Autobiography in Walker Percy

In this highly original study, Edward J. Dupuy looks not so much at a one-to-one correspondence between Walker Percy's life and his works but more at the broader relations among autobiography, philosophy, and language as evidenced in Percy's novels and essays. Although Percy never wrote what is commonly considered an autobiography, in both his fiction and nonfiction, as Dupuy shows, he repeatedly addressed some of the same issues that concern theorists of autobiography. His novels, in particular, exemplify the autobiographical act of repetitionthat is, the retrieval of foreclosed elements of the past in order to reveal present and future possibilities for the self. That movement is manifest in the characters' preoccupations and in the recurrence of certain elements drawn from Percy's own life. . Dupuy begins by establishing the theoretical underpinnings upon which the rest of the book depends. He shows that like Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Percy struggled with the placement of self in time and that he came to understand repetition as an effort to redeem or recover time. An intelligent, often witty discussion of not only Walker Percy but also New Criticism, post-modern criticism, and autobiographical principles, Autobiography in Walker Percy is a work rich in both theory and textual analysis that will engage scholars and true aficionados of Percy.