When he got abroad at last he was hardly grateful that he had been spared, remem- bering how lonely was his estate, how
companionless and forlorn he was.
Last comes the worst and most abhorred stage Of unregarded age, Joyless,
companionless and slow, Of woes the crowning woe.
The others paired off as before, and this arrangement left Jo
companionless. She did not mind it at the minute, for she lingered to answer Hannah's eager inquiry.
Only one hour in the twenty-four did she pass with her fellow-servants below; all the rest of her time was spent in some low-ceiled, oaken chamber of the second storey: there she sat and sewed--and probably laughed drearily to herself,--as
companionless as a prisoner in his dungeon.
In "Matar," he painstakingly chronicles the notion of facing the cold, cruel world alone and
companionless. The Synaptik strives for perfection, and 'the mother of all waves' is his clean slate, one that has announced the arrival of an authentic artist in command of his craft.
Shelley's vision of interstellar loneliness ("Wandering
companionless ...") allows him to "forget his own human and ineffectual grieving." If an ordinary object (graffito on a desk) casts him into existential panic, an imaginary one, the image of a "barren shell of the moon" (84), offers the consolation of poetry as a form of self-forgetting.
Houellebecq's world is inhabited first and foremost by elderly, trapped and
companionless individuals, depicting sexual dissatisfaction, unhappiness and hopelessness that occasionally generate aggression, self-harm or criminal conduct.