The Sovereign Wayfarer: Walker Percy's Diagnosis of the Malaise

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Martin Luschei

Walker Percy is a mature, highly intellectual novelist who in little more than ten years has achieved an important place in contemporary American literature. His three novels — The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, and Love in the Ruins — depict modern Americans suffering from a malaise; they are wayfarers who need a break from their mundane existence, but do not quite know how.

The Sovereign Wayfarer, the first book on Percy and the only detailed study of his work, begins with an intellectual biography tracing Percy's metamorphosis from physician to philosophical writer to novelist. Professor Martin Luschei discovers the philosophical roots of Percy's novels in existentialism — especially as conceived by Kierkegaard and Marcel — and uses this analysis to illuminate the elusive meanings of Percy's fiction.

After revealing the focal concepts Percy uses to probe the malaise of contemporary life, Luschei provides a close reading of each novel in turn.

The Sovereign Wayfarer considers Percy's theory of art as a reversal of alienation and discusses the implications of an existentialist sensibility taking root in America as a response to man's abstraction from self in a modern science-worshiping society.

Martin Luschei is the author of a novel, The Worst Season in Years. He is associate professor of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Publication Date: December 1, 1972