In the following excerpt, Young compares and contrasts the work of Walker Percy and Walter Miller, contending that both have authored science-fiction novels in the sense that science fiction deals with the effects of science on the human condition.

[For Percy, as indicated in his essay "Symbol as Need" (1954),] the inclination toward symbolization is not only a uniquely human one, but one in no way explained by reference to either evolution or biology. (p. 75) "Symbolic transformation" for him is not a "need," but rather "a means of knowing." He wants not to put labels on people, but understand what they are doing. He believes that symbols enable us to acquire not "facts," but rathe...

The relationship of [Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Camus, and Sartre] to Percy's fiction is just beginning to be sorted out. Certainly the sorting-out is crucial, for Percy himself has insisted that the modern writer must be a "passionate propagandist" full of "passionate convictions." He must know who he is and what he stands for—only such knowledge, Percy has contended, provides the foundation for art. (p. 21) Percy has been obsessed with "intersubjectivi...

Percy's devil [Immelmann] is a modern avatar of the Faust and Don Juan myths so prominently alluded to in Love in the Ruins, but the details of Immelmann's appearance and method also owe much to the devil in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, a book which helped lead Percy into a systematic study of Existentialism. The ideas and terms that Percy borrows from Existential novelists like Dostoyevsky and Sartre and from the philosophers Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Marcel give his fiction...

In an article published almost twenty years ago, Walker Percy talked of modern man's peculiar predicament, the result of secular man living under the protection of a tradition he ridicules and of religious man being unable to live the life his faith demands. Percy compares "our posture" to that of "the cat in the cartoon who ran off the cliff and found himself standing up in the air. Maybe he can get back to earth by backing up; on the other hand he might be in for a radical chan...

My keen admiration for Walker Percy's fiction always has been menaced around the edges by the fact that in each of his books there are at least three or four occasions when his writing tends to drive me up the wall to one distance or another; in the case of his last novel, Lancelot, I stayed up there pretty much throughout. It isn't that Percy ever writes really badly (though he is susceptible to sporadic attacks of damaging influence from Faulkner) but that at certain times he tends to write ...

Walker Percy's Lancelot reminds us of the novelist's role as conveyor of history. Although Percy is knowledgeable about the facts of Southern history, it is not factual history that he conveys. Rather it is that peculiar understanding of their own history which Southerners have that he reveals. (p. 875) There is an indeterminate but very real point when a people's history becomes internalized. Myth becomes mores. When that happens to a tribe or to a nation, then the history as understoo...

Though Walker Percy has always been a critic of how twentieth-century Americans live, and though The Second Coming, his fifth novel, continues this critique, this new work attempts in much greater detail than before to accentuate the positive: to explore, with great imaginative joy, states in which human beings may live together with authenticity. The Second Coming especially harkens back to and develops those scenes in Percy's previous work where authentic, human community occurs: a few conversation...