L. Lamar Nisly, "Walker Percy: The Writer as Diagnostic Canary to Pilgrim Wayfarers" in Wingless Chickens, Bayou Catholics, and Pilgrim Wayfarers: Constructions of Audience and Tone in O'Connor, Gautreaux, and Percy. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2011.
Percy often compared his writing to a "canary in a mineshaft, to sound a warning when problems arose" (156). Percy once wrote in a letter to Caroline Gordon: "Actually I do not consider myself a novelist but a moralist and a propagandist. My spiritual father is Pascal (and/or Kierkegaard). And if I also kneel before the alter of Lawrence and Joyce and Flaubert, it is not because I wish to do what they did, even if I could. What I really want to do is tell people what they must do and what they must believe if they want to live" ( Tolson, Pilgrim, 500). The problem with this statement is that it must not be taken too seriously. Percy often spoke ironically, and it is hard to know when he is shooting straight with you. I do think that he considered himself a novelist and he did have a message he wanted to deliver. In a 1986 essay Percy wrote: "If he [the novelist] doesn't qualify as a prophet these days, he may at least serve as a curious outsider and watcher, a kind of monitor--something like those instruments they stick into the earth on each side of the San Andreas Fault" (SSL 162). Percy often said that it was not his role to edify his reader "but rather to participate with the reader in his or her journey" (156). The reader needs to take all of Percy's statements about his role as a writer and compare them with each other. Percy wanted to deliver message, but he did not want to write a gospel tract. In addition, many people do consider Percy to be an excellent novelist.
Percy did say in his essays that his writing was informed by his Catholic faith. Percy through his long career sought in different ways sought to communicate his role as a writer. They are not necessarily consistent. Percy saw his writing as prophetic or apocalyptic. He stated, "the novelist writes about the coming of the end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end" (Message 101). Percy was a hopeful writer. He pointed out what was wrong with the world, so changes could be made to avoid disaster. He is also a writer of comedy because he uses satire to point out the ills in the world. Percy thought that novelists should "explore the darker recesses of the human heart, there to name and affirm the strange admixture of good and evil, the actions of the demonic, the action of grace" (SSL 36). Percy thought that the novelist is a diagnostician, "a person who stands toward another person in the relation of one who knows that something has gone wrong with the other. He, the physician-novelist, has a nose for pathology" (SSL 194). It is interesting that often when Percy describes novelists, he seems to be describing himself. He saw the novelist as a great explorer: "nothing less than an exploration of the options [...] a man who not only is in Crusoe's predicament, a castaway of sorts, but who is also acutely aware of his predicament" (SSL 217). He thinks that the writer should notice "small clues that something strange is going on, a telltale sign here and there. Sign of what? A sign that things have gotten very queer without anyone seeming to notice it" (SSL 115, 163). Percy believes that a "twentieth-century novelist should be a nag, an advertiser, a collector, a proclaimer of banal atrocities" (SSL 340).
A common theme in Percy's writings is that something is wrong and the novelist must point it out. Percy even differentiates his stance from Flannery O'Connor's: O'Connor recognized that "the modern world is territory largely occupied by the devil. No one doubts the malevolence abroad in the world. But the world is also deranged. What interests me as a novelist is not the malevolence of man--so what else is new?--but his looniness. The looniness, that is to say, of the normal denizen of the Western world who, I think it is fair to say, doesn't know who he is, what he believes, or what he is doing" (MCWP 141-142). Percy often has someone in his novel with mental disabilities and provokes the reader to decide who is sane in the world. Nisly states, "Percy is pointing out the craziness that he sees enacted around him. In pointing out this 'looniness,' Percy hopes to name the illness for his audience--an audience that he well knows since he was also in their same situation. With his position at the edge of the Church and the larger culture, he is uniquely situated to point out problems in both arenas" (157).
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