom they are attached. Mr. Bartlett has described to me the behavior of two chimpanzees, rather older animals than those generally imported into this country, when they were first brought together. They sat opposite, touching each other with their much protruded lips; and the one put his hand on the shoulder of the other. They then mutually folded each other in their arms. Afterwards they stood up, each with one arm on the shoulder of the other, lifted up their heads, opened their mouths, and yelled with delight.

Mr. and Miss Chimpanzee, in Philadelphia, were two of only four chimpanzees in America, and when she died human observers mourned her loss, but, above all, they remarked on the behavior of her companion. For a long time, they reported, he tried in vain to rouse her. Then he “went into a frenzy of grief.” This paroxysm accorded entirely with what Darwin had described in humans: “Persons suffering from excessive grief often seek relief by violent and almost frantic movements.” The bereaved chimpanzee began to pull out the hair from his head. He wailed, making a sound the zookeeper had never heard before: Hah-ah-ah-ah-ah . “His cries were heard over the entire garden. He dashed himself against the bars of the cage and butted his head upon the hard-wood bottom, and when this burst of grief was ended he poked his head under the straw in one corner and moaned as if his heart would break.”

Nothing quite like this had ever been recorded. Superintendent Brown prepared a scholarly article, “Grief in the Chimpanzee.” Even long after the death of the female, Brown reported, the male “invariably slept on a cross-beam at the top of the cage, returning to inherited habit, and showing, probably, that the apprehension of unseen dangers has been heightened by his sense of loneliness.”

Loneliness is grief, distended. People are primates, and even more sociable than chimpanzees. We hunger for intimacy. We wither without it. And yet, long before the present pandemic, with its forced isolation and social distancing, humans had begun building their own monkey houses. Before modern times, very few human beings lived alone. Slowly, beginning not much more than a century ago, that changed. In the United States, more than one in four people now lives alone; in some parts of the country, especially big cities, that percentage is much higher. You can live alone without being lonely, and you can be lonely without living alone, but the two are closely tied together, which makes lockdowns, sheltering in place, that much harder to bear. Loneliness, it seems unnecessary to say, is terrible for your health. In 2017 and 2018, the former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared an “epidemic of loneliness,” and the U.K. appointed a Minister of Loneliness. To diagnose this condition, doctors at U.C.L.A. devised a Loneliness Scale. Do you often, sometimes, rarely, or never feel these ways?

I am unhappy doing so many things alone. I have nobody to talk to. I cannot tolerate being so alone. I feel as if nobody really understands me. I am no longer close to anyone. There is no one I can turn to. I feel isolated from others.

In the age of quarantine, does one disease produce another?

“Loneliness” is a vogue term, and like all vogue terms it’s a cover for all sorts of things most people would rather not name and have no idea how to fix. Plenty of people like to be alone. I myself love to be alone. But solitude and seclusion, which are the things I love, are different from loneliness, which is a thing I hate. Loneliness is a state of profound distress. Neuroscientists identify loneliness as a state of hypervigilance whose origins lie among our primate ancestors and in our own hunter-gatherer past. Much of the research in this field was led by John Cacioppo, at the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, at the University of Chicago. Cacioppo, who died in 2018, was known as Dr. Loneliness. In the new book “ Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World ” (Harper Wave), Murthy explains how Cacioppo’s evolutionary theory of loneliness has been tested by anthropologists at the University of Oxford, who have traced its origins back fifty-two million years, to the very first primates. Primates need to belong to an intimate social group, a family or a band, in order to survive; this is especially true for humans (humans you don’t know might very well kill you, which is a problem not shared by most other primates). Separated from the group—either finding yourself alone or finding yourself among a group of people who do not know and understand you—triggers a fight-or-flight response. Cacioppo argued that your body understands being alone, or being with strangers, as an emergency. “Over millennia, this hypervigilance in response to isolation became embedded in our nervous system to produce the anxiety we associate with loneliness,” Murthy writes. We breathe fast, our heart races, our blood pressure rises, we don’t sleep. We act fearful, defensive, and self-involved, all of which drive away people who might actually want to help, and tend to stop lonely people from doing what would benefit them most: reaching out to others.

