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From Space to Self: Will Barrett’s Travels

in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman

Gérald Préher

The book is nothing but a journey.

(Walker Percy, in Lawson & Kramer 67)

In an interview, Walker Percy explained: “I am, as a novelist, concerned with the dislocation of man in the modern age, and I may well use a neurotic or psychotic man as a character who represents this dislocation, but note that it is an individual neurotic man” (Lawson & Kramer 11). Dislocation is indeed central in Percy’s fiction, as is manifest in his characters’ recurrent feeling that they are strangers in the world around them. Since they do not feel they belong anywhere, they tend to be on the move, either in time or space. The Last Gentleman (LG), Percy’s second published novel, is undoubtedly the best illustration of the writer’s statement. Describing the main protagonist in the novel, he writes: “Will Barrett […] is a curious young man beset by curious symptoms. He suffers a dislocation of his time sense which is manifested by attacks of amnesia and déjà vus” (Percy, “Introduction” 54; my emphasis). Early in the narrative, the reader understands that Percy’s choice to have Will Barrett, a native southerner, live in New York is not made at random: “As everyone knows, New York is noted for the number and variety of groups with which one might associate, so that even a normal person sometimes feels dislocated. As a consequence this young man, dislocated to begin with, hardly knew who he was from one day to the next” (LG 20; my emphasis). The question of identity is thus presented as a central trope and is intimately connected to the character’s search for the group he can belong to.

Will’s story has to do with the distinction Clément Rosset (Fantasmagories 66) makes between reality (the here and now) and the real (a mixture of impressions, images and ghostly presences). In order to reach the sphere of reality, Will must make sense of the real he has created, for, as Rosset says, “the real is not on the side of the self but, rather, on the side of the ghost.”¹ Percy’s character first needs to understand the voices of the past if he is to step into the present. In Percy’s aesthetics, coming to terms with one’s identity, as shaped by past events, is a key to understanding one’s predicament. The Last Gentleman illustrates such a process for the structure of the narrative itself shows that Will Barrett is on a journey to selfhood. The first two chapters expose his growing awareness that a change is coming; his encounter with a family from the South in a hospital helps him accept the possibility of an adjustment as he understands that he will find the meaning of his existence in the South when he is invited to follow his fellow southerners home. From the third chapter onward, Will reunites with his native region and his past; he drops his mask and relocates his true self in an environment he knows intimately. Will’s travels are thus closely linked to his search for manhood; the telescope he uses at the beginning of the novel brings him closer to his real self and paves the way for the changes that the scene at the hospital and the character’s subsequent trips around the States will bring about.

Will’s life is defined as a “gap” (LG 12) because of his recurrent memory lapses which, the reader understands, have to do with his repressing the memory of his father’s suicide. Such gaps would logically result in states of “selflessness” in which a person is alienated from himself and detached from the world outside—but this is not the case here. On the contrary, Will seems to be focused on using peripheral tools to read the world; the telescope is the most obvious one, his knowledge of psychoanalysis is another. His existence takes a new turn when he spots a telescope in a shop window and thinks that he has found what is missing in his life. As Jack Hicks argues, “he feels himself unable to touch reality, unable to participate in life, feels himself abstracted almost out of existence. And he seeks to correct that state by finding the right ‘key’” (164). Buying the telescope constitutes a pivotal moment in his quest since he soon finds out that the instrument “create[s] its own world in the brilliant theatre of its lenses” (LG 5). This comment is particularly important for the narrative as it places the eye/I in the foreground. In Emersonian fashion, Will’s eye does become “the best of artists” (Emerson 31) and allows him to step into the real or what he believes to be real. His decision to buy a telescope is as essential as the instrument itself, as it creates the illusion that something is yet to be discovered when actually everything is already there: “it is the act of avoiding destiny that coincides with its completion,” as Clément Rosset asserts.² What the telescope enables Will to see is the ordinariness of the world around him, something he seems unable to realize without an intermediary.

