The Second Coming (novel)

"The Second Coming" is a novel by Walker Percy. It is a sequel to "The Last Gentleman". It tells the story of middle-aged Will Barrett and his relationship with Allison, a young woman who has escaped from a mental hospital.

The novel spends much of its content in unspoken but printed dialog of Will Barrett (the principal character) with himself and/or people he has dealt with in his past. He talks his way through his memories and realizes he is a character who suffers form the affliction of his Father; that life as most people (including him) live it is worse than death. His Father's solution was to kill himself (as did Percy's Grandfather), but his Father also opted to try to kill him (Will), in order to save him from a life that what his Father knows will befall him. He reflects on these occurrences throughout the book.

Like most books with complex characters, the main character represents a doppelganger through which the author works his way through his own father's suicide, and confronts his personal struggle with spiritual belief. After a literal dark night of the soul in a cave in North Carolina, he is figuratively reborn, falling out of the cavern and into the care of a woman who is a refugee from an looney bin. Whereas he cannot escape the past, she can only live in the present, bereft of memory by prior electroshock therapy. Two maimed and incomplete people come together and somehow make each other whole, and Will Barrett is, however briefly, redeemed through love of and with another.

The book represents a remarkable depiction of the human struggle with faith.

This work contains Percy's musings on "ravening particles," a reference to the alienation and anomie the individual feels from both within and without in the absence of faith.