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

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Part 1, Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary

Allison has taken up residence at Sally Kemp’s old house. While most of it has burned down, the greenhouse is intact enough for her to stay in. Finding an old stove in a cellar, she tries to figure out how to lift the stove and move it into the greenhouse. Eventually, she begins to speculate about how she can survive and what she should do with the rest of her life. A brindle dog shows up, and she begins to feed it some of her food.

Allison slips into a flashback of her time in the psychiatric hospital. Her therapist, Dr. Duk, attempts to treat her problems with speech by making knock-knock jokes. Allison often responds cryptically or confusingly to the jokes, because she has trouble with the double meanings of words and the duplicitous nature of language. She tells Dr. Duk that she was trying to become a white dwarf, using her allegory of a compressed star to signify that she wanted to shrink down and stop trying to please other people. She asks him not to give her another course of electro-shock therapy. Before the hospital, she had been living at home with no job or marriage. While her grades in school were good, she choked at an important music audition and then started to isolate herself from everyone.

After this flashback, Allison continues to work on the problem of moving the stove out of the basement. She goes to the hardware store and buys a pulley, but she has no one to help her. She wonders if the man with the golf club whom she met in the woods might help.

Later, on encountering Will Barrett in the woods again, Allison notes that he seems gaunt. He gives her some avocados as a gift, and she responds in strange, pun-filled sentences. He, however, seems to understand her unusual way of speaking. She tells him that she needs to move the stove, and he teaches her the terms for some tools that might be useful. She regards the words as a gift equal in value to the avocados. Will offers to get some golfers and a cart to help, but she refuses. Her fear of awkward, undefined, and ambiguous social situations makes her want to avoid a large group.

Allison remembers a woman named Kelso with an eating disorder who stayed at the same hospital who suggested that Allison’s parents must be spending a lot of money on Allison’s stay. Allison recalls a day when her parents came to visit and discuss her case with Dr. Duk. Her mother wanted Allison to move to a carriage house apartment on a property they own; her mother further mentioned that some acquaintances, the daughter of Will Barrett and her new husband, might be moving nearby. After her parents go to speak privately with Dr. Duk, Allison eavesdrops. Her mother explains that Sally Kemp has died and left Allison a valuable property beside a golf course. Allison’s father is interested in visiting North Carolina to make business deals about their family properties with foreign investors. Her parents ask for Dr. Duk’s help in testifying that Allison is not mentally sound, which would allow them to take control of their daughter’s property. Allison resolves that night to leave and writes the note to her future self.

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary

Will Barrett visits a nursing home that he and his wife Marion previously supported. He remembers how Marion loved to be involved with funerals and seemed to enjoy standing solemnly at a burial. He recalls how, when she was dying, he began to realize how little they communicated and how they had essentially lived separate lives in the same house. Marion wanted him to promise that he would support their daughter at her wedding and keep the house so that Leslie could return there when she wanted.

An Episcopal pastor named Jack Curl shows Will the plan to create a new retirement community for Christian married couples and asks him to donate money in Marion’s name. Will is ambivalent about the proposal, instead analyzing how the pastor acts as a con-man and swindler, but in the name of God. Will returns to his car and takes out the German Luger pistol he still stores there. However, he is interrupted by Jack again, who invites him on an interfaith religious retreat. Will is intrigued by the prospect that there will be Jews there, revealing that Marion saw the strange history of the Jews as a sign of God’s existence. Will asks Jack if he believes in God, and Jack replies that he finds God in other people and through Grace. Wanting a more definitive answer, Will proposes asking God a question in such a way that, if God does not answer, that lack of a response proves God does not exist.

Will returns home to his house, where preparations are beginning for Leslie’s wedding. Kitty, his former girlfriend from before his wife, is there to attend the wedding along with her husband. She reveals that her daughter is Allison and then flirts with him, suggesting an erotic encounter later at the summerhouse. Will continues to think about his father and the hunting incident. Will finally realizes that his father had reloaded because he was intentionally trying to shoot him. Something must have changed after that incident, because when his father eventually died by suicide years later, he did not try to kill Will as well.

