The Second Coming

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1980

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-3

Part 1, Chapters 4-7

Part 2, Chapters 1-3

Part 2, Chapters 4-5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Part 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

Will Barrett is playing golf when he falls down and, on falling, realizes that something is wrong with him. After his fall, Will begins to see things in nature that remind him of events in his past, and he begins to contemplate suicide. He knows that he is depressed, but he cannot determine if his depression is a disease making him illogical or if he has, in fact, accurately determined that the world is farcical and absurd to live in. If more people became depressed, he wonders, would suicide begin to seem like a more rational choice?

During a golf game in North Carolina with a friend, Dr. Vance Battle, Will collapses again and suddenly relives a memory of his childhood in Mississippi. His experience is not diagnosed as a hallucination, but rather as the sudden recall of a memory that he had previously forgotten. He remembers walking through an unincorporated lot on a shortcut home and seeing Ethel Rosenblum at cheerleading practice. On admiring her beautiful body, he falls down, overwhelmed with desire for her. He and Ethel are both very intelligent, but they do not often interact at school. Will imagines settling down with her in the unincorporated lot, thinking that it is the only place where a Jew and a Gentile (non-Jewish person) could be together.

As doctors later try to explain this incident medically, wondering if he has a brain hemorrhage, Will continues to have the strange symptom of being reminded of other things whenever he has a sensory experience. Dr. Vance checks on him after the fall, asking if he is depressed because his wife, Marion, recently died. Will mentions that he is concerned that the Jews are leaving North Carolina, although the narration points out that his concern is not based on fact, as the Jewish population of the state remains the same. They finish the game of golf.

On a Sunday morning shortly after, Will drives through town and is suddenly attentive to how many churches are everywhere in the town. He parks in his garage and takes a gun out of his glove compartment. For a moment, he sees himself reflected in two mirrors, resulting in a sense of himself as just one among many. He presses the gun to his head, considering shooting himself. The narration ponders why a man who is seemingly successful and content would behave like this. Will concludes that the problem with his life is that no person is able to fully be themselves. While cats are always completely themselves, humans are barely 2% of themselves at any given time.

Will exits the car and is unexpectedly grazed in the leg by a bullet. Shocked back into being himself, he feels better. He eventually realizes that the bullet was fired by Ewell McBee, a neighbor who often poaches deer. He remembers Ewell as being a bully, associating Ewell’s wild and uncivilized behavior with the idea that white society degrades without the presence of the Jews or other minorities. Will concludes that people feel better when they have an enemy, because war feeling like hell is more expected than peace feeling like hell.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary

A woman sits on a bench in Linfield, North Carolina. Observing the people around her, she feels confused by the vague slogans and cliché phrases that they say and display on their clothes and cars. Recently, she purchased a new outfit of practical clothes alongside camping gear. The narration reveals that she has ended up in this town because of a note she found written by herself.

The note reveals that the woman was previously living in a psychiatric hospital and received electro-convulsive therapy, causing her current state of memory loss. The note that she left for herself provided a detailed escape plan from the hospital and instructions on what resources to acquire after. The woman likes the feel of her clothes, but not her hair. She goes into a hair salon and randomly chooses a movie poster to model her hair after. She feels better once her hair is cut and washed and dyed blond.

On the street, a proselytizer tries to give the woman a religious pamphlet, but she feels disoriented by the proselytizer’s hidden intentions and veiled speech. The woman returns to the bench, where a man who is training to run a marathon flirts with her. She reveals that her name is Allison, or Allie for short, which she only knows due to the driver’s license she carries. She tells the runner that she cannot meet him that night to enjoy an evening on a hiking trail because she needs to locate a house.

The second part of the woman’s note reveals that her past self planned to get her to the house of her Aunt Sally Kemp. Sally Kemp recently died and left her the house in the will, so Allison needs to take possession of it. The note recommends eventually finding a good lawyer, suggesting that she go to a doctor and complain of a minor injury before getting a recommendation.

Allison leaves the bench and gets directions from a man who tells her that the house is across the golf course three or four miles. However, he warns her that the place is used by bums and hippies and that the structure burned down. She sets out in the direction of the house.

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary

Will plays golf again, but with a different group of people who he does not like as much as Dr. Vance. He keeps hitting his ball out of bounds and into the woods, which disturbs him. When he goes to retrieve the ball, one of his companions, Lewis Peckam, shows him a nearby cave. Will remembers that the cave once had a sabertoothed tiger skeleton in it and had been used by Confederate soldiers to store munitions during the Civil War. The tiger skeleton was later removed and sent to a museum in Raleigh.

Will slips into a memory of hunting with his father. His father was upset with him for crawling under a fence with his gun, which hurt and angered the young Will. During the hunt, his father cryptically remarked that they were very similar. His father then shot in his direction, injuring Will’s face and deafening one ear. The rebound of the rifle knocked his father out, and young Will ran for help. While his mother praised Will’s bravery, thinking that the shooting was simply an accident, Will later realizes that his father had reloaded the gun again after firing at him, suggesting that he was planning a murder-suicide.

