The relationship of [Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Camus, and Sartre] to Percy's fiction is just beginning to be sorted out. Certainly the sorting-out is crucial, for Percy himself has insisted that the modern writer must be a "passionate propagandist" full of "passionate convictions." He must know who he is and what he stands for—only such knowledge, Percy has contended, provides the foundation for art. (p. 21)

Percy has been obsessed with "intersubjectivity"—a concept which the corpus of Percy's work suggests is the ground of being, the basis of consciousness, the way out of alienation, and a path to salvation.

The term, intersubjectivity, Percy took over from Gabriel Marcel, a French Catholic existentialist for whom Percy has felt a particular affinity. (p. 22)

Beginning with an article published in 1954 and continuing through at least The Moviegoer, published in 1961, Percy delineated with increasing concreteness what Marcel called "that unity which, of...