The loneliness epidemic, in this sense, is rather like the obesity epidemic. Evolutionarily speaking, panicking while being alone, like finding high-calorie foods irresistible, is highly adaptive, but, more recently, in a world where laws (mostly) prevent us from killing one another, we need to work with strangers every day, and the problem is more likely to be too much high-calorie food rather than too little. These drives backfire.

Loneliness, Murthy argues, lies behind a host of problems—anxiety, violence, trauma, crime, suicide, depression, political apathy, and even political polarization. Murthy writes with compassion, but his everything-can-be-reduced-to-loneliness argument is hard to swallow, not least because much of what he has to say about loneliness was said about homelessness in the nineteen-eighties, when “homelessness” was the vogue term—a word somehow easier to say than “poverty”—and saying it didn’t help. (Since then, the number of homeless Americans has increased.) Curiously, Murthy often conflates the two, explaining loneliness as feeling homeless. To belong is to feel at home. “To be at home is to be known,” he writes. Home can be anywhere. Human societies are so intricate that people have meaningful, intimate ties of all kinds, with all sorts of groups of other people, even across distances. You can feel at home with friends, or at work, or in a college dining hall, or at church, or in Yankee Stadium, or at your neighborhood bar. Loneliness is the feeling that no place is home. “In community after community,” Murthy writes, “I met lonely people who felt homeless even though they had a roof over their heads.” Maybe what people experiencing loneliness and people experiencing homelessness both need are homes with other humans who love them and need them, and to know they are needed by them in societies that care about them. That’s not a policy agenda. That’s an indictment of modern life.

In “ A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion ” (Oxford), the British historian Fay Bound Alberti defines loneliness as “a conscious, cognitive feeling of estrangement or social separation from meaningful others,” and she objects to the idea that it’s universal, transhistorical, and the source of all that ails us. She argues that the condition really didn’t exist before the nineteenth century, at least not in a chronic form. It’s not that people—widows and widowers, in particular, and the very poor, the sick, and the outcast—weren’t lonely; it’s that, since it wasn’t possible to survive without living among other people, and without being bonded to other people, by ties of affection and loyalty and obligation, loneliness was a passing experience. Monarchs probably were lonely, chronically. (Hey, it’s lonely at the top!) But, for most ordinary people, daily living involved such intricate webs of dependence and exchange—and shared shelter—that to be chronically or desperately lonely was to be dying. The word “loneliness” very seldom appears in English before about 1800. Robinson Crusoe was alone, but never lonely. One exception is “Hamlet”: Ophelia suffers from “loneliness”; then she drowns herself.

Modern loneliness, in Alberti’s view, is the child of capitalism and secularism. “Many of the divisions and hierarchies that have developed since the eighteenth century—between self and world, individual and community, public and private—have been naturalized through the politics and philosophy of individualism,” she writes. “Is it any coincidence that a language of loneliness emerged at the same time?” It is not a coincidence. The rise of privacy, itself a product of market capitalism—privacy being something that you buy—is a driver of loneliness. So is individualism, which you also have to pay for.

Alberti’s book is a cultural history (she offers an anodyne reading of “Wuthering Heights,” for instance, and another of the letters of Sylvia Plath ). But the social history is more interesting, and there the scholarship demonstrates that whatever epidemic of loneliness can be said to exist is very closely associated with living alone. Whether living alone makes people lonely or whether people live alone because they’re lonely might seem to be harder to say, but the preponderance of the evidence supports the former: it is the force of history, not the exertion of choice, that leads people to live alone. This is a problem for people trying to fight an epidemic of loneliness, because the force of history is relentless.

Before the twentieth century, according to the best longitudinal demographic studies, about five per cent of all households (or about one per cent of the world population) consisted of just one person. That figure began rising around 1910, driven by urbanization, the decline of live-in servants, a declining birth rate, and the replacement of the traditional, multigenerational family with the nuclear family. By the time David Riesman published “ The Lonely Crowd ,” in 1950, nine per cent of all households consisted of a single person. In 1959, psychiatry discovered loneliness, in a subtle essay by the German analyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. “Loneliness seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it,” she wrote. She, too, shrank in horror from its contemplation. “The longing for interpersonal intimacy stays with every human being from infancy through life,” she wrote, “and there is no human being who is not threatened by its loss.” People who are not lonely are so terrified of loneliness that they shun the lonely, afraid that the condition might be contagious. And people who are lonely are themselves so horrified by what they are experiencing that they become secretive and self-obsessed—“it produces the sad conviction that nobody else has experienced or ever will sense what they are experiencing or have experienced,” Fromm-Reichmann wrote. One tragedy of loneliness is that lonely people can’t see that lots of people feel the same way they do.

