Toward a triadic theory of Walker Percy: A semiotic reading of the novels.

摘要

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between Walker Percy's work in linguistic theory and his fiction. An investigative apparatus was distilled from Percy's essay "Toward a Triadic Theory of Meaning" and applied to the language behavior of important characters from each of his novels.;This procedure revealed a significant progression throughout Percy's fiction in his awareness of language as an overt, distinctly human behavior. In his first published novel, The Moviegoer, Percy's characters certainly engage in verbal behavior, but it does not dramatically call attention to itself as rule-governed normative behavior. In each succeeding novel, however, Percy shows a growing awareness of the verbal behavior of his characters, and manipulates this behavior to illuminate various psychological and spiritual aspects of the characters and the communities in which they live. This manipulation reaches a climax in Percy's penultimate novel, The Second Coming, which focuses on the relationship between the relative unconventionality of one character's verbal behavior and her community's consequent perception of her as mentally ill. Percy uses this relationship to demonstrate, as he does to some degree in all of his novels, that language in the postmodern world is bankrupt, and that the only way for a speaker to escape this bankruptcy is to deviate from what this world considers "normal" verbal behavior.;The application of Percy's language theory to his fiction demonstrates a mutually beneficial relationship between Percy's two abiding interests. More importantly, it provides a means of articulating the precise nature of this relationship.