Walker Percy’s Sacramental Landscapes: The Search in the Desert

This book maintains that a Catholic sacramental understanding of the self and the world is at the center of Percy’s imaginative and philosophical vision. In close textual analysis of The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming, Love in the Ruins, and The Thanatos Syndrome, the author shows bow these works present Percy’s sacramental worldview. The imagery and symbolism in these novels point out how the novels’ existential wayfarers make their journeys toward a new way of seeing. This reading of the novels reveals precisely how Percy uses his fiction to dramatize the sometimes abstruse philosophical and religious ideas developed in these works.