『타나토스 증후군』과 워커 퍼시의 생태학적 관심 = The Thanatos Syndrome and Walker Percy`s Ecological Concern

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In "The Postnatural Novel: Toxic Consciousness in Fiction of the 1980s"(1992), Cynthia Deitering includes Walker Percy among the novelists who share concern for the ecological problems of society. She cites Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) as a novel preoccupied with the question of chemical contamination of the environment. Although Percy himself was not particularly conscious of writing an ecological novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, a futuristic medical detective story, deals with the ecological themes of social engineering and euthanasia.
Percy's treatment of ecological themes is first represented in the practice of the chemical treatment of public water supply system that affects the brain functions of the local inhabitants. The scientists responsible for this experiment insist that they are helping people to overcome anxieties, scruples, and tensions thus enabling them to live carefree, efficient, high-achieving life. However, Tom More, the protagonist of the novel, discovers that this artificial manipulation of the water system, the so-called "Blue Boy Project", deprives people of their autonomy as individual human beings leading them to live at less than a human level without their normal worries and tensions. More also opposes the regular practice of euthanasia which is carried out with a view to maintaining the over-all quality of life. As a leitmotif for the development of his central theme, Percy borrows Flannery O'Connor's expression, "Tenderness leads to gas chambers", which refers to the sentimentalized practice of science-aided elimination of the lives of "the undesirable" exemplified in the Holocaust.
Percy's fiction stresses the importance of having correct and true understanding of humanity, which is the constitutive element of social environment for sustaining and fostering life. Thus the novelist's ecological concern represented in The Thanatos Syndrome is basically connected with his commitment to the ultimate concerns of human existence.