The Loss of One's Own Voice in the World.
In "The Loss of the Creature," Walker Percy writes that understanding can be reached through a so called true experience. According to Percy, one can only have a true experience if they can get rid of all the social biases and prejudices, and experience it by ignoring everything one has already heard about it. Throughout the story Percy is concerned with people losing their own voice in the world and giving into what they are told. He is also concerned with places losing their overall appeal to the public, for example the Grand Canyon. He uses example after example to illustrate our struggle to see the things before us seriously. .
The thing that bothers Walker, as said before, are objects and people losing their value in the world. Every time people look at the canyon they give up their creature or identity in the world and this is what concerns Percy the most. With technology and the Internet booming these days, people can look at sites or watch movies about the Grand Canyon and at that moment they lay eyes on it, they give up their identity and conform to someone else's. One can see this bothers him most in his writing by the use of example after example. The student and the Falkland Islander, the young couple on vacation, and the Grand Canyon, are all examples of people or places either losing their inner creature or of people trying to restore their inner creature. .
The line "the sightseer's satisfaction is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the performed symbolic complex," has a very true meaning. Percy argues that all the hype built up about the Grand Canyon taints the sightseers' vision. "The thing (Grand Canyon) is something that has already been formulated-by picture postcards, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon." Percy claims the sightseer will never see the Grand Canyon for what it is, as a fixed value of interest, unless one breaks away from the confrontation with the sight.