“During the past half century, our species has embarked on a remarkable social experiment,” the sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote in “ Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone ,” from 2012. “For the first time in human history, great numbers of people—at all ages, in all places, of every political persuasion—have begun settling down as singletons.” Klinenberg considers this to be, in large part, a triumph; more plausibly, it is a disaster. Beginning in the nineteen-sixties, the percentage of single-person households grew at a much steeper rate, driven by a high divorce rate, a still-falling birth rate, and longer lifespans over all. (After the rise of the nuclear family, the old began to reside alone, with women typically outliving their husbands.) A medical literature on loneliness began to emerge in the nineteen-eighties, at the same time that policymakers became concerned with, and named, “homelessness,” which is a far more dire condition than being a single-person household: to be homeless is to be a household that does not hold a house. Cacioppo began his research in the nineteen-nineties, even as humans were building a network of computers, to connect us all. Klinenberg, who graduated from college in 1993, is particularly interested in people who chose to live alone right about then.

I suppose I was one of them. I tried living alone when I was twenty-five, because it seemed important to me, the way owning a piece of furniture that I did not find on the street seemed important to me, as a sign that I had come of age, could pay rent without subletting a sublet. I could afford to buy privacy, I might say now, but then I’m sure I would have said that I had become “my own person.” I lasted only two months. I didn’t like watching television alone, and also I didn’t have a television, and this, if not the golden age of television, was the golden age of “The Simpsons,” so I started watching television with the person who lived in the apartment next door. I moved in with him, and then I married him.

This experience might not fit so well into the story Klinenberg tells; he argues that networked technologies of communication, beginning with the telephone’s widespread adoption, in the nineteen-fifties, helped make living alone possible. Radio, television, Internet, social media: we can feel at home online. Or not. Robert Putnam’s influential book about the decline of American community ties, “Bowling Alone,” came out in 2000, four years before the launch of Facebook, which monetized loneliness. Some people say that the success of social media was a product of an epidemic of loneliness; some people say it was a contributor to it; some people say it’s the only remedy for it. Connect! Disconnect! The Economist declared loneliness to be “the leprosy of the 21st century.” The epidemic only grew.

This is not a peculiarly American phenomenon. Living alone, while common in the United States, is more common in many other parts of the world, including Scandinavia, Japan, Germany, France, the U.K., Australia, and Canada, and it’s on the rise in China, India, and Brazil. Living alone works best in nations with strong social supports. It works worst in places like the United States. It is best to have not only an Internet but a social safety net.

Then the great, global confinement began: enforced isolation, social distancing, shutdowns, lockdowns, a human but inhuman zoological garden. Zoom is better than nothing. But for how long? And what about the moment your connection crashes: the panic, the last tie severed? It is a terrible, frightful experiment, a test of the human capacity to bear loneliness. Do you pull out your hair? Do you dash yourself against the walls of your cage? Do you, locked inside, thrash and cry and moan? Sometimes, rarely, or never? More today than yesterday? ♦

A Guide to the Coronavirus

• How to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
• How people cope and create new customs amid a pandemic.
• What it means to contain and mitigate the coronavirus outbreak.
• How much of the world is likely to be quarantined ?
• Donald Trump in the time of coronavirus .
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine could be widely available.
• We are all irrational panic shoppers .
• The strange terror of watching the coronavirus take Rome .
• How pandemics change history .

ThinkWritten

How to Overcome Loneliness as a Writer

Writing can be a lonely and isolating passion – here are 10 ways to overcome loneliness and isolation as a writer.

We may receive a commission when you make a purchase from one of our links for products and services we recommend. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for support!

Sharing is caring!

Writing is a skill that requires creativity and technical know-how. It takes someone with a great deal of experience and exposure to write exceptionally well. Different writing styles require various skill sets. Hence, for the creative juices to flow, a calm and quiet environment is a writer’s best friend.

Finding a spot where one can focus and work undisturbed is like a healthy soil where imagination flourishes. At the same time, this ideal environment for writing can take a toll on your own mental and emotional well-being.

