| Most of the criticism of Walker Percy's fiction is comprised of analyses of the existentialist influences under which Percy writes as a novelist. Frequent reviews, articles, and interviews, as well as dissertations, trace the influence of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, and others as the sources informing Percy's own philosophical vision and its rendering in the fiction. Occasionally a piece appears studying some of the stylistic roots of Percy's fiction, paying particular attention to Sartre and Camus. The two book-length studies published thus far also concentrate on the philosophical aspects of Percy's novels. In short, criticism of the what--the message--of Percy's fiction abounds, but criticism of the how--the means--of conveying that message is scarce.;A brief introduction in which I establish the procedure of the study is followed by four main chapters, arranged chronologically to correspond with the publication of the novels. In each chapter I analyze the presentation, development, and alteration of the rhetoric of voice. Chapter One argues that Binx Bolling, the first-person narrator of The Moviegoer, is also the model protagonist, appropriately crafted for Percy's fictive world. Chapters Two, Three, and Four, which respectively treat The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, and Lancelot, analyze the manner by which narrative voice either continues the development of the model, enriches it, or deviates from it. My thesis is that the rising stridency of the narrative voice reflects a darkening of Percy's own vision and tends in effect to isolate the fictive protagonist from a reading audience. The novels present a protagonist progressively more unstable, even to the point of insanity, and the narrative voice in turn becomes harsher and less credible, reflecting the position of the protagonist. The voice in Lancelot is so extreme that it might have no external audience at all; as the epitome of isolation, it suggests the logical extreme at which the protagonist arrives in his fictive journey as pilgrim or wayfarer, favorite words of Percy's in describing his protagonist.;The conclusion briefly summarizes the verbal and narrative devices which recur in the novels and the ways in which Percy manipulates them to show the progress of the fictive protagonist from novel to novel. In the conclusion I also evaluate the four novels as fictive renderings of Percy's philosophical world, arguing that when Percy subordinates the message to the means his fiction is more successful than when the philosophical inclinations outweigh the fictional craft.;This dissertation analyzes and evaluates the technical means Percy uses to organize his fiction, especially the rhetorical and narrative devices and strategies which recur throughout the four novels. Tracing such patterns as repeated words, clusters of images, recurrent scenes, and other verbal and narrative signposts provides clues to interpreting and understanding Percy's novels in their structural design as well as in their philosophical import. |
