The southern gentleman in the novels of Walker Percy

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the protagonists' rejection of the role of the Southern gentleman in four of Walker Percy's novels: The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming, and Lancelot. The thesis begins with a study of Lanterns on the Levee, the autobiography of William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy's adoptive father, for this work provides a definition of the Southern code and an illustration of the Southern gentleman. Will Percy himself was considered to be the last gentleman" by many of his contemporaries because he fulfilled all the obligations required by the Southern code, most noticeably the obligation to serve his community. In fact, the role of the Southern gentleman provided him with a way to live a meaningful life he lived it for others. Since society and values have changed, the protagonists in Walker Percy's fiction are no longer able to adopt the role of the Southern gentleman, even though they have all been raised in that tradition.

Moreover, each novel is an integral part of a thematic pattern; that is, with each successive novel (beginning with The Moviegoer, then moving to the two novels about Will Barrett, and ending with Lancelot) the community becomes increasingly fragmented. In the last two novels--The Second Coming and Lancelot--the community is so fragmented that the protagonists want to start over, to start a new community. And Lancelot returns us to Lanterns on the Levee, for the protagonist there not only wants to start a new community, but also a new order based on the old code as defined in Lanterns on the Levee. This thesis demonstrates, then, that studying the novels of Walker Percy in relation to the autobiography of William Alexander Percy is a valuable approach to Walker Percy's fiction, for the autobiography provides a base from which we see how Walker Percy's work evolves and, in a sense, it is the point to which his work eventually returns.