1. In The Loss of a Creature, if Percy attempted to convey why he thought todays average “consumer” of any type of information has succeeded in losing himself using one example, then the reader would be thoroughly confused. Most of us are trained consumers because of the society that we’ve grown-up in. In order to break us out of this stereotypical mind and have us think outside the box, it is necessary for him to re-train, if you will, our minds so that we can see and experience life in a new way. He does this step by step by building up one example through a series of smaller examples that somehow relate to the center example. The two main examples he creates are the tourist and the student. He moves from the first to the latter to demonstrate how the “consumer’s” mind is created; the progress of thought of a sovereign mind to a consumer mind. His two examples demonstrate different aspects of Percy’s logic, but he shows how the consumerism stays and affects every aspect of our society and keeps us from being sovereign. The tourist comes to the Grand Canyon to observe the information about the site that he was previously told to expect. On the other hand, the student comes to class to learn the information he is expected to know to tell other consumers in his future job. A circular pattern is created in which the “symbolic complex” is trapped and integrated. We learn (consume) facts in school to give the symbolic complex created by the facts to consumers. Through the tourist, Percy shows where the person has lost himself. His perceptions are spoiled by his expectations. The tourist surrenders the sovereignty of his own expertise. He has given more weight to the opinions of others than his own. This is the progress of thought that he has tried to convey, the loss of our ability to have an authentic experience, to form our own interpretations of experience, which slowy form who we are. He solidifies his logic through the example of the student. The student is the source of the symbolic complex because he is the future distributor to the consumers. The student can never form his or her own symbolic complex to pass on because they go to school to consume the expert’s information, and consequently learn as an exercise, not a “delight”. They exercise in their brain whatr they’ve been told, they don’t delve into the subject willingly and see it in their own way.
2. The interests of the individual are represented in The Loss of the Creature. When he refers to “the loss of sovereignty” and “the loss of the creature” he is referring to the human who loses the himself. Percy demonstrates this loss in two ways: objectification and abstraction. First, he shows the consequences of objectification, the replacement of an object by an idea, with the example of the tourist. The tourist, because of the Grand Canyons symbolic complex, has preconceived notions about what the canyon will be like. Already he has failed in seeing the Canyon. Isn’t it true that a person is dissapointed if something isn’t experienced by them as advertised? There is the loss of sovereignty; the person has given up the right to form his or her own perceptions. They are experiencing someone elses experience, not there own. The canyon is now no longer a canyon, but an idea. To make things worse it’s not even the idea of the tourist, it’s the idea formed by someone else’s experience. He becomes partly someone else in the mind as a result. The negative effects of abstraction are shown through Percy’s example of the dogfish. Through classification, the dogfish is referred to Squalus acanthias. We no longer think of the dogfish as an individual, but rather as the specimen that should look like the idea shown in the textbook that is owned by the student. Through this abstraction, the fish has become objectified, it has become an idea. Everyday people look around to see if they are up to society’s standards. They are a member of society and no longer an individual in that moment. They don’t act like themselves, they act like the idea of the human race. Percy is looking out for the interests of the individual here so that he or she is not a repeated victim of consumerism. By being “subversive” to abstraction and objectification, the individual can “struggle” for himself.