Back in the present, Will returns to the golf game. One of the golfers, an old college friend called Jimmy Rodgers, irritates Will. Will brings up his wife’s recent death and his daughter Leslie’s impending marriage. Jimmy congratulates him on having lived a good and successful life. Will recalls the time he once spent living in New York City, where he worked as a lawyer and enjoyed a simple, pleasant life. He compares himself to his father, who he now realizes was obsessed with death. Will comes to believe that everything he has ever done was meaningless and that nothing has ever really happened to him.

Will hits another golf ball out of bounds and goes into the woods to search for it. There, he encounters Allison, who points out that one of his golf balls has broken the window of the old house she was staying in. Will offers to pay for the damage and considers how strange it is to find a young woman in men’s clothing living alone in a house in the woods behind the golf course.

Part 1, Chapters 1-3 Analysis

The beginning of The Second Coming introduces the characters of Will and Allison and establishes their struggles to live and find meaning in the modern world. Both characters have a form of mental illness, likely a chemical imbalance of their brain. However, Walker Percy suggests that, in both cases, part of the problem is also the expectations and structures of contemporary society.

Though Will and Allison both begin the novel suffering due to their actions being restrained and controlled by social rules, they steadily become aware of The Absurdity of Modern Life and the meaninglessness of conforming. As their awareness grows, in turn, they begin to break away from those rules. Allison begins the novel in a highly vulnerable position. Having recently escaped from a psychiatric hospital, she is unsure what to do, relying entirely on instructions written by a past version of herself that she cannot remember due to electro-convulsive therapy. Allison feels particularly paralyzed by language, finding it so absurd and meaningless that she struggles to communicate. However, as she attempts to make her own way to Sally Kemp’s house, she realizes that “[p]eople didn’t seem to need more than a word or two to make their own sense of what you said […] she could talk as long as she asked questions. Making a statement was risky” (24-25). While independence is difficult for Allison initially, that difficulty is largely due to the confusion she experiences regarding inauthenticity and misleading language; as she starts to put space between herself and society, she begins to develop greater confidence and intrinsic motivation. Her past self’s letter represents the important mental shift that she undergoes: “What was my (your, our) discovery? That I could act. I was free to act” (40). While Allison has no memory of this realization at the beginning of The Second Coming, taking action and doing what she wants to do, rather than what is preferred by others, does begin to have a positive impact on her mental state.

Similarly, Will begins the novel by realizing that none of the actions he takes in life seem to have any impact or greater reason. Will initially observes that he is surrounded by signs of life’s greater meaning in the form of Christianity. He recognizes that “he lived in the most Christian nation in the world, the U.S.A., in the most Christian part of the nation, the South, in the most Christian state in the South, North Carolina, in the most Christian town in North Carolina” (13). Nonetheless, the presence of these religious organizations fails to make him feel connected meaningfully to others; what they have to offer does not give him a compelling reason to exist. In similarly becoming aware of The Absurdity of Modern Life, he reflects, “[T]here is no mystery. The only mystery is that nothing changes. Nothing really happens” (51). Will’s constant golfing during his retirement reflects his growing awareness of this absurdity. Golf is a game and therefore has little purpose or reason behind it other than amusement. Will explicitly compares his own life to the game:

[I]s a game so designed that there is always a chance that one can so badly transgress its limits and bounds, fall victim to its hazards, that disgrace is always possible, and that it is the public avoidance of disgrace that gives one a pleasant sense of license and justification? (45).

This sense of purposeless action causes Will to seek out a way to change his circumstances, although in his case, the pathway he finds is harmful rather than helpful. The novel describes Will’s suicidal urges as gradually intensifying: “[F]irst, it was only a thought that popped into his head. Next, it was an idea which he entertained ironically. Finally, it was a course of action which he took seriously and decided to carry out” (4). While making plans and deciding on a personal course of action is a sign of positive growth in Allison, it represents a danger to Will.

The beginning chapters of The Second Coming also establish The Search for the Signs of God and, with more subtlety, The Purpose of Love, the latter of which will play an important role in the former in the coming chapters. As Will seeks out a way to give his existence a purpose, he begins to fixate on the Jews as a possible sign of a coming revelation or apocalypse. In his first episode of falling down, he has a vivid memory of a Jewish girl from his high school. As he remembers her, he fantasizes about finding a place where differences in religion do not matter and love can flourish despite social barriers: “Let’s me and you homestead this left-over land here and now, this non-place, this surveyor’s interstice. Here’s the place for us, the only place not Jew or Gentile, not black or white, not public or private” (8). While Percy sets up Will’s obsession with the Jews as an irrational manifestation of mental illness, he also foreshadows how Will is eventually saved from his suicidal tendencies. Finding love and finding a place to exist that is outside of the control or judgment of society eventually helps Will to find a sense of meaning and peace in his life, although it is with Allison at her greenhouse rather than with Ethel Rosenblum.