In effect, the opening sequence of The Last Gentleman illustrates Rosset’s theory. Will is in the park, waiting for “the” peregrine falcon³ to appear so that he can freeze it in time thanks to a camera “fitted to the telescope” (LG 4); in other words, he is trying to force things. Though he fails to reach his goal, the telescope “[becomes] the instrument of a bit of accidental eavesdropping” (LG 3). The choice of “eavesdropping,” an action associated with the ear and not the eye, is significant as it underlines Will’s coming to terms with his senses.⁴ This episode is the starting-point of another search, which turns Will into an amateur detective, calling to mind Paul Auster’s Quinn in City of Glass whom Brian Jarvis defines as “simply lost in the city and to himself” (85). Intrigued by the behavior of a woman who leaves a note on the bench where she was sitting, Will decides to see for himself⁵ what the message says, and, although there is apparently not much to it, to hide close by and see who the note is intended for. A beautiful young woman (Kitty) soon appears and, in what might seem like a parody of fairy tale, Will falls in love. Although the peregrine did not put in an appearance, the telescope undoubtedly directed Will’s attention to something unexpected. Lewis A. Lawson, in an illuminating essay on The Last Gentleman, has noted that “Will’s mental life is ‘layered’ like the mental life illustrated by Freud’s telescope [in chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams]. Will is, in a sense, the telescope that he uses...” (“Will Barrett” 18). Lawson’s comment helps understand the novel as an inquiry into the psyche of a singular character; it also highlights the way space and self intertwine throughout the narrative.

Will’s decision to buy the telescope is not at all accidental: “the conviction grew upon him that his very life would be changed if he owned the telescope” (LG 29). The main improvement resulting from this purchase is Will’s resolution to stop seeing his psychiatrist, since he can no longer afford it. His last session with Dr. Gamow is seen to be the starting point of his search, as the following exchange makes clear:

“Do you intend to become a seer?”

“A seer?”

“A see-er. After all a seer is a see-er, one who can see. Could it be that you believe that there is some ultimate hidden truth and that you have the magical means for obtaining it?” “Ha-ha, there might be something in that. A see-er. Yes.” “So now it seems you have spent your money on an instrument which will enable you to see the truth once for all?” (LG 37, my emphasis)

Noticeably, a few pages earlier, the narrator had mentioned that Will “couldn’t help attributing magical properties to the telescope” (LG 29, my emphasis). Dr. Gamow’s use of the same adjective, “magical,” suggests that the telescope is an extension of Will’s persona. In Percy’s aesthetics, reality can never be a firsthand experience and the characters often need intermediaries to grasp the meaning of the world they inhabit. The influence of the telescope on Will’s actions is as significant as that of the movies on Binx Bolling in Percy’s The Moviegoer and should therefore not be overlooked. The analyst is pointing out that Will is looking for “some ultimate hidden truth;” since the telescope is generally used to watch the sky, it can be assumed that truth comes from above, that is to say, from God.

Will’s decision to give up his therapy sessions shows that he has realized he was just hiding from the real world and did not want to face his responsibilities as a human being and take his life into his own hands: “Williston Barrett once again set forth into the wide world at the age of twenty-five […]. Once again he found himself alone in the world, cut adrift from Dr. Gamow, a father of sorts, and from his alma mater, sweet mother psychoanalysis” (LG 41). Will’s new freedom may be frightening to him at first, but it is an inevitable step in any man’s life. It is necessary that at some point he should break away from his analyst—whom he sees as a father figure—and live his own life. As for psychoanalysis, it has been part of his life for so long that he has assimilated its method and thus believes he can move on without anyone overseeing him.

Percy points out Will’s newly acquired awareness of his destiny through free indirect discourse in the very last paragraph of the first chapter, which is meant to sum up Will’s motives: “I am […] an engineer in a deeper sense: I shall engineer the future of my life according to the scientific principles and the self-knowledge I have so arduously gained from five years of analysis” (LG 41). Now that he understands himself, Will is ready to face the world. He decides to leave New York and become a “wayfarer” (LG 353), confirming the narrator’s words that he is “a watcher and a listener and a wanderer” (LG 10). Will takes his first step towards home when he follows one of the ladies he had spotted in the park into a hospital.

