The Second Coming by Walker Percy

First published: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980

Genre(s): Novel

Subgenre(s): Catholic fiction; literary fiction; romance

Core issue(s): Death; doubt; hope; love; memory; self-knowledge

Principal characters

• Will Barrett, the protagonist
• Marion Barrett, Will’s deceased wife
• Ed Barrett, Will’s deceased father
• Leslie Barrett, Will’s daughter
• Lewis Peckham, Will’s friend
• Allison Huger, Will’s lover, an escaped mental patient
• Kitty Vaught Huger, Allison’s mother
• Jack Curl, a chaplain

Overview

Walker Percy told the first part of the story of Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman (1966) and continues it in The Second Coming. In this novel, something is wrong with Will Barrett, a retired Wall Street lawyer in his mid-forties. His golf game, usually excellent, is suffering; he keeps falling down; he is obsessed with the movement of the Jews, which he interprets as a possible sign; and he is haunted by long-suppressed memories. Will has returned to the Carolina mountains where he grew up and is consumed with thoughts of suicide. His wife, Marion, a disabled, fat Christian philanthropist, has been dead less than a year, and his born-again daughter, Leslie, is getting married in a few weeks. Will cannot find solace in either woman’s faith. He finds no help in Jack Curl, the chaplain who runs the nursing home funded by the Barretts, or in Lewis Peckham, his atheist friend.

Will considers the extent of his deceased father’s legacy: two guns and a lust for suicide. Will recalls what was referred to as the “hunting accident” in his family and realizes that on that day, his father not only attempted suicide but also attempted homicide. Ed Barrett, tortured by living a “death-in-life” and believing he was bequeathing it to his son, tried to end it for both of them. He failed at both that day but did manage to kill himself not long after (Percy’s own father committed suicide). Will decides to devise a test that will solve his problem. He dispatches the proper letters to cover his tracks however the experiment works out, then climbs into a cave in the Carolina mountains and waits. Will believes that if there is a God, he will receive a sign that will allow him to live renewed; if not, there will be no sign and he will die.

Meanwhile, Allison Huger, a young adult, finds herself on a bench. She cannot remember who she is or how she got there. In her hand she holds a notebook in which she has apparently written some notes to herself. She discovers that she has spent the last few years of her life in a mental institution her parents committed her to. She does not think, communicate, or interact the way others do, and her parents feel she can never live completely on her own. In the institution, she was regularly subjected to electromagnetic shock therapy. The information in the notebook is written in her own hand, telling her how to escape from the hospital; that she will remember very little, as is typical for a few days after getting “buzzed”; and why she has chosen now to escape. By spying on a meeting between her parents and her doctor, she has learned that she has just inherited some property. She gathers the supplies the notebook tells her she will need and heads up the mountain to the greenhouse on her property. In the following days, she takes great pleasure in cleaning the greenhouse and making it habitable; in particular, she enjoys the mental and physical exertions required for hoisting things. A dog decides to live with her, Will happens on her when he loses a golf ball, and an occasional hiker stops for water, but in general she is alone and not upset about that, except at four o’clock in the afternoon.

Will has to call his test off. After a week in the cave, he develops an awful toothache that takes precedence over questions regarding God’s existence. Weak and sick, he tries to climb out of the mountain the way he came in but loses his way, comes tumbling out of the wrong cave exit, and smashes through the ceiling of Allie’s greenhouse. She bathes and feeds him, runs his errands, and hoists him up when he falls. She realizes she is in love with him, not knowing that her mother, Kitty, was his girlfriend many years ago or that Will knows who she is. Will leaves, promising to come back, but is detained by his illness. After falling down again, he is diagnosed with a rare disease affecting the pH balance in his body. His pH levels must be maintained constantly, and he is admitted as a patient into his own nursing home. When his pH levels are back to normal, he is no longer concerned about God or with the movement of the Jews and its possible meaning; however, he still thinks of the girl.

Eventually, after learning that Kitty has found out where Allie is and is going to retrieve her, largely to have her deemed incompetent and sell her property, Will leaves the home. Will and Allie check into a motel, where they make love, a renewing and sacred experience for both, and plan for the future. They will marry, ending all property claims by the Hugers, and they will begin a new life. Will plans to use skills learned from men in the nursing home, who were put out to pasture by society but still had valuable skills and knowledge, to build homes on the property and grow produce; they will make love in the afternoons to fill the four o’clock void. As he prepares for his nuptials, Will wonders if he is crazy to want both God and Allie. He rephrases the question to himself: “No, not want, must have. And will have.”

Christian Themes

The title of this novel is, of course, a reference to the prophesied second coming of Jesus Christ; Will wonders if the last days are on him as he considers whether the movement of the Jews is a possible sign. Part of the theme of salvation are the changes both major characters undergo. Will spends the majority of the book contemplating Christianity. He cannot decide whether he finds it more difficult to relate to the faithful or the unfaithful, but he certainly cannot place himself in either camp. The answers he receives, whether from his traditionally Christian wife, his evangelical daughter, his atheist friend, his death-loving father, or his chaplain, seemingly embarrassed by religion, are not good enough.

