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  • From: "Henry P. Mills III" <wppdirector AT gmail.com>
  • To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [percy-l] ​Existential Dilemma In Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and Love In The Ruins​ - A View from India
  • Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:35:00 -0400

Dear Percy-L:

Some might enjoy reflecting on these excerpts from a recently published Percy essay by a scholar from India, Surinder Kumar Verma. 

Any thoughts on Percy as a "peculiar kind of existentialist" as he posits? On literary parallels between Percy and Kafka? Other comments? Please share.

Best wishes,
Henry Mills
---
TITLE:
"Existential Dilemma In Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and Love In The Ruins
by Surinder Kumar Verma

EXCERPTS:
"Percy's interest in existentialism can be documented from his many philosophical articles as well as from the novels themselves. Arguably, one of the most important of these essays, "The Man on the Train: Three Existential Modes," is a study of alienation, its causes and possibly its cure. He is fascinated by the psychological condition of displacement, the kind of existential estrangement from self and surrounding that Albert Camus described so brilliantly in L'Étranger. The alienated man no longer knows or cares who he is, where he is going, or why he is going there. He is Percy's man on a train, the commuter, staring blankly out the window at a landscape that both terrifies and bores him - bores him because it is all too familiar, terrifies him because he does not know what awaits him when he steps off the platform - alone...."

"Percy is an existentialist, thanks largely to his conversion by way of Kierkegaard though also to his deep debt to Sartre and Kafka and Camus. Yet Percy was opposed to the most fundamental proposition of Continental existentialism: the notion that we inhabit a cosmic void wherein all meaning and value are entirely human inventions. Far from being any sort of absurdist, Percy held that our existence is inherently vexed, not because the welkin rings empty, but because we have an innate and irrepressible hunger for God, a transcendent yearning that modernity has sought to answer with pseudo-satisfactions. It is true that he honored the atheistic existentialists because, even in their denial that our longing can be divinely fulfilled, they nonetheless discerned its gnawing presence. He saluted them also for discerning the utter inability of modern science to account for our troubled human condition. Thus was Percy a peculiar kind of existentialist."


SOURCE:
"Existential Dilemma In Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and Love In The Ruins"
Surinder Kumar Verma
Purva Mimaansa | Refereed | Peer Reviewed ISSN: 0976-0237 | Volume 14, Issue September 2023 | Impact Factor 5.320
https://pm.sdcollegeambala.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Purva-Mimaansa-SEPT-2023-paper-13.pdf


__
Henry P. Mills III
Director, The Walker Percy Project


  • [percy-l] ​Existential Dilemma In Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and Love In The Ruins​ - A View from India, Henry P. Mills III, 04/19/2025

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