Percy's The Last Gentleman

I waited until now to post this because I was waiting to finish Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman. Though I read it for my English class, it deals with a classic existential problem. The main character, Will Barrett is an ex-pat of the pre-desegregation South, who is floating through life in Manhattan. His father killed himself, as did his grandfather. Each generation of his family has become increasingly more introverted and less prone to action. Will is, himself, always in a state of dis-ease. He is always going to a Freudian analyst or looking for someone to diagnose his problem. Will meets the Vaughts, a Southern family, in New York, and moves back to Georgia with them. The Vaughts’ all live lives of bad faith, each of them trying to fit a stereotype. Rita, the Vaughts’ ex-daughter-in-law, represents Kierkegaard’s aesthetic realm, while their daughter-turned-nun, Val, has stepped all the way up to the Religious realm. Sutter, the Vaught’s adult son is a troublemaker who stubbornly teeters on the edge of religious but refuses to acknowledge that he must make the leap on his own. Will suffers the same difficulty. He lives in bad faith squarely in the ethical realm, and he is looking for someone or some thing to cure him of his lack of the divine. After will goes on a journey of discovery to find Sutter and the Vaught’s youngest son, Jamie, he realizes that no one can make the leap of faith for him, and so he must take it upon himself. In a very Sartrian sequence, he comes to understand his father’s suicide, Sutter’s suicide attempt, and Jamie’s young death. Having faced death, Will understands that he is free (in the sense Sartre uses “free”) and that he must make a leap of faith on his own. I think that this story illustrates how Sartre fits into Kierkegaard very well, and lays out the Christian Existentialist process.