Percy's Essay 'The Loss Of The Creature'

1400 Words6 Pages
The Analysis of Percy’s Classifications of Readers The act of reading becomes most effective when it becomes an ongoing collaboration between both the reader and the author of the work. It is one’s responsibility as an effective reader to naturally question and contribute the main ideas of the author, and then work towards developing a deeper understanding of the material. The ability of a person to approach the act of reading with this constructive mindset allows them to be either distinguished as a “common” or a “complex” reader based on how they perceive the work. The ideas presented in the essay "The Loss of the Creature”, written by Walker Percy, allows for readers to be either classified as “common” or “complex” based on the observation of whether they choose to advance on given…show more content…
When reading a work, the “common” reader has already made the decision to not “collaborate” with the author’s ideas, and chooses not to leave their “mark” on the work as they overlook the opportunity to perform a deeper analysis of the main ideas. Due to the “common” reader’s inability to conceptualize the deeper meanings of certain ideas, he or she is therefore unable to comprehend all of the concepts the author intended to convey to readers. The “common” reader reads Percy’s essay "The Loss of the Creature" and extracts only the main ideas of the work, as they miss out on a “deeper” understanding of the concepts given by Percy. The “common” reader would most likely read each paragraph as a boring collection of meaningless statements, as they put strong emphasis on noting the simple ideas of a topic, instead of analyzing the main ideas and making comprehension of these concepts the main priority. Percy introduces an example that effectively allows different types of readers to be immediately distinguished based on how they choose to perceive certain

More about Percy's Essay 'The Loss Of The Creature'

Open Document