Lonely Writer Syndrome

Writing in itself is a solitary experience. An act accomplished only by you and your trusted ally – your computer. In order to meet target deadlines, and sometimes just because of utter concentration, being cooped up indoors for several days and nights is nothing unusual.

It is a sacrifice one must take in order to get all ideas, thoughts, transferred into paper. After accomplishing such a feat, there is a sense of accomplishment, happiness, or satisfaction that overwhelms a writer and motivates them to do it all over again if they have to. 

Most people say all writers are introverts as a result. When in reality, even those who have gotten used to being alone and in the quiet for long periods of time still experience bouts of loneliness from time to time. There are various reasons a writer can feel depressed or lonely.

Perhaps it’s the inability to socialize with people who understood what being a writer entails, being unable to find the time to form a bond and establish a connection or other rationale. One thing’s clear though – there’s no need to dwell on the situation. It’s time to act and remember the points raised below to overcome loneliness as a writer. 

Here’s How to Overcome Loneliness as a Writer:

1. Keep a Healthy Mindset

You are not alone. What you do has an impact on other people’s lives. You matter. 

Living and writing is similar in certain ways. You get to breathe, eat, sleep and live life on your own standards. However, living your life with intention means connecting with other people, committing to a lifestyle within your means and creating meaningful relationships.

Living and writing is a journey you don’t do just for yourself. Your ultimate goal as a writer is for someone to read your work, learn from it, feel inspired by it, and eventually change their lives for the better. 

If you get tired from doing what you do, rest. Allow your body to feel pain, exhaustion or weariness and when you are ready, stand up and do what you do best – write! Write your thoughts, feelings and use your emotions to inspire and motivate you. 

2. Connect and Interact

There are others just like you who have the same goals. There are others who may not be like you but appreciates what you do and accepts you for who you are and what you aim to accomplish. The key is in finding these types of people and reaching out. But the first step is to be visible. You won’t be meeting anyone if you don’t make an effort. 

Join writing groups  – online or face-to-face. Reply to comments. Answer questions from newbies without expecting anything in return. Enlist in Webinars. Welcome out of the blue conference calls. Participate in group activities. Attend meetups. Do a video call with a friend. Create or support a cause. Engage in social media challenges. 

There is an endless list of ways you can meet new people and expand your circle to combat loneliness as a writer. Don’t stop though after merely getting to know them. Make a consistent effort to get to know them more and establish a relationship.

Remember, building relationships is a two way street. You need to put in as much effort as the other person if you’re keen on maintaining a bond. Keep an honest and open communication. 

3. Stay Toxic-Free

What do you do with the people who don’t do you any good? Let them go. That’s right. Value yourself.  Appreciate yourself more. Steer away from people or activities that bring you sadness, anxiety or apprehension. Invest in those that make you feel empowered, energized and positive. 

4. Get Outside

You are not bound to the chair you usually sat in or the room you’re stuck in. There are several places you can still write but still have a few people around to inspire you and encourage simple interactions.

Move about. Find a new coffee shop to hang out every week or so. Check out a new restaurant in the area. Bask in the sunlight as you write while lying down on your stomach on the green lawn in a park nearby.

What’s even better? Find a friend who can hang out with you without feeling pressured to carry on a conversation. Having someone physically present without any expectation of small talk is a great way to write and not be alone. 

5. Give Back

Volunteer and spend your vacant time to help a non-profit organization. Offer dog walking. Serve meals at a homeless shelter. Spend time at a nursing home. Clean up trash in your community.

Knowing that you can do something, no matter how small of an act, to contribute and help others brings about a sense of accomplishment and pride. 

6. Vary your Routine

Take a shower in the afternoon instead of in the morning. Wear something different. Dab a little powder on your face. Brush your hair. Look at the mirror and appreciate the change.

Sometimes just taking a few minutes break to take care of yourself and change things up from your normal routine does a lot with your outlook and helps you stay focused and motivated. 

7. Get a Pet or a Plant

Get a plant, a dog, cat, bird or fish to take care of. Having something else to take care of other than yourself can alleviate feelings of loneliness. A pet or plant both offer companionship with minimal supervision. 

8. Learn Something New

Give yourself something to aim for, something you would need to invest your time and energy in so that you funnel your focus and energy to doing something worthwhile versus dwelling on your emotions.

