The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: John Singer and the reader

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a very good, enjoyable novel. At the same time, I can’t help feeling tired of the political speeches—you know, the Marxist speeches and anti-Nazi speeches and religious speeches and race speeches (I’m using the polite term “speech”, some of them are actually rants). 
These speeches serve the book—they’re not pointless digressions from the author, and if they’re intended by Carson McCullers to be some messages to readers (which I doubt), it’s not overt. My reaction says something about me, more than the book itself.   
As written in the previous blog post, the novel is about the lonely lives of 4 people in a Southern town who are drawn to a deaf-mute named John Singer. They come to him to talk, to pour their hearts out, to treat him as a confidante and a priest and a therapist—they turn him into a personal god in their minds and tell him all the things they want to say but can’t say to anyone else. 2 out of these 4 are desperate, bitter, and angry at the world—Jake Blount, the mad alcoholic, ceaselessly raging against injustice and wealth disparity, can’t stop talking about “the truth”, and Dr Copeland, the black doctor and Marxist, can’t stop talking about Marxism and race and “the purpose”. 
In addition, there are a few religious speeches here and there throughout the book, and Mick’s neighbour/ friend is a Jewish teenage boy called Harry Minowitz, who reads newspapers and goes on and on about Hitler and Nazis.    
Part of me just wants to tell them to calm their tits and stop saying the same things over and over again. I even think, Jane Austen was wise not to put political ideas in her books—over time, political ideas in literary works easily become old-fashioned, irrelevant, or just tiresome (Tolstoy is a great writer, but I doubt that there are many people today who would take his ideas seriously). 
These speeches capture well the political climate in a Southern town in the 30s, and help characterise the people in the book. Carson McCullers’s depiction of Dr Copeland, I must say, is remarkable—how could a white woman at the age of 22-23 get into the mind of a middle-aged black doctor, filled with rage and disappointment? So when I say The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is marred by its politics, I suppose it says more about me than about the book itself. 
Anyway, I’ve decided to modify my approach: I’m going to read the novel like I’m John Singer—I’m going to read it like these people attach themselves to me and go on and on about ideas I don’t care about and I don’t understand why they keep talking and keep saying the same things. Carson McCullers, somehow, in writing these characters’ thoughts and rants, puts the reader in the position of Singer. Biff aside, who comes to watch rather than unburden himself on Singer, the other 3 characters are each occupied with a single subject, and they come to Singer not to have a conversation, but to have a monologue. 
I picked up The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, thinking it’s about loneliness and communication difficulties, but now I think it’s about something else, something harder to describe. Mick Kelly, Jake Blount, and Dr Copeland come to John Singer because they feel lonely, and they feel lonely because they cannot share their thoughts with anyone, but they don’t really look for friendship, and don’t see Singer as a friend. They come to him to talk, to have someone listening, and imagine that he understands—but does he? The question hardly seems to bother them. 
If we look at each of these characters, Jake Blount is rude and hostile, pushing everyone away (see his conversation with Biff, when Biff attempts to know more about him), Dr Copeland alienates the people closest to him because he takes out on his own family his rage at the world and at himself, and Mick keeps to herself for a large part of the story and doesn’t try to get closer to her older siblings or anyone at school (until later, she becomes closer to Harry). With Singer, they just use him, and talk and talk, without any interest in him as a person. 
In a way, their loneliness seems to come from something within them—their egotism, their inability to see beyond themselves, perhaps. 
The irony is that the person that they see as a personal god, the only one who is wise and understands, is a blank. The only person Singer sees as a friend is his deaf-mute friend, the Greek, Antonapoulos. 
Does Antonapoulos see Singer as a friend, and love him in the same way? Now that is another question.