Writers in Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes: Writing as a Way to Fight Solitude

Abstract

Solitude is the core notion in Hugh MacLennan’s novel Two Solitudes. This essay focuses on certain characters who try to become or do become writers in the novel, and especially on their attitude towards solitude and their ways to fight it. Though all three analyzed characters desire to start writing, only one of them is predetermined to succeed. On the other hand – as all of them are primary consanguineous kin – failure to become a writer is also studied in order to discover how one person’s lack of success may become a warning and lesson learnt of issues to be avoided for another one. The potential writers – a father and his two sons – are observed in a historical perspective related not only to their personal growth as prospective writers but also in relation to their participation in two world wars which form the temporal frame of the plot. The wars make some of the characters realize how unimportant the inner division of the Canadian nation is going to become in the future. Not only is Paul – the most successful of the three potential writers – able to overcome this Canadian duality but he also accesses the wisdom of a sage who is able to help create the new post-war reality, helping himself simultaneously not to remain solitary in his creation.