Learn a new language. Look up how to knit. Join a dance class. Sing to your heart’s content while discovering how to play a guitar. Try out a new recipe.

Focus on a new goal and be relentless in achieving it. Diverting your emotions to task-oriented goals can help you stay objective and can bring about self satisfaction from achieving it. 

As a writer, you rely a lot on words to express what you think and how you feel. Channel your emotions differently by attempting to draw.

Feel free to use colors, pens, markers, or anything that can help draw out your emotions without feeling any pressure. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. Don’t focus on what you are making but rather on how the activity makes you feel. Grab a pen and paper and scribble away!

10. Play a Game 

Install a new game on your phone or laptop or try a new online game. When you are starting to feel stuck, overwhelmed, and isolated, hold off on whatever you are doing and take a few minutes to play the game. Chat with some of the players. Take a break, enjoy and have fun. 

Solitude vs Isolation

Studies conclude that the less time an individual spends with others, the more he puts himself at risk for feeling lonely and depressed. While writers are more exposed to this risk since they put in a lot of work while being alone most of the time, there are several ways you can fight it off. 

There is a difference between working in solitude and working in isolation. One pertains to simply being alone per one’s own choosing while the latter implies a negative connotation of being alone without wanting or meaning to. 

Some people can feel isolated when they are within a group of people who don’t appreciate them as they are and have interests that are not meeting their own.

In order to not feel this way, one must invest time and effort in being visible, interacting with random people and selecting which groups they are most likely to be accepted for who they are and what they do, participating in activities that allow them to become better versions of themselves and be comfortable in their own skin.

It’s important to partake in activities you don’t normally get involved in if it means bringing you in the open and letting you meet new people.

Keep a healthy mindset and take action. Instead of feeling unwanted and alone, take appropriate measures to change the situation you are in. There is always something you can do to take advantage of it and bring about the best version of yourself.

Allow yourself to feel, acknowledge and react to the current circumstances. You are not a robot. Your feelings are normal. However, what you do given how you feel weighs more. Don’t rush yourself into making a decision and plan how to live your life more purposely. 

Do you have any tips for overcoming loneliness as a writer? Share your comments and how you deal with feelings of isolation in the comments section below!

Eric Pangburn is a freelance writer who shares his best tips with other writers here at ThinkWritten. When not writing, he enjoys coaching basketball and spending time with his family.

Similar Posts

How I Write Over 2,500+ Words a Day

12 Tips for Distraction Free Writing

10 Ways to Be a More Productive Writer

How to Make Time for Writing: 5 Ways to Find Time to Write Now

How Long Does It Take To Write a Book?

How to Build Your Own Writer’s Studio + 5 Beautiful Shed Kits You Will Love

Poems & Poets

Poems about Loneliness and Solitude

Poetry offers solace for the lonely and a positive perspective on being alone..

BY The Editors

In the book Journal of a Solitude , the poet May Sarton once wrote that “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.” Poetry’s relationship to solitude is paradoxical: while many poets savor the isolation needed to write their best work, the finished product will ideally create connection, or even community.

Childhood’s Retreat

The Solitude of Night

Ode on Solitude

The Sound of One Fork

American Solitude

Danse Russe

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

The Glass Essay

p1 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Proportion Surviving

Those Winter Sundays

[He is pruning the privet]

Flood: Years of Solitude

p1 Bryant Park at Dusk

On Broadway

The Healing Power of Poetry

Loneliness Rhymes and Slippery Slopes

Light in the Service of Loneliness

A Wild Solitude Revealed

• Entertainment
• Environment
• Information Science and Technology
• Social Issues

Home Essay Samples Literature The Road

Alienation and Loneliness in The Road by Cormac McCarthy

*minimum deadline

Cite this Essay

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below

• Macbeth Power
• As You Like It
• The Importance of Being Earnest

Related Essays

Need writing help?

You can always rely on us no matter what type of paper you need

*No hidden charges

100% Unique Essays

Absolutely Confidential

Money Back Guarantee

By clicking “Send Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails

You can also get a UNIQUE essay on this or any other topic

Thank you! We’ll contact you as soon as possible.

