Carson McCullers has frequently employed mythic patterns to explicate the psychological tensions urging her characters…. The people in her books, stripped of all irrelevant behavioral flesh, present the heart's core of action that we also see played out for us in legend, fairytale, and folk-story.

Yet her books—such as Reflections in a Golden Eye, Clock Without Hands, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—are contemporary reports of life in America…. As a novelist one of her gifts has been the ability to fuse the demands of verisimilitude and romance, one of her difficulties the occasional splitting of the two—as in Clock Without Hands—to the detriment of her work's impact….

[In] The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter she successfully employs one of our oldest myths—that of initiation—to solve a delicate problem of verisimilitude, and how at the same time she perfectly retells the myth...