Loss of the Creature Analysis

Discovering the Loss of the Creature In Walker Percy’s essay titled “The Loss of the Creature,” Percy repeatedly attempts to instill the philosophy of realism in the mind of the reader. However, the manner in which he chooses to approach this goal is fairly peculiar, and uncommon among essayists. The essay is one of examples, mostly describing the pitfalls of expectation, and leaving much room for interpretation. It is felicitous that just as Percy desires to ingrain the value of the principle of discovery in the reader’s approach, the reader himself must discover the actual meaning of the essay. By looking through the examples, the reader soon picks out a couple that are particularly intriguing. That of a student in anatomy dissecting a dogfish, and the seemingly contradictory one of a tourist couple that gets lost and stumbles across an Indian village. Percy uses these (among others) to ask his audience to put aside expectations and preconceptions, and instead focus on the discovery, the creature, itself. He cautions against a “loss of sovereignty” (hence the initially cryptic title) and urges each individual to “wrest control of it [sovereignty; the creature itself]” to truly have a sense of awe and wonder at the creature—to possess his own island of Formosa. When dissecting an essay, it is appropriate to pick an example detailing dissection of a different nature. Percy details the story of a student who is dissecting a dogfish. The student seems to treat the experience as a simple assignment, one more collection of facts to be memorized. The physical dissection of the dogfish is simply a confirmation of the student’s expectations. “Yes, everything is in the right place, just like my book shows,” he seems to say. This is partially the fault of the “symbolic package” the experience comes from. The package consists of the preliminary reading, previous knowledge, lesson plans, and