• Career Exploration
• Arts, Communications, & Media
• Education, Nonprofit, & Public Health
• Business, Consulting, Finance, & Marketing
• Government, International Affairs, Law, & Public Policy
• Health Professions Advising
• Career Essentials Resources
• Graduate School
• Career Education Placements
• Grants Program
• Lumpkin Non-Profit Internships Program
• Elisabeth Luce Moore ’24 Internships in Asia
• Application Support
• Short Internship Projects (SHIPs)
• Fellowships for Undergraduates
• Fellowships for Graduates
• Class of 2025 Fellowship Planning
• Fellowships for International Students
• Civic Engagement

Writing a Personal Statement

Preparing to Write

Brainstorming, don't forget, sample prompts.

A personal statement is a narrative essay that connects your background, experiences, and goals to the mission, requirements, and desired outcomes of the specific opportunity you are seeking. It is a critical component in the selection process, whether the essay is for a competitive internship, a graduate fellowship, or admittance to a graduate school program. It gives the selection committee the best opportunity to get to know you, how you think and make decisions, ways in which past experiences have been significant or formative, and how you envision your future. Personal statements can be varied in form; some are given a specific prompt, while others are less structured. However, in general a personal statement should answer the following questions:

• Who are you?
• What are your goals?
• How does this specific program/opportunity help you achieve your goals?
• What is in the future?

A personal statement is not:

• A variation of your college admissions essay
• An academic/research paper
• A narrative version of your resume
• A creative writing piece (it can be creative, though)
• An essay about somebody else

Keep in mind that your statement is only a portion of the application and should be written with this in mind. Your entire application package will include some, possibly all, of the materials listed below. You will want to consider what these pieces of the application communicate about you. Your personal statement should aim to tie everything together and fill in or address any gaps. There will likely be some overlap but be sure not to be too repetitive.

• Personal Statement(s)
• Transcripts
• Letters of recommendations
• Sample of written work
• Research proposal

For a quick overview of personal statements, you might begin by watching this "5 Minute Fellowships" video!

If you are writing your first personal statement or working to improve upon an existing personal statement, the video below is a helpful, in-depth resource.

A large portion of your work towards completing a personal statement begins well before your first draft or even an outline. It is incredibly important to be sure you understand all of the rules and regulations around the statement. Things to consider before you begin writing:

• How many prompts? And what are they? It is important to know the basics so you can get your ideas in order. Some programs will require a general statement of interest and a focused supplementary or secondary statement closely aligned with the institution's goals.
• Are there formatting guidelines? Single or double spaced, margins, fonts, text sizes, etc. Our general guideline is to keep it simple.
• How do I submit my statement(s)? If uploading a document we highly suggest using a PDF as it will minimize the chances of accidental changes to formatting. Some programs may event ask you to copy and paste into a text box.
• When do I have to submit my statement(s)? Most are due at the time of application but some programs, especially medical schools, will ask for secondary statements a few months after you apply. In these instances be sure to complete them within two weeks, any longer is an indication that you aren't that interested in the institution.

Below is a second 5 Minute Fellowships video that can help you get started!

Before you start writing, take some time to reflect on your experiences and motivations as they relate to the programs to which you are applying. This will offer you a chance to organize your thoughts which will make the writing process much easier. Below are a list of questions to help you get started:

• What individuals, experiences or events have shaped your interest in this particular field?
• What has influenced your decision to apply to graduate school?
• How does this field align with your interests, strengths, and values?
• What distinguishes you from other applicants?
• What would you bring to this program/profession?
• What has prepared you for graduate study in this field? Consider your classes at Wellesley, research and work experience, including internships, summer jobs and volunteer work.
• Why are you interested in this particular institution or degree program?
• How is this program distinct from others?
• What do you hope to gain?
• What is motivating you to seek an advanced degree now?
• Where do you see yourself headed and how will this degree program help you get there?

For those applying to Medical School, if you need a committee letter for your application and are using the Medical Professions Advisory Committee you have already done a lot of heavy lifting through the 2017-2018 Applicant Information Form . Even if you aren't using MPAC the applicant information form is a great place to start.

Another great place to start is through talking out your ideas. You have a number of options both on and off campus, such as: Career Education advisors and mentors ( you can set up an appointment here ), major advisor, family, friends. If you are applying to a graduate program it is especially important to talk with a faculty member in the field. Remember to take good notes so you can refer to them later.