Will finds the old shotgun his father had used that day to determine exactly how the barrels work. While in the woods, he runs into his golfing friend, Lewis Peckham, and Lewis suggests that Will is clinically depressed and should try psychoanalysis and listening to classical music. Will thinks that the only proposal that sounds good is to hunt and sit in the cave that Lewis once found with the Confederate munition.

Looking back on his relationship to his late wife Marion, Will recalls that he married her because he was seeking an escape from the Southern culture he had been born into and saw Marion as a good representative of northern Episcopal Christianity. Marion enjoyed doing good works for others. She was faithful without being fantastical. However, after their marriage, she became extremely fat and ate constantly. Will believes that her weight led to her premature death.

Leslie argues with Jack Curl about the wedding ceremony. She is a born-again Christian and therefore does not want to follow traditions. Will observes that his daughter is a very angry person who often frowns, although he once saw her joyfully crying after a Pentecostal service, which annoyed him. He has a strange urge to snap at their Japanese employee, Yamaiuchi, who is serving them food; the urge makes conclude that violence is the only way to have any control in the world. He recalls that his father expressed the same sort of violent anger toward their Black guide when they went hunting, even though his father was generally opposed to racism.

After the dinner, Will arranges a time to meet Kitty for an erotic rendezvous. He confesses to her that he was not a very good husband to Marion, having once mysteriously vanished for weeks to travel to New Mexico and visit Kitty’s brother, Sutter Vaught. Kitty tells him that she always imagined that he would have been a father to Allison and that he and her daughter might be able to communicate well.

Will ponders the similarity between love and death, deciding that his father must also have sought both and eventually decided that death was easier to obtain. When Will goes down to the garage, he meets Ewell McBee again, who invites him over to watch a porno at his house and meet the girl who performed in it. Will is only intrigued when Ewell mentions that the star of the erotic film is a North Carolina Jew called Sarah Goodman. Realizing that he may have been wrong about the Jews leaving North Carolina, Will comes to a decision—he needs to come up with a test to prove the existence of God.

Will writes a letter to Lewis Peckham, cheerfully claiming that he plans to go explore the cave and that, afterward, he would be happy to listen to classical music with him. Will simultaneously writes another letter to Kitty’s brother, Sutter Vaugh, instructing him to visit North Carolina in three weeks to either mail or destroy this letter to Lewis. Will explains in Sutter’s letter that Will needs Sutter’s help to stage an accidental death so that his life insurance policy will pay out. Will has made Sutter the recipient of the policy to ensure that Sutter will accomplish this task. Will admits that he intends to set up his suicide in such a way that it will either confirm or deny the existence of God. Fed-up with both believers and unbelievers, he’ll go into the cave and pray for God to save him. If Will dies, then God either does not exist or does not help or care for humans. If God saves him, Will can emerge on his own, and the letter will not need to be mailed. The narration identifies this plan as the culmination of Will’s descent into madness.

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary

Allison visits the hardware store again, determined to move the stove up and out of the cellar now that it is getting colder. She uses the terms that Will told her in order to acquire tools such as creepers for the feet of the stove. At the hardware story, she talks to a young Black mechanic, using conversation to remind herself of Will’s name and learn enough about Will to ask the owner of the store to order more supplies for her. She realizes that she can use her words effectively to get what she wants and that she was able to end a conversation without feeling bad or awkward. When she returns to the greenhouse, she uses the block and pulley system to lift the stove.

Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary

Meanwhile, Will prepares to enter the cave to begin his suicide attempt/experiment. He brings a few weeks’ worth of sleeping pills so that he will not have to endure the discomfort of starving to death. He enters the old cave and finds the chamber where the tiger skeleton was discovered. Before he takes the sleeping pills, he drops a note down the shaft that claims he has had a stroke and cannot move so that his death, if it comes to pass, will be ruled an accident. Feeling satisfied that this plan will adequately test the existence of God, he goes to sleep and waits for either death or divine intervention.

Will dreams and hallucinates for several days. He thinks about his father and the hunting trip, imagining a conversation with his dead father, who tells him that there is no place in the world for him. Will hallucinates that the dying ancient tiger is lying beside him, hardening into a fossil. He remembers conversations with his daughter about his relationship with Marion. While Marion accused him of only marrying her for money, he remembers how he enjoyed the feeling of making her happy and wanted his marriage to be a good deed.