Though Will sees his test as a failure, one he never gets to complete, Percy seems to be suggesting that Will does get an answer. It is not as black and white, perhaps, as the manifestation of God Will may have hoped for in the cave or the personal relationship with Christ attested to by his daughter, but it is his climbing into the cave, his testing, his timely toothache, and his inability to find his way that bring him literally crashing into his salvation. It is through Allie that he is, in a very real way, reborn. His final divesting himself of his father’s legacy, both the guns and the urge for suicide, are the signs that he has in fact chosen life. For Allie, as well, the story is one of rebirth. It is literally her second coming into the world, as she finds herself relearning, or learning in some cases, how to communicate, how to work, how to love, and how to live.

Will is, like many of Percy’s characters, a searcher who has not yet found what he is looking for. At the end of The Second Coming, however, Will has actually found something. Although he did not have a personal encounter with God, the end of the novel is filled with a sense of hope that through working on the land, loving truly, and searching without cynicism, he will find meaning, peace, and possibly even religion.

Sources for Further Study

Allen, William Rodney. Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Allen reads Percy as a distinctly American, particularly Southern writer, claiming that the formative event in Percy’s life was his father’s suicide, not his reading of existentialist writers or conversion to Roman Catholicism. Allen’s readings of individual novels emphasize the presence of weak fathers and rejection of the Southern stoic heritage on the part of Percy’s protagonists.

Ciuba, Gary M. Walker Percy: Books of Revelations. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Study focused on the apocalyptic elements of Percy’s fiction, with a chapter devoted to The Second Coming.

Coles, Robert. Walker Percy: An American Search. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. An early but always intelligent and certainly sensitive reading of Percy’s essays and novels by a leading psychiatrist whose main contention is that Percy’s work speaks directly to modern humanity. In Coles’s words, Percy “has balanced a contemporary Christian existentialism with the pragmatism and empiricism of an American physician.”

Desmond, John F. At the Crossroads: Ethical and Religious Themes in the Writings of Walker Percy. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1997. Chapters on Percy and T. S. Eliot; on Percy’s treatment of suicide; on Percy and Flannery O’Connor; on his treatment of myth, history, and religion; and his philosophical debt to pragmatism and Charles Sanders Peirce. A useful, accessible introduction to Percy’s background in theology and philosophy.

Hardy, John Edward. The Fiction of Walker Percy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. The originality of this book, comprising an introduction and six chapters (one for each of the novels, including The Thanatos Syndrome), derives from Hardy’s choosing to read the novels in terms of internal formal matters rather than (as is usually the case) Percy’s essays, existentialism, Catholicism, or Southern background. Hardy sees Percy as a novelist, not a prophet.

Lawson, Lewis A. Following Percy: Essays on Walker Percy’s Work. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1988. Collects essays originally published between 1969 and 1984 by one of Percy’s most dedicated, prolific, and knowledgeable commentators. Discussions of The Moviegoer and Lancelot predominate.

Moore, Benita A. “Language as Sacrament in Walker Percy’s The Second Coming.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60, no. 2 (Summer, 1992): 281-299. Considers the addition of the female Heideggerian search to the expected male Kierkegaardian search and its relation to language in The Second Coming.

Percy, Walker. Conversations with Walker Percy, edited by Lewis A. Lawson, and Victor A. Kramer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. This indispensable volume collects all the most important interviews with Percy, including one (with the editors) previously unpublished. The volume is especially important for biographical background, influences, discussion of writing habits, and the author’s comments on individual works through Lost in the Cosmos.

Pridgen, Allen. Walker Percy’s Sacramental Landscapes: The Search in the Desert. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2000. Argues that Percy’s protagonists can find sacramental signs toward meaning amid their affluent but empty cultural landscapes. Will Barrett is considered extensively.

Quinlan, Kieran. Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. This study argues that Percy’s Catholicism is his defining characteristic and attempts to present his theology.

Tharpe, Jac. Walker Percy: Art and Ethics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980. Ten essays by diverse hands, plus a bibliography. The essays focus on settings, existential sources, Martin Heidegger, Percy’s theory of language, the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, Percy’s politics, and Lancelot (in terms of his essays, Roman Catholicism, medieval sources, and semiotics).

Tharpe, Jac. Walker Percy. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Reading Percy as a Roman Catholic novelist concerned chiefly with eschatological matters, Tharpe divides his study into ten chapters: “Biography, Background, and Influences,” “Theory of Art,” “Christendom,” “Techniques,” one chapter on each of the five novels through The Second Coming, and conclusion. The annotated secondary bibliography is especially good.