When you begin writing keep in mind that your essay is one of many in the application pool. This is not to say you should exaggerate your experiences to “stand out” but that you should focus on clear, concise writing. Also keep in mind that the readers are considering you not just as a potential student but a future colleague. Be sure to show them examples and experiences which demonstrate you are ready to begin their program.

It is important to remember that your personal statement will take time and energy to complete, so plan accordingly. Every application and statement should be seen as different from one another, even if they are all the same type of program. Each institution may teach you the same material but their delivery or focus will be slightly different.

In addition, remember:

• Be yourself: You aren’t good at being someone else
• Tragedy is not a requirement, reflection and depth are
• Research the institution or organization
• Proofread, proofread, proofread
• How to have your personal statement reviewed

The prompts below are from actual applications to a several types of programs. As you will notice many of them are VERY general in nature. This is why it is so important to do your research and reflect on your motivations. Although the prompts are similar in nature the resulting statements would be very different depending on the discipline and type of program, as well as your particular background and reasons for wanting to pursue this graduate degree.

• This statement should illustrate your academic background and experiences and explain why you would excel in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (UMass Amherst - M.S. in Civil Engineering).
• Describe your academic and career objectives and how the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies can help you achieve them. Include other considerations that explain why you seek admissions to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and your interests in the environmental field (Yale - Master of Environmental Management).  
• Please discuss your academic interests and goals. Include your current professional and research interests, as well as your long-range professional objectives. Please be as specific as possible about how your objectives can be met at Clark and do not exceed 800 words (Clark University - M.A. in International Development and Social Change).
• Write a 500- to 700-word statement that describes your work or research. Discuss how you came to focus on the medium, body of work, or academic area you wish to pursue at the graduate level. Also discuss future directions or goals for your work, and describe how the Master of Fine Arts in Studio (Printmedia) is particularly suited to your professional goals (School of the Art Institute of Chicago - MFA in Studio, Printmaking).
• Your statement should explain why you want to study economics at the graduate level. The statement is particularly important if there is something unusual about your background and preparation that you would like us to know about you (University of Texas at Austin - Ph.D in Economics).
• Your personal goal statement is an important part of the review process for our faculty members as they consider your application. They want to know about your background, work experience, plans for graduate study and professional career, qualifications that make you a strong candidate for the program, and any other relevant information (Indiana University Bloomington - M.S.Ed. in Secondary Education).
• Your autobiographical essay/personal statement is a narrative that outlines significant experiences in your life, including childhood experiences, study and work, your strengths and aspirations in the field of architecture, and why you want to come to the University of Oregon (University of Oregon - Master of Architecture).
• Personal history and diversity statement, in which you describe how your personal background informs your decision to pursue a graduate degree. You may refer to any educational, familial, cultural, economic or social experiences, challenges, community service, outreach activities, residency and citizenship, first-generation college status, or opportunities relevant to your academic journey; how your life experiences contribute to the social, intellectual or cultural diversity within a campus community and your chosen field; or how you might serve educationally underrepresented and underserved segments of society with your graduate education (U.C. Davis - M.A. in Linguistics).
• A Personal Statement specifying your past experiences, reasons for applying, and your areas of interest. It should explain your intellectual and personal goals, why you are interested in pursuing an interdisciplinary degree rather than a more traditional disciplinary one, and how this degree fits into your intellectual and personal future (Rutgers University - Ph.D in Women’s and Gender Studies).
• Your application requires a written statement to uploaded into your application and is a critical component of your application for admission. This is your opportunity to tell us what excites you about the field of library and information science, and what problems you want to help solve in this field. Please also tell us how your prior experiences have prepared you for this next step toward your career goals and how this program will help you achieve them (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill - Master of Science in Library Science).
• After watching the video, please describe what strengths and preferences as a learner you have that will facilitate your success in this innovative curriculum. What challenges in our curriculum do you anticipate and what strategies might you use to address these challenges? (MGH Institute of Health Professions PT - They recently redesigned their curriculum)
• Your personal goal statement should briefly describe how you view the future of the field, what your goals are to be part of that future, and what brought you to pursue an advanced education degree in your chosen field. You may include any other information that you feel might be useful. (Northeastern PT)
• Personal Statement: In 500 words or less, describe a meaningful educational experience that affected your professional goals and growth and explain how it impacted you. The educational experience does not need to be related to this degree. Focus on the educational experience and not why you think you would be a good professional in this field. (Simmons PT)
• Personal Statement (500 word minimum): State your reasons for seeking admission to this program at this institution. Include your professional goals, why you want to pursue a career in this field and how admission to this program will assist you in accomplishing those goals. (Regis College Nursing)
• “Use the space provided to explain why you want to go to this type of program.” (AMCAS)
• Address the following three questions(Though there is no set limit, most statements are 1–2 pages, single-spaced.): What are your reasons for pursuing this degree? Why do you wish to pursue your degree at this institution? How do you intend to leverage your degree in a career of this field? (Boston University MPH)
• Please submit a personal statement/statement of purpose of no more than 500 words for the department/degree of choice. Professional degree essays require a clear understanding of the _______ field and how you hope to work within the field. Be sure to proofread your personal statement carefully for spelling and grammar. In your statement, be sure to address the following: what interests you in the field of _____ what interests you in a specific degree program and department at this institution and what interests you in a particular certificate (if applicable). Please also describe how you hope to use your ________ training to help you achieve your career goals. (Columbia PhD in Public Health - Epidemiology)
• Because each Home Program requires significant original research activities in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree, we are interested in obtaining as much information as possible about your previous research experiences. Those who already have such experience are in a better position to know whether they are truly interested in performing ______ research as part of a graduate program. Please include specific information about your research experience in your Statement of Purpose. You may also use the Statement to amplify your comments about your choice of Home Program(s), and how your past experiences and current interests are related to your choice. Personal Statements should not exceed two pages in length (single spaced). Make sure to set your computer to Western European or other English-language setting. We cannot guarantee the ability to access your statement if it is submitted in other fonts. (Stanford Biosciences PhD)
• Your statement of purpose should describe succinctly your reasons for applying to the Department of ____ at ___ University. It would be helpful to include what you have done to prepare for this degree program. Please describe your research interests, past research experience, future career plans and other details of your background and interests that will allow us to evaluate your ability to thrive in our program. If you have interests that align with a specific faculty member, you may state this in your application. Your statement of purpose should not exceed two pages in length (single spaced). (Stanford Bioengineering PhD)
• Statement of purpose (Up to one page or 1,000 words): Rather than a research proposal, you should provide a statement of purpose. Your statement should be written in English and explain your motivation for applying for the course at this institution and your relevant experience and education. Please provide an indication of the area of your proposed research and supervisor(s) in your statement. This will be assessed for the coherence of the statement; evidence of motivation for and understanding of the proposed area of study; the ability to present a reasoned case in English; and commitment to the subject. (Oxford Inorganic Chemistry - DPhil)

