Sovereignty, an inextricable mixture of independence, autonomy, self discovery and freedom from influence, congruent to material, physical or spiritual experiences, is the theme of Percy's treatise, "The Loss of the Creature," where he asserts that a sovereign experience is the only form of "authentic" experience a person can go through. Virginia Woolf, too, channels in her novel, A Room of One's Own, a whole thought process, based on her thoughtful experiences, reflecting on the topic of women and fiction, on attaining a form of sovereignty.
The strategic concept of struggle centers the stage of both the piece of literature, "The Loss of the Creature," and A Room of One's Own. An attempt can be made to expose the overlapping theoretic dimensions of both, and perhaps ensconce the ideas comfortably using the former to unpack the latter. Struggle is a key element, between being an autonomous being, or being a "consumer" of the social reality. The idea that Percy knocks on, is that of self definition and self determination, which in essence overcomes what can be termed, double-consciousness (the act of seeing oneself, through the eyes of others, and measuring oneself by the tape of the world, which looks down in amused contempt or pity ). .
Percy, in his essay, writes about sovereignty, as the lost creature, and advices the readers, to explore oneself, and struggle to know the object to be known, whether it is oneself or other than oneself, materially or mystically. It is through this struggle that one goes beyond the conventions, which creates a person, of being an "authentic" person. There is a struggle that Percy presents for each person; as he describes a person to be "something one struggles for. But unless he also struggles for himself, unless he knows that there is a struggle, he is going to be just what the planners think he is." Percy stresses the gaining of knowledge through sovereign experience of an individual, vis a vis its own natural order, not via a presumed naturalized order created by societal entrepreneurs.
