SOURCE: Guagliardo, Huey. “Walker Percy, Bruce Springsteen, and the Quest for Healing Words in the Fiction of Richard Ford.” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures (fall-winter 2002): 424-26.

In the following essay, Guagliardo discusses the theme of storytelling as an antidote to loneliness and alienation, as expressed in Ford's fiction.

In The Message in the Bottle, Walker Percy points out that “There is no such thing, strictly speaking, as a literature of alienation.” As Percy explains, “In the representing of alienation the category is reversed and becomes something entirely different.” Arguing that literature of this type actually serves to defeat feelings of alienation by forming human connections. Percy describes a “triple alliance” of reader, alienated character in a novel, and novelist that is created via the language by which the “unspeakable” experience of alienation is rendered speakable. The reader's response takes the form of consoling recognition: “Yes! That is...