Message In The Bottle Summary

[1] Independent, complete experiences allow us to feel the full palette of emotions and comprehend the full depth and complexity of knowledge. But do we want to pursue that ideal through struggle every time we experience something, or should we be occasionally satisfied with the limited, “spoiled” experiences? In the second chapter of his book, “The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other”, Walker Percy argues that lack of independence, as well as the presence of “symbolic complexes,” or interpretations of an experience in the eyes of the public, deprives an individual of a truly full or “sovereign” experience. In order to make a point on a broad set of experiences, he extrapolates a hypothetical example of a tourist visiting the Grand Canyon following the “beaten path” on the general process of institutionalized learning, which simply put, means learning in colleges and high schools. Percy states that the tourist loses his sovereignty to the pre-formed symbolic complex that a tourist forms long before the actual visit. He argues that educational experience of studying “dogfish” (Percy 58), for instance, becomes spoiled by two primary concepts: the “packaging” of information, or delivering information in pre-organized, recurring …show more content…
First of all, he builds his reasoning on an incorrect assumption that all the incomplete, “unsovereign” experiences are universally inappropriate and idle. Moreover, he does not provide enough evidentiary support to demonstrate that the concepts of loss of sovereignty and pre-conceived symbolic complexes can be easily apply to education. In other words, Percy simply does not provide proof that what happens to students in a standard setting is identical to tourists’ unsatisfying experiences. In that way, Percy’s assumptions and logic seem to conflict with