Abstract

This article offers four views of Walker Percy’s fourth novel, Lancelot: [1] The novel echoes themes engaged by William Faulkner in two of his works, Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun ; [2] Lancelot advances Faulkner’s particular assertion that the “past is never dead, it is not even past”; [3] as the novel’s epigraph suggests, Percy also writes Lancelot in relation to Dante Alighieri’s early 14th century poetic allegory, The Divine Comedy; [4] understanding Lancelot as an advancement of Faulkner’s view of history by means of Dante’s theology contradicts Shelby Foote’s memorial hope that Percy would be remembered “not merely [as] an explicator of various philosophers and divines,” but as a novelist in “simple and solemn fact.”