Beginning of Essay
In addition to finding meaning and purpose to his life, Will Barrett in Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman must attribute some meaning to his father's suicide in order to resolve his ongoing grief. Suicide survivors experience dramatic shock and trauma as explain ....

Middle of Essay
.... by his father's suicide. In the end, Jamie and Sutter Vaught, as adopted family, help Will find meaning in life and resolution with his father's suicide. Suicide may be the least forgivable sin of all human betrayals; Ed Barrett arrogantly and selfishly committed suicide, leaving himself dead and unanswerable to his son. As John M. Schwartz states, what finally provoked Mr. Barrett to suicide was, "His dance of honor collapsed amidst its moral ambiguities. At the last, he was a moralist, but his world completely failed to stand at the moral attention he demanded" (117). What he wanted was for all gentlemen to accept the burden of noblesse obl ....