Like much of McCullers’s work, Reflections in a Golden Eye depicts elements of what literary critics have called “spiritual isolation” and longing for connection. This isolation, in turn, is bound up to the idea of the grotesque, or spiritual incompleteness and distortion; the grotesque famously typifies Southern Gothic literature, which often portrays aspects of human experience that are likely to contravene the readership’s preconceived notions of what is natural. The characters are therefore generally seen as somehow bizarre or eccentric, both despite and because of their humanity. This novel’s characters, being somehow “incomplete,” long for wholeness and unconsciously believe that union with a beloved will make them whole—yet that longing is thwarted, due both to the oppressive environment and to the subjects’ apparent inability to give or receive love.

The novel opens with a symbol of spiritual isolation when the narrator reveals that the story will end in murder. Homicide—one person’s willful and consummate destruction of another—is the furthest thing from spiritual communion, and this premise sets the tone for the narrative. Even without the looming murder, however, alienation pervades nearly every aspect of life on the army base, where the marriages are not only loveless but fractured by chronic infidelity and antipathy.