The Second Coming

The Second Coming is a novel by Walker Percy published in 1980. It is the sequel to Percy’s 1966 novel The Last Gentleman, continuing the story of Will Barrett as a middle-aged man. The Second Coming explores issues prevalent across Percy’s novels: existential crisis in the modern age and the search for philosophical meaning in life. Like many of Percy’s other works, the novel utilizes the setting of the American South and contemplates how the legacy of war, racial discrimination, and cultural secularization have resulted in widespread alienation and a general crisis of faith.

This guide is based on the edition published by Farrer, Straus & Giroux in 1980.

Content Warning: This work and this guide extensively discuss suicide, and suicide attempts are depicted in this novel.

Plot Summary

The Second Coming follows the character of Will Barrett, the protagonist of Percy’s 1966 novel The Last Gentleman. Many years after his pivotal trip with the Vaught family, Will Barrett has retired to North Carolina, concluding a successful career as a lawyer in New York City. His wife, Marion Peabody, was a woman with disabilities and the heiress to a large fortune. At the beginning of The Second Coming, Marion has recently died, and Will’s daughter with her, Leslie, is preparing to get married and move out of the house. Will spends most of his time playing golf, but he experiences a strange problem during a game that leaves him shaken. After falling down, he suddenly recovers a vivid memory of seeing Ethel Rosenblum, a cheerleader at his old high school in Mississippi. Will recalls, in that moment, being struck with intense desire for her before falling down in much the same way that he has just collapsed. After this unusual moment, Will becomes irrationally convinced that the Jews are leaving North Carolina and returning to the Holy Land, suggesting that the world is likely ending, and some sign of God’s existence will imminently manifest.

While Will finds himself increasingly lost in memories of the past, the book switches to the perspective of a young woman named Allison Huger. Allison, in contrast to Will, has no memories of her past after being subjected to electro-convulsive therapy in a psychiatric hospital. Allison has escaped the hospital using instructions that her past self wrote for her in a letter. She has traveled to North Carolina to seek out a property left to her by her aunt, Sally Kemp, where she can reside. Allison finds the house in ruins, with only a greenhouse and potting shed left intact.

Will fixates obsessively on a memory of a hunting trip with his father to a swamp in Georgia, where his father shot him in an apparent hunting accident. However, the more that Will considers this memory, the more he becomes certain that his father intentionally attempted to kill him during that hunting trip. His father later died by suicide, and Will begins to suspect that his father was attempting to kill his own son to spare him the suffering of life. Will begins to have suicidal thoughts. Several times, he considers ending his own life with a gun he keeps in his car. Minor interruptions prevent him from going through with the plan.

Allison encounters Will in the woods one day when he hits his golf ball out of the green and goes to find it. Will helps Allison, who is trying to move a stove, by reminding her of the words for the tools that she will need to acquire at the hardware store. When Will returns to help prepare for Leslie’s wedding, he realizes that Allison is the daughter of Kitty Vaught, his former lover. Kitty, who has also come for Leslie’s wedding, tries to arrange a fling with Will. Will finds himself torn between Kitty’s erotic appeal and his plans to end his life.

Leslie has recently become a born-again Christian. The local Episcopal priest, Jack Curl, has been hinting in turn to Will that he should use his late wife’s fortune to start a religious retirement home in the North Carolina mountains. Will becomes annoyed by both believers and non-believers, and he decides to settle the question of God’s existence definitively. He plans to enter a nearby cave and take sleeping pills until he either dies or God saves him. If God does not intervene, Will reasons that God either does not exist or is so careless as to be irrelevant.

Will enters the cave, setting up a system so that his death will be ruled as accidental if he is not saved. He lies there for several days, relying on the sleeping pills to reduce the discomfort of hunger and thirst. However, a bad toothache pulls him out of his stupor and, unable to tolerate the pain and nausea, he begins to try to crawl out of the cave. He gets lost in the dark and accidentally falls through a vent into Allison’s greenhouse. Allison nurses him back to health, and the pair find that they enjoy each other’s company and possess complementary skills. Allison is good at hoisting things, like the stove she moved up from the cellar to keep the greenhouse warm, and Will is good at remembering things and providing Allison with the right words to say.

After a few days recovering in the woods, Will returns to his life. He has a revelation in his car that his suicidal urges are his true enemy and that he should fight them. After getting into a bus accident, Will is sent to the hospital and diagnosed with a rare form of epilepsy called Hausmann’s Syndrome. Leslie arranges for him to be sent to the retirement community to live out the rest of his life playing golf and watching television. However, Will decides that he wants to continue to live and work, regarding the pleasures of retirement as a living death. He leaves the retirement home and returns to Allison. They declare their love for one another and plan to stay together. Will files legal paperwork to prevent Kitty from sending Allison back to a psychiatric institution, and Allison rediscovers her love of singing.