Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["Steve Petrica" <steve.petrica AT gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 9:16 AM, Jim Forest <jhforest AT gmail.com> wrote:

>> Percy -- like most any good novelist -- was at home with the idea of moral complexity and ambiguity.  But I don't think he'd buy into the notion of moral equivalence. <<

I'm not sure Percy was "at home" (in the sense of being comfortable) with moral complexity and ambiguity, but he certainly had a deep if probably uncomfortable sense of moral complexity and ambiguity. This didn't, however, lead him to see everything in shades of grey, as one sees so vividly in his last novel, "The Thanatos Syndrome." Here his rage about euthanasia and chemical fixes of pathological
tendencies was not unlike a lava flow.

I take your point that "at home" (in the sense of being comfortable with) may not be the best way to describe Percy's apprehension of moral complexity and ambiguity.  Perhaps "reconciled to the fact of" moral complexity and ambiguity gets at it better.  We agree that he didn't duck the problem by resorting to shades of moral grey.

Steve