Social Isolation?

Thoreau, in Walden, describes an ambitious experiment: in his late 20s, he temporarily moves away from his home to live by himself, building his own house and producing (most of) his own food. Leto Atreides, in Dune, abdicates his humanity and patiently waits, for thousands of years, for his inevitable fragmentation into uncountably many semi-conscious creatures. His father, Paul Atreides, after being blinded and stripped off his supernatural foresight, walks aimlessly and alone in the desert, as per Fremen tradition. Luke Skywalker, in Star Wars, becomes a recluse Jedi in a forgotten island. The nameless narrator of White Nights, by Dostoevsky, frequently emphasizes his chronic loneliness, pointing out that he lived “utterly alone—alone, entirely alone”. Fagin, in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, ensures Oliver’s loyalty by preparing his mind, “by solitude and gloom, to prefer any society to the companionship of his own sad thoughts”. Contemporaneously, the protagonists of Houellebecq’s novels—from Whatever to Serotonin—progressively deprive themselves from the commonalities of social life.

Despite their remarkable dissimilarities, these artistic creations—both fiction and non-fiction—touch upon a shared theme: characters that, often willingly, have been exposed to varying degrees of social isolation.