Analyzing Walker Percy's Another Message In The Bottle

How could something as little as reading determine your whole life? Walker Percy explains just how he believes this to be true in his essay, Another Message in the Bottle. According to Percy, you must make the breakthrough into reading in order to have a beautiful imagination, do well in your profession, and treasure your heritage. In Walker Percy's essay, he shortly mentions that making the breakthrough into reading is basically just finding the pleasure in reading. This pleasure ultimately brings out the vivid imaginations that would not be possible without it. Percy believes it to be so important that he even goes to say "that the flight of the imaginations [from reading]... is a thousand times more vivid, more real, more present, than the... TV screen" (55). Saying that reading makes your imagination a thousand times better in these areas is a huge declaration, but I believe that Percy is correct. Great novelists did not get their creative imagination from watching TV all day. These novelists were able to make that breakthrough into reading, and through this, they are able to create vivid pictures in their books through their imagination. …show more content…
Although reading is an extremely important aspect in a novelists life, reading is also quite important for other jobs. Walker Percy states that "no matter what you go in to -- law, medicine, computer science, housewifing [etc.]... you are not going to be first-class unless you've made this breakthrough" (54). In every single job that you do, paperwork, reports, and many other things that come from the knowledge of reading, these are all going to be necessary at some point, if not