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#TheThanatosSyndrome

The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) was Walker Percy's last novel. It is a sequel to Love in the Ruins. It tells the story of a former psychiatrist who suspects that something or someone is making everyone in the town crazy and they turn to (into) Read More..

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Review# tag	TheThanatosSyndrome
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Hash title	The Thanatos Syndrome
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Description	The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) was Walker Percy's last novel. It is a sequel to Love in the Ruins. It tells the story of a former psychiatrist who suspects that something or someone is making everyone in the town crazy and they turn to (into) zombies.In 1989, Percy stated that, in The Thanatos Syndrome:"I tried to show how, while truth should prevail, it is a disaster when only one kind of truth prevails at the expense of another. If only one kind of truth prevails -- the abstract and technical truth of science -- then nothing stands in the way of a demeaning of and a destruction of human life for what appear to be reasonable short-term goals." Critic Allen Pridgen—in his Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes (2000)—describes the "disconnectedness" that the protagonist, Dr. Tom More, begins to notice in The Thanatos Syndrome:"Perhaps the single most important idea in Percy's epistemology, expressed again and again in his essays and interviews (especially MB, 282), is his conviction that this kind of impoverishment in the power to name experience causes a subsequent impoverishment of consciousness and being since it is only through language transactions with others that the self locates who and where it is."Pridgen points out that it is not just the victims of the chemical additive in the drinking water who are being "impoverished":"....but also the scientists who victimize and study them. They, including Tom, are enclosed in a lifeless, self-constructed interior world of scientific abstractions that numb them to the realities of the phenomenal world and the flesh-and-blood people in it. All, Percy maintains, are casualties, of a 'century of death' (MCON,120-21), an 'age of thanatos' (TS, 86)."
Description	The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) was Walker Percy's last novel. It is a sequel to Love in the Ruins. It tells the story of a former psychiatrist who suspects that something or someone is making everyone in the town crazy and they turn to (into) zombies.In 1989, Percy stated that, in The Thanatos Syndrome:"I tried to show how, while truth should prevail, it is a disaster when only one kind of truth prevails at the expense of another. If only one kind of truth prevails -- the abstract and technical truth of science -- then nothing stands in the way of a demeaning of and a destruction of human life for what appear to be reasonable short-term goals." Critic Allen Pridgen—in his Walker Percy's Sacramental Landscapes (2000)—describes the "disconnectedness" that the protagonist, Dr. Tom More, begins to notice in The Thanatos Syndrome:"Perhaps the single most important idea in Percy's epistemology, expressed again and again in his essays and interviews (especially MB, 282), is his conviction that this kind of impoverishment in the power to name experience causes a subsequent impoverishment of consciousness and being since it is only through language transactions with others that the self locates who and where it is."Pridgen points out that it is not just the victims of the chemical additive in the drinking water who are being "impoverished":"....but also the scientists who victimize and study them. They, including Tom, are enclosed in a lifeless, self-constructed interior world of scientific abstractions that numb them to the realities of the phenomenal world and the flesh-and-blood people in it. All, Percy maintains, are casualties, of a 'century of death' (MCON,120-21), an 'age of thanatos' (TS, 86)."

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Name	The Thanatos Syndrome
Name
Authors	Walker Percy
Authors
Translator
Translator
Genre	Thriller novel
Genre
Series
Series
Number in series
Number in series
Language	English
Language
Country	United States
Country

PUBLISH

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Story timeline
Pages	372 pp (hardback edition) & 384 pp (paperback edition)
Pages
Media_type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Media_type
Isbn	0-374-27354-5
Isbn
Oclc	14718928
Oclc
Publisher	Farrar Straus & Giroux (HB) & Palandin (PB)
Publisher