The Man on the Train

Percy, Walker. "The Man on the Train" in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, And What One Has To Do With the Other. New York: Picador.

Percy's essay, "Man on the Train" is about alienation. It is a popular essay mentioned often in works on Percy. Percy writes, "There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation. In the re-presenting of alienation the category is reversed and becomes entirely different. There is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated commuter riding a train" (83). Here, Percy makes a distinction between someone riding a train and the same person reading about someone alienated riding the train. Why does he make this distinction? It probably has something to do with his theory of language and theory of man. Reading about an alienated man riding a train somehow names his experience for him and in a sense, he is no longer alienated. Percy says, "The nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable; the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author" (82).

Percy describes what he means by alienation: "I mean that whereas one may sit on the train and feel himself quite at home, seeing the passing scene as a series of meaningful projects full of signs which he reads without difficulty, another commuter, although he has no empirical reason for being so, although he has satisfied the same empirical needs as commuter A, is alienated" (84). Other terms Percy uses to describe alienation is boredom, unhappy, a feeling of emptiness and being out of place.  

Percy thinks that alienation is a "reversal of the objective-empirical" (84). This means that the man should not be alienated because all of his empirical needs have been met. Why do people feel alienated in the best environments. For example, I am a Christian, I have a good job, I have a good family, I have a roof over my head, and all the food I could want. Why do I still feel alienated? Why do I feel lost, out of place? Why does it feel like that this is not my home? Why do I long for something more? Is the materialist, scientific view really satisfying?

I like the image of the train. It indicates that man is on a journey, as we all are. 

As Percy earlier said, alienation can be reversed by art. Alienation can be depicted in art, and this somehow decreases the sense of alienation. 

Percy was influenced by Kierkegaard and used some of his ideas for his own use. A key idea was the theory of the stages or spheres: Aesthetic, Moral, and Religious. Then, there was Kierkegaard's distinction between the apostle and the genius. Two concepts that appears frequently in Percy's novels are rotation and repetition. One thing one must understand that when Percy appropriates ideas from others he transforms the ideas to his own purposes. In other words, they may look different than the ideas from the original source. Percy is an original thinker. That is why it is incorrect to think that Percy is simply applying the ideas of others in different contexts. Percy has his own fish to fry.

So two terms that Percy appropriates from Kierkegaard are repetition and rotation. These are things that people do to escape their alienation. Another term to try to escape alienation is the ordeal. The problem is that these things work only temporarily. Percy describes rotation and repetition: "It is by virtue of the fact that rotation is the quest for the new as the new, the reposing of all hope in what may lie around the bend, a mode of experience which is much the same in the reading as the experiencing" (86). Percy thinks repetition is a little harder to understand. Percy notes, "Thus when Charles Gray Marquad's Point of No Return returns to Clyde, Massachusetts, or when Tom Wolfe's hero returns to the shabby boardinghouse in St. Louis, the reader can experience repetition only if he imagines that he too is a native of Clyde or has lived in St. Louis. (He doesn't have to imagine he is Huck--it is he, the reader who is drifting down the river.)" (86). Maybe, it will make sense if I give an example from one of Percy's novels. Will Barrett, in The Second Coming returns to his childhood home where his father killed himself. He relives the earlier experience, but he looks at it from a different perspective. For example, he concludes that his father did not have to kill himself. In another episode, he realizes when he was shot by his father, it was not an accident as he earlier thought.