What makes this such a human-scaled and heartbreaking description of loneliness, real loneliness, loneliness as it actually occurs in the world, is that weâve watched Marya go through all of this from a position inside her. A story with less internality might have produced a simple feeling of pity (âOh, that poor, lonely personâ). Weâd understand Marya as the Lesser Other. But the storyâs virtuosic internality implicates her, even as it draws us in. Sheâs not a perfect person who is lonely. Sheâs an imperfect person who is lonely. We feel pity for lonely imperfect Marya in the same way we would feel pity for someone lonely and imperfect we loved, or for imperfect (lonely) us.