The Message In The Bottle Summary

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In the first chapter, The Delta Factor in the book, The Message in the Bottle, by Walker Percy there is various key components the author wants to go in depth with. The main purpose for this book which he states is, “ the book is not about language but about the creatures who use it and what happens when they do.”(Percy 11) to sum it up, the book is about man and how he uses and understands language. In this book, he starts out by bringing out many questions in the beginning of the chapter which demonstrate, that we have many unanswered questions about ourselves, about man. Which he then states and emphasis, that this makes man unhappy in the 2Oth century. For the reason, that man does not know about themselves he implies makes them unhappy.…show more content…
Percy goes over how this is something so important and uniques to us humans yet, we know so little or nothing about. Is is so important that he believes and states, “language is too important to be left to linguisticians.” (Percy 10) He believes it something many need to looked over not just its specialized field, but by many others, it need much more importance. Percy goes on about how language has so much to be questioned on. He questions language by how is it that we can talk and understand each other, it's structured and much more. He explain that our lack of knowledge to language is so big to the extent that if one even bothered to look up language, one would find themselves looking into everything else but language itself. Language is somewhat like the eyes that we use to see and know the world. Nevertheless, he bring up as concern why is it that this phenomenon is not being further looked upon. Is it that we have grasped and have become accustomed to the concept of language to the point that we disregard how important it…show more content…
He used three components to show how language works a thing, word and an organism. In this case water, the word and thing and Helen the organism. He put together various diagrams to find what he believed best suited how Helen perceived language. Percy started by building his first diagram which indicates that Helen got the word then associated with the the thing. However, in this case that would be wrong she received both at the same time not one by one. In one hand she was spelled out the word but touch and the other she touched water itself. Then he came to his second diagram and third which as well did not grasp fully how Helen got to grasping language in this case a work, water. When he finally came to his fourth diagram, he felt as it betters showed how the word is associated with the thing which is all connect together to understand language. With his idea of Delta Factor Percy believes that maybe it would not unlock the mysteries of language but it would at least open a new way of thinking about
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