The Message In The Bottle Summary

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After reading “The Message in the Bottle” by Walker Percy, one can conclude that Percy believes that each person on this earth is a “castaway” who is searching for revelation. He uses the analogy of the castaway to communicate the lessons of discernment between knowledge versus news, the importance of faith and how Christianity, specifically, can connect both. Percy begins the story with quotes on faith from Aquinas and Kierkegaard, but he lets the analogy of the castaway speak for itself and later on explains how knowledge and news connect to Christianity. Knowledge and news are keywords used to make the reading approachable and comprehensible. To put it simply, knowledge is a discovery or an experiment that anyone can accomplish. A form of …show more content…

Eventually he makes a name for himself, but part of him always seems drawn back to the waves that brought him to this island. One day, the castaway finds washed up bottles with messages, which sparks his curiosity. He decides that now he must understand each and every sentence and organize them into categories. Eventually he sorts them into news and knowledge. The separation of categories is extremely important to the castaway analogy, it is also important to acknowledge his process to this conclusion which may add guidance to human beings' decisions on core values. In the process of receiving bottle messages, the castaway organizes them into knowledge and news; there are other subcategories but he believes this is the most effective. Castaway tries to keep an objective mind when doing this so that he doesn’t take his own beliefs into account when deciding what is news and knowledge. However, it is later revealed that the castaways unconscious belief, the desire to know the truth, is what gave him the desire to sort the messages. Sorting those messages satisfies his desires and answers his questions, which allows the castaway to experience

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