Throughout “The Loss of the Creature", Walker Percy tried to convey views regarding society and preconceived ideas. Percy explains that people have idealistic views of what something is going to be like or what they are going to experience from outside sources (such as travel guides, postcards, or teachers in school) . However, if the expectations people have do not match exactly what they were told or had in mind they are let down. I thought Percy did an excellent job of describing the situations and the imagery was excellent. I found one example, the educator and the student, especially striking. On page 493, paragraph three, Percy says: “Does this mean that there is no use taking biology at Harvard and Shreveport High? No, but it means that the student should know what a fight he has on his hands to rescue the specimen from the educational package.” What Percy means is that a student should learn from his or her teachers but this cannot be the only means of learning. The student must also try to separate themselves from their educational constraints so that they may infer their own thoughts and jump to their own conclusions. Percy goes on to say: “The educator is only partly to blame. For there is nothing the educator can do to provide for this need of the student. Everything the educator does only succeeds in becoming, for the student, part of the educational package. The highest role of the educator is the miaeutic role of Socrates: to help the student come to himself not as a consumer of experience but as a sovereign individual.” The educator must help the student see things from his or her own point of view, not that of anyone else’s. They can only help to a certain extent however. Obscuration by structure is one of the basic conditions of modern society. The individual is reduced to nothing more than a consumer. The individual thing becomes lost to the systems of classification and the theory created for the consumer, and the individual loses all...