As the narrative unfolds, Will’s glances into the telescope become more and more meaningful. Rooted in what Percy calls “everydayness,” the second chapter opens with Will’s renewed attempt at taking a picture of the peregrine. He is more successful this time but the reader learns that his ultimate goal is to “catch the fierce eclipsed eye of the falcon” (LG 43), which is another indication of Will’s desire to be a seer and to get to the heart of the act of seeing. Interestingly, Will has also “witnessed the peculiar behavior of the Handsome Woman and her beautiful young friend” (LG 43), which makes his growing interest even stronger. The bench scene becomes a landmark in his life: “The bench, where the Handsome Woman had sat, was actually at ground zero. […] He smiled again. It was a sign. He knew he would see the two women again” (LG 48). At this point, the reader is totally immersed in the novel but s/he is aware that “[a]s a consequence of a chance event the rest of [Will’s] life was to be changed” (LG 3) and is therefore on the lookout for the key to understand the significance of the change. In actuality, there is more than one chance event in the novel since Will “luckily” sees the woman he noticed in the park in the subway and is so attracted to her mysterious self that he decides to tail her: “He followed the Handsome Woman into a great mauve pile of buildings. Inside he took a sniff: hospital” (LG 48). The location hints at Will’s impending rebirth, and the scene that follows is the first step towards his integration into a new family, the Vaughts. The same process of being-becoming is at work in the character when Will remembers that he once came to the hospital for treatment because, due to his nervous condition, he had forgotten who he was, and that it is the place where he recovered his identity; hence his assertion: “I felt better in the hospital than anywhere else” (LG 56). Introducing this episode as an interpolated story within the story foreshadows Will’s confirmation of his identity.⁶

In the hospital, Will makes the acquaintance of Jamie Vaught; the boy is there for leukemia treatment. Significantly, Will offers to lend him his telescope as a birthday gift, which confirms its function as an instrument of communication, designed to connect people. But the connection is not limited to the boy; Will also connects closely with each member of the Vaught family: “The Vaughts liked the engineer very much, each feeling that he was his or her special sort of person. […] Each saw him differently” (LG 64). The Vaughts give Will an opportunity to step into the outside world, into a family that can be seen as a metaphor for the human population. In this respect, the following exchange between Mr. Vaught and Will, though brief and at first glance devoid of any special significance, can be seen as one of the novel’s many beginnings:

“You come on up here in the morning and see Jamie.”

“Yes sir.” (LG 59)

Will is given a function, a purpose, and his situation echoes Lancelot’s question in Percy’s eponymous novel: “Have families ever loved each other except when some dread thing happens to somebody?” (55). Will offers his support to the Vaughts and they provide him with a new family. Jamie’s disease is the bond between them and provides the protagonist with a re-entry into the world of the living, of the family, of the community. Will tells the Vaughts, “All my immediate family are dead. Do you know this is the first time I have talked to a, ah, family in years. I had forgotten—” (LG 56). The absence of a question mark, the use of aposiopesis and Will’s apparent discomfort when it comes to the concept of “family” make it clear that he has stepped into something new, even though the final dash also reminds the reader of Will’s amnesia and his feelings of déjà vu. It also proves that love is closely linked to catastrophe. While Rita, the Handsome Woman, talks to Will about Jamie’s condition, he “was thinking of wars and deaths at home. On the days of bad news there was the same clearing and sweetness in the air” (LG 94). Will looks to another reality than that presented by Rita: he shows his ability to see what is good even in bad times. Consequently, though dislocated, Will seems to find solace in the apparent harmony of the past.

But in order to fully relocate his self in the present, Will chooses a new father in the person of Sutter Vaught who bears a resemblance to his actual father in that he too has suicidal tendencies. Now that Will has given up his psychiatrist, he expects Sutter to give him the answers to his existential worries. Ironically, Will’s first contact with Sutter is through a paper titled “The Incidence of Post-orgasmic Suicide in Male University Graduate Students” but though “the engineer read the article twice [he] could not make head or tail of it” (LG 65). Will’s interrogations about the paper lead him to think that Sutter has a secret he must find out about. As a consequence, he becomes increasingly interested in Sutter, an interest that increases when Rita tells him: “I saw him meet a man (…) ask him two questions, then turn to me and say: that man will be dead of malignant hypertension inside a year” (LG 181). Sutter is presented as a prophet, one who can read into things, into people, and one who knows about the future. Knowledge appears to be what Will is after, something whose worth no one can define but something that can help shape one’s personality. Upon meeting Sutter for the first time, Will tells him, “I only want to know what you know” (LG 218).

