Characters and coldness: The dispassion of Carson McCullers

Reading through Carson McCullers's "Collected Stories," you can see that the first few are very good stories, but remarkable only in that she was a teenager when she wrote them - and for the viewpoint they give us on the novels she would go on to write. The next group of stories date from her days as an undergrad at NYU, the mid-1030s, and they're pretty strong by any measure and especially so when you think, a college kid wrote these? Really? Two are particularly notable: Aliens, about a Jewish man (she always identifies him as such, but it's not clear to me why his ethnicity is important - unless he's meant to represent The Wandering Jew? but why? ) riding a bus through the South, it's unclear what he's leaving or where he's headed, engages in some conversation with his seatmate and observes the passing scenery, very unfamiliar to him - not much happens, but the end of the story, which I won't disclose here, is very deft and surprising. Wunderkind was her first published story - an account of a young woman who's been studying the piano but apparently loses her talent - leading to a strained relation with her long-time teacher. Evidently, there are autobiographical elements in this story. McCullers's characters tend to be outsiders, often of ambiguous sexual orientation, doubtful about the worth, abandoned or mistreated by the elders, parents in particular, prone to taking risks and to indulging in sudden, impetuous behaviors. All writers love their characters to some degree, even inhabit them to some degree, but there's also in McCullers a kind of cold, clinical dispassion: her characters at times seem like specimens rather than people.