Will gets a toothache and begins to suffer physical discomfort. Eventually, despite the pills, he can no longer tolerate the pain. He tries to crawl out of the cave, but falls, breaking his leg. He continues to crawl through the dark, unable to find the exit. He is physically weak and sick. Eventually, he crawls down a tunnel and pushes through some vines, falling out of a hole and into Allison’s greenhouse. When he wakes, Allison gives him food and water. They realize that the Kemps must have built the greenhouse beside a vent in the cave system to help regulate temperature and humidity. Will sees that Allison has successfully moved, rebuilt, and used the stove all by herself.

Part 1, Chapters 4-7 Analysis

The conclusion of the first part of The Second Coming builds up to Will’s attempt to end his own life, focusing on the idea that Will sees death as a rational response to the conditions of life. Rather than framing Will’s suicidal ideation as the result of emotional disturbance or upheaval, Percy presents Will’s desire to end his life as the result of logic and a scientific desire for total certainty. This attempt, in other words, incorporates both Will’s growing awareness of The Absurdity of Modern Life and The Search for Signs of God. Will’s attempt to end his life is motivated both by memories of his father’s death by suicide and by his attempt to get a conclusive answer about the existence of God. He describes his father’s death as “the logical and ultimate act of fuck-you love fuck-off world, the penetration and union of perfect cold gunmetal into warm quailing mortal flesh, the coming to end all coming” (149). By describing the act of suicide as a form of “coming,” Will’s description affiliates his father’s suicide with the Second Coming, the Biblical moment when Jesus Christ returns to Earth and resolves all ambiguities or questions about the moral nature of the universe. Therefore, Will demonstrates that he associates death with knowledge, reason, and certainty. This portrayal disrupts the notion that suicide is the result of irrationality or an overreliance on emotion.

Will conceives of his own attempt to die by suicide as an experiment, describing his motivations as a way to gain knowledge about the purpose of the world rather than as an escape from suffering. He realizes that he cannot imitate his father’s suicide, although he shares his father’s despair over the state of the modern world:

It dawned on him that his father’s suicide was wasted. It availed nothing, proved nothing, solved nothing, posed no questions let alone answered questions, did nobody good. It was no more than an exit, a getting up and a going out, a closing of a door (182).

Unlike the “wasted” suicide of his father, Will attempts to find a method of death that will benefit other people and resolve the questions that have led him to desire to end his life. He writes as much to his old associate Sutter Vaught: “[M]y suicide will represent progress in the history of suicide. Unlike my father’s, it will be done in good faith, logically, neatly, and unobtrusively, unobtrusive even to the Prudential Insurance Company” (211). While the narrative voice describes Will’s actions as madness and insanity, Will’s words always focus on rationality, logic, and a desire to help others—traits not generally associated with suicide.

However, Percy includes several moments in these chapters that create ambiguity and prevent Will from ever obtaining the certainty he craves. Despite Will’s effort to gain clarity through his attempt to die of natural causes in the cave, Will finds himself in a scenario that neither confirms nor denies the existence of God. God does not rescue him from the cave in an explicit manner; Will chooses to exit the cave himself due to a toothache. Percy’s narration makes clear the lack of apparent divinity about Will’s decision too: “[T]here is one sure cure for cosmic explorations, grandiose ideas about God, man, death, suicide, and such—and that is nausea. I defy a man afflicted with nausea to give a single thought to these vast subjects” (213). Because of the physical pain caused by his infected tooth, Will’s survival instincts take over. However, Percy leaves open the possibility that God sent the toothache to save Will. This ambiguous resolution parallels the existentialist philosophy that Percy’s works often explore: that free will and individual choices are what ultimately gives an experience meaning. Because Will decided to leave the cave, he regains an attachment to his own survival that does not depend on the existence or non-existence of God.

Will’s descent into the cave and his reemergence in the greenhouse are paralleled by Allison’s task of using a pulley system to remove a heavy iron stove from the cellar and bring it up into the greenhouse. In both cases, the imagery of a body returning from a subterranean space evokes the image of the dead rising from their graves. This image, in turn, is traditionally associated with the Christian apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. Through the imagery of Will and the stove emerging from the ground, Percy ironically suggests the presence of Christ at this moment in the story, despite the fact that there is no direct or clear sign from God.