The Lonely Crowd A Timeless, Pervasive Experience with Special Reference to Ayn Rand and Chinua Achebe

Hyacinth Pink

Abstract: The concept of the lonely crowd is not exclusively an American or African experience. It is as old as man and as prevalent and intractable as feelings of joy and sorrow. As an experience, it cuts across boundaries of place and time. There is overwhelming evidence from psychology, sociology and other branches of contemporary thought in support of the fact that man has lost his ancient moorings in nature, religion and simple human relationships. These changes have so affected man that he has become lonely and insignificant Nietzsche, Freud and Marx were the most powerful influence on the twentieth century mind and had different ways of looking at the individual’s plight in society. In both –the American ‘Novelist –Philosopher’ Ayn Rand’s and the African ‘Philosopher-Priest’ Chinua Achebe’s novels, one notices a change that evolved from surface description to the invocations of the deep silent regions of the mind, from art as a means of social propaganda, to a powerful medium used for the expressions of a ‘real’ reality that is different from photographic representation.

Keywords: Lonely crowd, social, psychological, dialectical experience, reality, structural, symbolic, thematic leve