The Thanatos Syndrome: Analysis of Major Characters

Author: Walker Percy

First published: 1987

Genre: Novel

Locale: Louisiana

Plot: Moral

Time: The 1980's

Thomas More, a psychiatrist, psychiatric outpatient, and bad Catholic in a dissolute and decrepit postmodern Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Dr. Tom, as he is commonly known, has settled down with his Presbyterian bride, Ellen, into what he believes to be a comfortable, if somewhat unlucrative, private practice. His female patients begin making sexual advances, presenting him with their hindquarters in a gesture that Dr. Tom finds disturbingly simian. He discovers correlating evidence of something awry when a local Catholic priest, Father Smith, holes up in a fire tower and refuses to come down. His fears are confirmed when even his formerly stalwart and conservative wife begins to act strangely and suddenly blossoms into one of the best contract bridge players in the world. All these oddities turn Dr. Tom into a detective. His research eventually leads to his discovery of a physical crisis emblematic of a larger spiritual crisis, a chemically caused worship of death and deviance that has gripped the parish. Dr. Tom reveals the cause of this syndrome, but only after personally facing the temptations offered by the chemical pseudo-cure.

Ellen Oglethorpe More, the former nurse and longtime wife of Dr. Tom. Ellen becomes an inverse of her former self in the first two-thirds of the novel as she is affected by the sodium-based drug that two experimenters, Dr. Bob Comeaux and John Van Dorn, introduce into the water supply of Feliciana Parish. In addition to becoming a wizard at mathematical computations and card playing, Ellen loses her moral grip and has at least one extramarital affair.

Dr. Bob Comeaux, a bureaucrat responsible for the “sodium shunt” that releases a mind-altering drug into the water system. Comeaux, who has a fondness for Mercedes automobiles and Strauss waltzes, is an archetype of the social engineering scientist who prefers order to freedom and the exercise of the individual will. After Dr. Tom proves that the sodium-based drug leads to deviance and perversion, Comeaux skulks away and becomes a free-lance scientist who is said to work as a consultant to authoritarian governments.

John Van Dorn, the despicable counterpart to Comeaux's order-craving scientism. Van Dorn is a pseudoscientist whose health clinic becomes a center for child molestation and perverted sexuality. Poisoned by his own drug, Van Dorn is exposed as a pedophile, leading to the end of the Thanatos experiment.

Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, a Catholic priest who recognizes that the parish is in trouble. Smith's unusual solution is to climb into a fire tower and refuse to come down. Dr. Tom is chosen as ambassador to Smith, and he tries unsuccessfully to convince the priest to leave the tower. Father Smith's Dostoevski-like “confession” to Dr. Tom concerning his temptation by the death-worshiping Nazism of the 1930's forms the dramatic center of the novel. Whether Dr. Tom understands the symbolic importance of Father Smith's fable is uncertain, but he is led to act in a manner that brings to an end the possibility of a similar death cult in the parishes of Louisiana.

Lucy Lipscomb, Dr. Tom's cousin, an epidemiologist who becomes involved in his investigation. Her access to government data banks is a key part of his work.