Related resources

Home — Essay Samples — Nursing & Health — Mental Health — Theme Of Loneliness

Theme of Loneliness

• Categories: Mental Health

About this sample

Words: 554 |

Published: Mar 5, 2024

Words: 554 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr. Heisenberg

Verified writer

• Expert in: Nursing & Health

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 1103 words

4 pages / 2007 words

1 pages / 550 words

2 pages / 873 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Mental Health

In today's fast-paced and interconnected world, the concept of self-love has become increasingly important. With the rise of social media and constant exposure to curated images of perfection, many individuals find themselves [...]

In today's society, one of the most pressing social problems is the increasing rate of mental health disorders among college students. According to a study conducted by the American Psychological Association, nearly one in three [...]

Social media has become an integral part of modern life, providing platforms for communication, connection, and self-expression. However, the implications of heavy social media use on mental health have raised concerns. In this [...]

Al-Rousan et al., 2017Baba et al., 2017da Rosa et al., 2019Davidson et al., 2020Esnafoglu & Ozturan, 2020Gangadharan & Madani, 2018Greene et al., 2018Kilbourne et al., 2018

Contact sports have long been a subject of debate, with arguments on both sides regarding their benefits and drawbacks. On one hand, proponents argue that contact sports provide numerous physical and mental health benefits, [...]

Despite being a common term in today’s society, mental illness is still underdiagnosed by physicians. It is projected that less than half of the individuals who meet diagnostic criteria for psychological conditions are actually [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

Donald J. Trump intends to bring independent regulatory agencies under direct presidential control. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

Supported by

• Share full article

By Jonathan Swan Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

• Published July 17, 2023 Updated July 18, 2023

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Advertisement