The Second Coming

The narrative voice of The Second Coming frequently remarks on the absurdity of living in the modern world, where unhappiness thrives despite all of a person’s basic survival needs being met. The novel exposes this absurdity through contrasting the outwardly cheerful lives of the characters with their declining mental health and through observing the widening gap between words and meaning. Walker Percy does not resolve the problem of this absurdity by the end of the novel. However, he does suggest that the best way to cope with it is to find meaningful connection rather than succumbing to alienation and lack of purpose.

At the beginning of The Second Coming, Will Barrett’s sudden desire to die by suicide is framed as both a nonsensical urge and as a rational response to a nonsensical world. While the narrator points out that Will lives a successful and pleasant life, with plenty of money and leisure time, Percy also acknowledges that Will’s seemingly irrational mental state might be a normal response to a bizarre world: “[O]n the one hand, he was depressed. On the other hand, the world is in fact farcical” (4).