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). This tension between explaining Will’s suicidal ideation as a mental health problem versus as an appropriate response to society continues throughout The Second Coming. Will later articulates the problem through the ironic juxtaposition of peace and war. Will, who lives in a generally peaceful state, feels happier when he is threatened with violence because having an enemy gives his continued survival more meaning. In other words, “peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense” (21). Therefore, Percy suggests that the problem with the absurd state of modern life is that it does not provide any sense of meaning or purpose for most people. In Will’s perspective, all actions are equally rational to undertake, including suicide, if no person has any reason to do anything.

The Second Coming suggests that the modern world is absurd because people are alienated from one another even in contexts in which they ought to be closely connected. Allison’s struggle with language reflects this problem. When Allison is wandering through the city, she encounters a woman trying to convert people to her church, an experience that ought to be deeply personal and meaningful. However, Allison notices when she talks to the woman handing out religious pamphlets that “her voice was still cordial, but the question did not sound like a question and the promise did not sound like a promise” (33). Even in a situation that ought to promote human connection, the conversion to a religion, Allison finds that the lack of meaning in words causes her to feel more alienated. Will also feels unfulfilled by his Episcopal religious community. He is similarly irritated by the born-again Christian movement that his daughter joins, even though Leslie finds it gives her a more intimate connection to God. Will observes that modern society is generating an increasing number of alternative religious movements, but he is not compelled to join any of them, considering them just alternative forms of insanity: “Is this an age of belief, he reflected, a great renaissance of faith after a period of crass materialism, atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, scientism? Or is it an age of madness in which everyone believes everything? Which?” (159). While Percy frames some form of religious belief as necessary for human happiness, he also portrays the ways that most organized religions fail to truly connect believers to one another and to the world around them.

Similarly, Will finds that his marriage to Marion has created more distance between them, not emotional intimacy. As Marion is sick and dying, he realizes that their marriage has never been very meaningful, prompting him to reflect on how it all happened:

[H]ow can it happen that one day you are young, you marry, and then another day you come to yourself and your life has passed like a dream? They looked at each other curiously and wondered how they could have missed each other, lived in the same house all those years and passed in the halls like ghosts (124).

The lack of meaning to be found in both religion and love, two areas of human life that are associated with deep closeness and higher purpose, results in absurdity. That absurdity, in turn, causes Will to consider ending his own life.

By the end of the novel, Will decides to leave behind many of the comforts of his wealth and retirement, returning to work and to living simply in order to feel less disconnected from meaning. Rather than spending all of his time playing golf, a game without any particular purpose other than amusement, he decides to work as a clerk in a law firm and help Allison start a greenhouse farm. Finding ways to be closer to meaningful actions and finding people to genuinely connect with helps Will combat the absurdity that led to his suicidal depression.