Stories Submission

James B. Griffin (cosette@adsnet.com)
Tue, 24 Jun 1997 01:58:52 -0400

Comments:
I was born in Birmingham in 1962, the year the Moviegoer came out. My father is a Korean War veteran from a Catholic family; my mother comes from a long line of Stoic Southern Episcopalians. She turned when I was a child to a very evangelical form of Protestantism, and I was lost in the cosmos until I converted to Catholicism a bit more than a year ago.

An English teacher put The Moviegoer in my hands two summers ago. Last summer I read The Last Gentleman, and this summer I just finished The Second Coming. Walker Percy and T.S. Eliot seem to have diagnosed our century quite correctly: it is a living death. Nonetheless, there is hope.

Will Barrett had to make a conscious decision to reject this living death, and The Second Coming ends with his redemption. He threw his father's weapons of suicide off the cliff, put his hands and mind to good use, and pursued the simple joys of a new marriage. His final statement to the Catholic priest seems to be a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. It reminds me of the father of suffering boy in Mark 9 who said: "Lord, I believe. Help me in my unbelief!" Percy didn't have Will quite say it quite that way, but that's what I think he meant.