Will’s decision to leave the North is in keeping with his initial decision to “engineer” his life. Making Sutter’s acquaintance adds to his intuition that getting closer to Kitty and confirming his manhood will validate his identity. He “imagines that he may regain the world only by losing his virginity; yet remaining a gentleman is necessary to his self-esteem” (Broughton 100). Sexual experience becomes a point of honor for Will and his feelings prove that he believes sex can fulfill an ideal of virility. Incidentally, his existential questions always involve honor, probably because he is a southerner and wants “to perpetuate ideals of loyalty and obligation” (Wyatt-Brown 20). Nonetheless, the implication here is that clinging to honor is no longer useful because the world has gone mad and honor has become meaningless. Taking on the role Will has selected for him, Sutter gives him the advice he’s been seeking: “Fornicate if you want to and enjoy yourself but don’t come looking to me for a merit badge certifying you as a Christian or a gentleman whatever it is you cleave by” (LG 225). Sutter’s discourse is fatherly in that he both gives Will his blessing and warns him, basically telling him to take his own responsibilities. The rediscovery of his South seems to have helped Will take responsibility for his own life.

The perspective of the trip to the South has Will “set about putting his life in order” (LG 87), a phrase which confirms his eagerness to make a change. He takes Mr. Vaught’s job offer to take care of Jamie seriously as for him it is full of hope: a new life, a new place, a girl. The job presents itself as a good rotation⁷ for Will because, as Mr Vaught explains, the South stands apart from the United States, where “there’s been a loss of integrity […] all the things that made this country great” (LG 81). The only remedy to the modern malaise is to go to the South, where values still matter, or so the characters think. Mr. Vaught is very close to Binx Bolling’s Aunt Emily, who exemplifies the myth of the southern stoic in her belief that man must face all that life offers with strength and silent dignity. However, southern values crumble when Mr. Vaught fails to show up at his appointment with Will on the day of the departure. For Will there is no turning back: he has given up his job and his room and so he leaves New York and heads south, where he hopes to catch up with the Vaughts. Percy’s goal was probably to prove that Will’s pilgrimage to his origins could only be achieved if he made it alone.

The trip undoubtedly helps Will to gain self-confidence: “I want to make it clear what apparently I failed to make clear in New York, that from the beginning I accepted Mr. Vaught’s offer with great pleasure and shall be happy to go to school with Jamie or anywhere he wants to go” (LG 157). And, acting like a perfect gentleman, Will adds, “I had already committed myself to Mr. Vaught and I always honor my obligations” (LG 158). Going southward has revived Will’s ideal of southern honor and he proves his right to “gentlemanhood,” as the title of the novel suggests. It must be added that Will’s decision to travel south is also intimately connected to Kitty: he believes that she is the one for him, the only person in whom his desire to behave according to southern honor and to confirm his virility can be reconciled. Will’s relationship with her is therefore one of the central elements in the narrative.

One of the reasons why Will is attracted to the young woman is that she saved him from one of his bouts of amnesia. At first, however, the attraction is not reciprocal and Kitty remains quite distant. The two of them do not seem to have the same vision of love: Will is trying to find an answer to the questions of the heart, while Kitty appears to be more interested in the sexual act—in Panthea Broughton’s words, “as a modern woman, [Kitty] feels obliged to see love as a matter of sex alone” (104). The first osmotic contact between the pair happens when Kitty becomes sick and asks Will for support, but this episode of intersubjectivity is short-lived and communication fades away. For Richard Pindell, Will and Kitty’s love-making fails because they are “unable to possess themselves or each other. Utterance is reduced to a form of existential absence. Despoiled of their sovereignty, the two remain vacancies in a void” (55). When Will catches up with the Vaughts in the South, he finds a different Kitty: “…we have become like strangers. Worse, we avoid each other” (LG 165). After Will has cleared the air between them, Kitty’s attitude changes and Will decides, “I shall court her henceforth in the old style” (LG 166). Their relationship is, however, anything but satisfactory, and their last encounter indicates the path it is taking: “They separated at a fork in the campus walk, she bound for the Chi Omega house to fetch her books, he for his Theory of Large Numbers” (LG 288). Omega being the last letter of the Greek alphabet, it is likely to symbolize the fact that Kitty has come to the end of the road and that, in spite of their commitment, their relationship has reached a dead-end.

At this stage of the novel, Will is still looking for a home in the world: “It came over him suddenly that he didn’t live anywhere and had no address” (LG 313). The issue of memory keeps coming back to Will and his desire to remember is the same as Camus’s Meursault’s who declares that he would like “a life where I could remember my present life,”⁸ because he feels empty inside.⁹ Mr. Vaught’s job offer therefore comes as the perfect opportunity for Will to revisit his family past. Unfortunately, Will’s hopes flounder when he realizes that “The South he came home to was different from the South he had left. It was happy, victorious, Christian, rich, patriotic and Republican” (LG 185). Once again, he feels “dislocated”: “It was like home here but different too” (LG 164). The discrepancy that Will perceives between the remembered place and the present place is important as he realizes that change is at the core of experience. His feelings of displacement and dislocation are linked to a past that he has hidden and does not want to face. At the Vaughts’, however, he is going to step back into the past and unconsciously relive his father’s suicide and the terror he felt back then.

One night, Will awakes with the certainty that he has heard a shot. Like a robot, he ascends the stairs “as if he knew exactly where he was, though he had only once visited the second floor and not once been above it. Around again and up a final closeted flight of narrow wooden steps and into the attic” (LG 239). As this quotation makes clear, action is central; yet, the absence of a verb indicates that what is at stake has to do with emotion rather than motion. The attic appears to be Will’s final destination, one he was guided to by an unknown force. In his frantic run, he has woken up Kitty and he asks her, “Is there a room up here?” (LG 240), as if to confirm his intuition that there is something hidden from him, a place where he might find the answers to his existential questions. Obviously, Will does not recognize the place: it is not the attic he was expecting to find. It will take another trip for him to grasp the meaning of his vision.

Will’s newly acquired freedom as he goes on a trip with Jamie gives him the possibility to choose his destination as Jamie is uncertain about the places he wants to go to: “Jamie was determined to go either out west or to [his sister] Val’s [mission school]” (LG 274). Will decides on Val but first chooses to go to Sutter’s place in case there is a clue for him there. Indeed, Sutter has purposely left his notebook for Will to learn a lesson: “the dawn of discovery, the imminent sense of coming at last upon those secrets closest to one and therefore most inaccessible, broke over him” (LG 289).

During the trip, Will keeps wondering where and who he is. As soon as he meets Val, however, his problems seem to be washed away. As she did on their first meeting, when she named Will before even introducing herself (LG 207), Val calls Will by his name and thus confirms his identity to him (LG 296) while symbolically giving him admittance into the world of the living. Val presents language as a discovery and, talking about her pupils, she observes: “When they do suddenly break into the world of language, it is something to see. They are like Adam on the first day” (LG 301). Will admires Val for “the wonderful work [she’s] doing [there]” (LG 297) and adds, “I’ve always liked Catholics” (LG 297). This sudden religious attraction—not an accident, knowing Percy’s beliefs—finds an echo in Val’s revelation that Sutter and Jamie have gone to Santa Fe—”Holy Faith” in English. Their destination foreshadows what Will is going to find there, all the more so as the Southwest stands for possibility and abstraction while the Deep South is associated with concreteness and actuality (Lawson, Another 3-21).

However, before Will can proceed on the journey that will give him a chance to have access to “Holy Faith,” he, like “every man[,] has to stand in front of the house of his childhood in order to recover himself” (Percy quoting from Kierkegaard, in Lawson & Kramer 67). On his way to Santa Fe, Will stops at his family house and goes straight to the attic, where past and present overlap and help him visualize his father’s suicide on “the night of [his] victory” (LG 330). The importance of the attic in Will’s life is made clear: it is where his father shot himself. To Ed Barrett, death was a victory over life because it allowed him to escape the dullness of the everyday and affirm his difference from a world of conformity. As Mark Johnson points out, “The house [...] plays a dual role in the scene, as both the place in which Barrett must confront the memory of his father’s suicide and as the concrete place in which he at last seems to approach some insight into life” (60). Will’s pilgrimage into the heart of his father’s darkness might have taught him something, but at the end of the novel he is still expecting more.

The Last Gentleman pictures Will Barrett as a character who is ready to engineer his life. However, he seems more likely to achieve his goal in The Second Coming, since he has decided to take a journey inward without using a mediator: there is no telescope, that is to say no intermediary between himself and experience, and there is no Sutter to give him clues—he goes into a cave and waits for signs that would justify the worthiness of life. In his biography of Percy, significantly entitled Walker Percy: An American Search, Robert Coles notes:

Through Barrett’s eyes (aided occasionally by the lens of his telescope), the obsessions and pretensions of mid-twentieth-century American secular society, as well as its earnest, decent side, get seen and heard. To a degree The Last Gentleman is a novel of social observation: a character of broad sensibility, both serious and with a sense of humor, travels across a country; the various experiences he has, the accidents and incidents he encounters enable the reader to glimpse what otherwise might go unnoticed. (178)

Indeed with The Last Gentleman Percy explores American history and issues related to race and politics, but he also makes it possible, and this is obviously his main goal, for his character to make sense of his life rather than that of his culture. The aim of the pilgrimage is to bring him salvation, and the one who cannot feel the change would be—to use Percy’s expression—forever “lost in the cosmos.”

Works Cited

Broughton, Panthea Reid. “Gentlemen and Fornicators: The Last Gentleman and a Bisected Reality.” The Art of Walker Percy: Stratagems for Being. Ed. Panthea Reid Broughton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1979. 96-114.

Camus, Albert. L’Etranger. 1942. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

Coles, Robert. Walker Percy: An American Search. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. Ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris. New York: Norton, 2001. 27-55.

Hicks, Jack. “The Lesions of the Dead: Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman.” Études Anglaises 32.2 (Avril/Juin 1979): 162-170.

Jarvis, Brian. Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Johnson, Mark. “The Search for Place in Walker Percy’s Novels.” The Southern Literary Journal 8.1 (Fall 1975): 55-81.

Lawson, Lewis A. Another Generation: Southern Fiction since World War II. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1984.

——. “Will Barrett under The Telescope.” The Southern Literary Journal 20.2 (Spring 1988): 16-41.

Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Conversations with Walker Percy. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1985.

Percy, Walker. Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.

——. “The Last Gentleman: Two Excerpts from the Forthcoming Novel by Walker Percy.” [Introduction by Walker Percy]. Harper’s Magazine 232.1392 (May 1966): 54-61.

——. The Last Gentleman. 1966. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.

——. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983.

——. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975.

Pindell, Richard. “Toward Home: Place, Language and Death in The Last Gentleman.” The Art of Walker Percy: Stratagems for Being. Ed. Panthea Reid Broughton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1979. 50-68.

Rosset, Clément. Le Réel et son double: Essai sur l’illusion. 1976, 1984. Paris: Gallimard, Collection « Folio essais », 1993.

——. Fantasmagories suivi de Le réel, l’imaginaire et l’illusoire. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2006.

Vauthier, Simone. “Narrative Triangulation in The Last Gentleman.” The Art of Walker Percy: Stratagems for Being. Ed. Panthea Reid Broughton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1979. 69-95.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

¹ According to Rosset, “le réel n’est pas du côté du moi, mais bien du côté du fantôme” (Le Réel 91).

² “c’est l’acte même d’éviter le destin qui vient coïncider avec son accomplissement” (Le Réel 25).

³ The choice of this bird is telling since the novel itself has to do with Will’s peregrinations.

⁴ The reader is aware that Will suffers from deafness in one ear (LG 8) and that, as a consequence, his other senses are more acute.

⁵ Another element reminiscent of Emerson’s theories: “There is no country as extensive as a thought” (qtd. in Jarvis 1). The journey begins in the mind of the individual before it materializes into space.

⁶ Simone Vauthier has analyzed this issue at length, showing that “the novel is partly the story of [Will’s] acceptance of himself as a subject through the free use of his name” (80).

⁷ Percy defines this concept in “The Man on the Train”: “rotation is the quest for the new as the new, the reposing of all hope in what may lie around the bend, a mode of experience which is much the same in the reading as in the experiencing” (The Message 86).

⁸ “une vie où je pourrais me souvenir de celle-ci” (Camus 181).

⁹ “Je n’ai pas vraiment de dedans” (Camus 37).