Walker Percy Essay

827 Words4 Pages
Walker Percy is the author of philosophical fiction novels, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, The second Coming, The Thanatos Syndrome and The Moviegoer and winner of the National Book Award. Percy has also published non-fiction books that explore his interests in semiotics and existentialism the most widely known is Lost in the Cosmos. Like his other work, Lancelot is a philosophical period fiction novel set in a fictional place that resembles New Orleans and the surrounding area sometime in the 1970’s. It is a monologue by Lancelot Andrews Lamar, a man of the upper class that in his words “peaked” in college where he was a Football star, president of the student body, Rhodes Scholar, and Golden Glover. He finds himself confined in…show more content…
As he continues to remember as he tells the story to Harry Hotspur (Percival) of how his life completely changes when he discovers that his daughter Siobhan is not his and as Lancelot puts it “my life can be divided in two parts. Before and after the moment I discovered that my wife had been rendered ecstatic, beside herself, by a man on top of her” His wife Mary Margaret Reilly, the daughter of a Texas oil family had become bored and unhappy with her life and she takes up acting. Mary, or Margot as Lance calls her, has an ongoing affair with a film director Merlin. Lancelot gets an opportunity to set up hiding cameras when his wife, Merlin and other actors come to Belle Isles to film a scene for a film they are working on, Even though there is a storm approaching. With the help of Elgin, an MIT student and electronics wiz, Lancelot is able to confirm his suspicion. While he is in the Center for Aberrant Behavior he decides that he is going to start a new life, the “Holly Grail” which seems to be Ana, a woman that he meet at Center for Aberrant Behavior which Lancelot believes is the “new type of women” a woman that has a choice to be either used as a whore or worshipped as virginal Southern

More about Walker Percy Essay

Open Document