ENGLISH 22 Composition and Language

Restate Walker Percy's argumentative thesis in the selection "Loss of the Creature." What evidence does he use to support his argument? Is it valid--why or why not?

‘The Loss of the Creature’ is a powerful essay in which the writer Walker Percy has conveyed his view of the world completely in a different way. He has stated his argument in a notion that how a prepackaged idea about something, could build a ‘symbolic complex’ in an individual’s mind, which causes to lose the true experience and essence of that thing (Percy). One could have the true experience if only he or she could get rid of all the social images and prejudices of any particular thing. Another portion of his essay is about the loss of the sovereignty into the symbolic complex. Here the symbolic complex means the images and symbols created by the society about any particular thing that an individual mind gets before encountering that particular thing.

He has used evidences of Grand Canyon, couple visiting Mexico and a Falkland Islander boy and a college student’s view about a dogfish. The man, Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, who discovered the Grand Canyon saw it what it is (Percy). Other sightseer views the same thing by comparing the standards extracted from pictures, post cards or travel brochures about Grand Canyon. The loss of exclusiveness in case of Grand Canyon could be applicable in case of other two examples where one couple takes help from ethnologist for approving their experience about corn dance.

The argument is valid as whatever we see, the image of it is affected by the prepackaged images built by the society.

References

Percy, Walker. "The loss of the creature." The Message inthe Bottle: HowQueer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has toDo with the Other (2012).