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The Walker Percy Project

A Descriptive Annotation

In Search of Self: Life, Death, and Walker Percy (Jerome L. Taylor, 1986)

Annotated by Jeannette D. Apperson

Taylor, L. Jerome. In Search of Self: Life, Death, and Walker Percy. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1986. 174 pp.

In Search of Self is a publication of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal religious community, and represents "an attempt to convey ... the wrongness of our world" through the insights of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard as embodied in Percy's writings (1). It appeals to five of Walker Percy's novels — The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, and The Second Coming — as well as to his essay collection The Message in the Bottle. There are ten chapters and an Epilogue. The titles of the chapters reveal the work's primary concern with religious or spiritual awakening — "In Search of Self," "Seduction and Despair," "Beasts and Angels," "Percy's Fictional 'Dead'," "Passive Angelism," "Active Angelism," "Kierkegaard's Injunction to Choose," "Percy's Heroes Make the Choice," "Religious Existence" — Kierkegaard, and Percy's Knights of Faith.

Like Kierkegaard, Taylor says, "Percy speaks with wry sarcasm and humor to our self-imposed plight and attempts through indirection to stir us out of it" (2). Taylor thus intends to show through the writing of a perceptive modern novelist what new and recovered life is like and what a person should do to achieve that state (9). He advances his argument by an analysis of the major characters from five Percy novels, demonstrating how they conform to Kierkegaard's definition of existentialism, which states that "the existing person's central task in life is to acquire his or her own selfhood through personal choice and action" (1). Each protagonist moves from the state of death-in-life to find himself, in such a way that "he who was dead is alive again" (2).

According to Taylor, Percy's characters embody what Kierkegaard termed religious faith or "selfhood before God," even though these characters are not necessarily portrayed as having conscious awareness of God. By the choices which they make they have "moved into new relationships to their own selves and to life, which is essentially the same as the religious attitude of faith," and this attitude in every case is arrived at through the friendship and love of a particular person. Taylor maintains that "Percy's great contribution is to suggest to modern persons who have given up on God and faith that new possibilities may even now be overtaking them" (9).

The bibliography provides a list of works consulted. There is no index.

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