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.
Nisly thinks that Percy and O'connor looked at their audience differently. O'connor saw her audience as more hostile. Nisly asserts, "Though Percy set out to confront his readers, he envisioned a greater affinity between himself and his audience than did O'Connor--even though he did not see them as congenial as Gautreaux's companions" (154). Walker Percy seems to see his readers as fellow-wayfarers. Percy was not separated from the secular world or the world of unbelievers. For example, he had a life-long close relationship with Shelby Foote, an agnostic. Brinkmeyer thinks that Percy thought he had two kind of readers, "an alienated reader who knows he is alienated and an alienated reader who imagines he is not" (Brinkmeyer "Percy's Bludgeon" 82). Nisly thinks that Percy saw his reader as something like himself before he became a believer. A person that lacked meaning and was looking for a way to find meaning in his life. Percy thought his book, The Moviegoer, was misunderstood: The Moviegoer was "almost universally misunderstood" : "My warmest admirers usually totally misunderstood the book. They usually read it as a novel of despair, rather than a novel about despair but with hope, which was my intention" (Samway, Life, 224). Percy saw his himself "as writing for people on a journey, readers who needed to be pointed in the right direction so that they do not despair" (155). This journey is made up "of fellow-wayfarers" or pilgrims on the journey of life. Percy would include himself in this fellowship. Even after conversion, Percy continued to see himself as a wayfarer and he believed the nature of man is that of a wayfarer.
Percy wrote about his search and its connection to his authorship: "My theory of literature and art is that the best transaction that can take place is when the reader or viewer is told something he doesn't know he knows. The good thing that happens is that the reader has the shock of recognition. He says, 'Oh yeah, that;s the way it is.' It's a curious combination. My medical career has something to do with it. [...] It was a diagnostic search I made, to find out what had gone wrong, and I found unconsciously I transferred that mindset to writing novels and other kinds of writing where there is something wrong in the world, something wrong with society, something wrong with the times. [...] What makes [writing] really exciting is that I'm exploring in the novel for myself as well as the reader" (MCWP 42).
Nisly sees certain changes in Percy's intentions in his career as a novelist. The early novels are more interested in "connecting with his reader and hinting at the way to avoid despair;" the later novels are more explicit in its presenting the Christian faith as the answer to the alienation of man (155). Nisly thinks, however, Percy consistently sees an audience "who is lost, a shipwrecked castaway who needs to receive a message in a bottle" (155). The message in the bottle was a metaphor for the good news of the Gospel. Nisly argues that Percy because of his marginal stance in Covington and the Catholic Church, his critique and acceptance of the Second Vatican Council, was uniquely situated to speak to his alienated audience. Percy was on the margins of these different communities, part of them, and at a distance from them which allowed him to see both the postive and negative elements of these communities. Nisly writes, "Like his wayfaring audience, Percy knew how it felt to be lost. Yet in both his adopted hometown and his newly embraced faith, Percy found himself living on the edge, feeling at home, yet not fully subsumed. From this liminal position, Percy found it congenial to address his readers in their own pilgrim status, searching for, hoping for some solid spot on which to stand" (156).
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