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The Walker Percy Project

A Descriptive Annotation

The Gift of the Other: Gabriel Marcel's Concept of Intersubjectivity in Walker Percy's Novels (Mary Deems Howland, 1990)

Annotated by Tracy Ferrington

Howland, Mary Deems. The Gift of the Other: Gabriel Marcel's Concept of Intersubjectivity in Walker Percy's Novels. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1990, 172 pp.

As an overall strategy, Howland devotes a chapter to each of Percy's novels — emphasizing the protagonists of the first three novels (The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, and Love in the Ruins), but treating the latter three novels as a whole (Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome). An introductory chapter explains intersubjectivity and presents an overview of the subject in Percy's novels and essays. A brief Afterword concludes the book.

Howland focuses on Percy's self-admitted indebtedness to Gabriel Marcel, whose philosophy falls somewhere between Kierkegaardian subjectivity and Hegelian objectivity. Marcel's concept of intersubjectivity is used extensively in Percy's works and includes the idea that persons are perceived as an "I" or a "Thou" to "share and affirm the world"(3). In the fictional world created by Percy and inspired by Marcel, God is seen as the absolute "Thou." Howland bases Percy's affinity for Marcel on the influence of his "Uncle" Will Percy, whose "melancholy and tight-lipped stoic endurance" affected the impressionable young Percy (17). Marcel's hope-filled works provided an antidote to Uncle Will's stoicism.

The protagonist-centered chapters trace Binx Bolling, Will Barrett, and Tom More as they journey from lives of alienation, isolation, and/or despair into lives enhanced by relationships with others. Percy thus employs Marcel's belief that "when a person encounters others and treats them as 'thou's,' then community is possible, and this kind of community, based on intersubjectivity, defines reality and creates a new world" (83).

The last three chapters center on whole novels rather than protagonists. Howland describes the world of Lancelot as one lacking the benefits of intersubjectivity. The chapter on The Second Coming relates the hunting accident and the father's suicide to Will Barrett's problems communing with the "thou's" of the world. In The Thanatos Syndrome, Howland contends that Percy depicts a prominent theme of Marcel's — "the assertion that abstractions kill, that only the concrete saves" (143).

The Gift of the Other provides an informative overview of Marcelian philosophy and an explanation of how Percy was drawn to these ideas and later incorporated them into his novels. The bibliography is limited to works by Marcel and Percy, but the Chapter Notes are more extensive. There is no index.

Prepared as a requirement for Graduate Seminar
John R. May, Professor
Dept. of English
Louisiana State University
(Spring 1997)