Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide

Download or read book Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide written by John F. Desmond and published by Catholic University of America Press. This book was released on 2019-01-09 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walker Percy, and the Age of Suicide is a study of the phenomenon of suicide in modern and post-modern society as represented in the major fictional works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Walker Percy. In his study, suicide is understood in both a literal and spiritual sense as referring to both the actual suicides in their works and to the broader social malaise of spiritual suicide, or despair. In the 19th century Dostoevsky called suicide “the terrible question of our age”. For his part, Percy understood 20th century Western culture as “suicidal” in both its social, political and military behavior and in the deeper sense that its citizenry had suffered an ontological “loss of self” or “deformation” of being. Likewise, Thomas Merton called the 20th century an “age of suicide”.