DROPPING OUT: SPIRITUAL CRISIS AND COUNTERCULTURAL ATTITUDES IN FOUR AMERICAN NOVELISTS OF THE 1960S (UPDIKE, PERCY, BRAUTIGAN, PYNCHON)

The 1960s was a decade of spiritual as well as political restlessness. The counterculture embodied one highly visible manifestation of this spiritual discontent and of the problems attending its resolution in contemporary America. The period\u27s fiction constitutes a second manifestation of these concerns. As a social phenomenon, the counterculture also forms a significant part of the social context within which this fiction was written, a context affecting the attitudes and beliefs of many authors, including the four under consideration here: Walker Percy, John Updike, Richard Brautigan, and Thomas Pynchon. Chapter One sketches two relevant aspects of the theological context shaping both the period and its fiction: the breakdown of traditional theism and of social community. Chapter Two reads the counterculture as an instance of spiritual dissatisfaction, pointing to historical precedents and suggesting in what ways this discontent was unlike earlier examples of unease in America. Against this social-theological background Chapters Three-Six explore how particular spiritual problems were wrestled with in selected fictional works. Chapter Three discusses Percy\u27s The Moviegoer and the loss of wonder, a loss diminishing the scope and depth of emotional and spiritual life. Chapter Four looks at Updike\u27s Rabbit novels to consider love\u27s misconception and failure as vehicle to transcendence. Chapter Five discusses several works by Brautigan and the various ploys they forward to gain imaginative control over death. Chapter Six treats the reader of Gravity\u27s Rainbow, the culmination of Pynchon\u27s work throughout the Sixties, as protagonist to explore how the book\u27s style translates reading into the means of escaping the horrific, apocalyptic world this novel presents. The larger theme uniting these readings is the quest for a salvific vision in the secular world, a quest prompted by dissatisfaction with the status quo and provoking a disaffiliation from the social mainstream as a prerequisite to spiritual search