The novelist writes about the coming end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end....[but he] is less like a prophet than he is like the canary that coal miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air. When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries, and collapses, it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over. - Walker Percy

Very little can be said about the recent misadventures of modernism that hasn’t already been pointed out by some postmodern critic who regularly dances on the grave of certainty, rationality, and objectivity. The purpose of this work is not to argue that we are living in a postmodern world; this much is assumed, for better or worse. Something has changed. Some current of belief or unbelief has pushed modernity into waters it hadn’t charted out.

The scope of this work is focused on three Roman Catholic novelists of the 20th century: Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), Graham Greene (1904-1991), and Walker Percy (1916-1990). Each entered the scene while modernity was trying to recover from its freefall into relativism and uncertainty. Each novelist picked up on the signs that modernity was in its death-throes (something many modern evangelicals fail to notice even now). And each shared a common idea of what needed to be restored in order to bring peace back to an age of violence and uncertainty. In the middle of all the hundreds of postmodern philosophers and their weighty tomes, the books of Waugh, Greene, and Percy provide a perspective on our age which is accessible, relevant, and counter-intuitive. Many Christians still attempt to defend the faith within a modernist framework. Others have abandoned certainty and dogma, failing into the warm embraces of a postmodernity which is all-too-welcoming of any group which has fled from the abusive arms of dogma and Christendom. Claims to exclusivity or objectivity of belief were supposed to have been buried under the rubble of modernism. They now are left only to haunt the hollow cathedrals of dead Christianity with its dead god, drifting between gargoyles with a grotesque face only a medievalist could love.

The three novelists that will be analyzed subsequently are worthy of infinitely more ink than this thesis can afford. However, collectively, their works form a unique microcosm of the death of modernity. In their own ways, they perform individual autopsies on the haggard god which Nietzsche pronounced dead in 1882. These autopsies can be outlined in three overlapping parts: 1) an observation of the excess of immorality which presaged modernism’s final fall (Waugh); 2) an analysis of Europe’s senility and moroseness after two world wars (Greene); and, 3) a prognosis of what is to come based on the symptoms that plague the West (Percy). If this outline is a little vague, I trust excerpts of the stories and images of the novelists themselves will serve to clear things up.

The death of modernism can be (and has been) analyzed from a great many angles. The perspective which Waugh, Greene, and Percy (and hopefully this work) provide shares the outlook of the Preacher from Ecclesiastes. There truly is nothing new under the sun—a sermon which modernity apparently slept through during its youth. One finds in Ecclesiastes a pattern of youth, middle age, senility, and death which applies not just to individuals, but also to cultures and to ages. As our three novelists will demonstrate, the Preacher could’ve warned modernity about the evil that lay in wait for it. All the knowledge that can be stored up in books and minds and ages eventually falls under judgment. All that is hollow and vain will be exposed. All that vaunts itself will be lowered into earth at last. And every evil work will be burned under the same blood-red sun.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar