From ennui to egress: Walker Percy's sovereign wayfarer

Samantha M. Grissom
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:51:50 PDT

"After converting to Catholicism in 1947, Walker Percy abandoned his career in medicine in order to write novels about the human predicament: what it means to be a man living in the world who must die. Having personally experienced feelings of alienation and despair, Percy is especially interested in reaching those readers who suffer from feelings of estrangement, anxiety, boredom, and loss. In each of his novels, Percy seeks to bring readers, if not to the point of conversion, then at least to an awareness of modernity's spiritual bankruptcy and the possibility of a search for something more. This thesis investigates how Percy's unique perspective as a Christian existentialist informs his authorial strategy. He portrays a protagonist on an existential journey, reveals man's alienated state, emphasizes the importance of the search, and illuminates modes of egress for the wayfarer. Percy's twin ambition in each novel is to deflate traditional systems of value wherein men typically place their hope: Romanticism, scientific humanism, nominal religion, and Southern Stoicism. He is most interested in taking readers on an existential journey that ends in what Kierkegaard calls the 'leap to faith, ' and in demonstrating that Southern Stoicism is a false avenue of egress"--Leaf iii