The next citizen of Winesburg, Ohio is a man named Doctor Parcival. Unlike the other characters we’ve encountered, Doctor Parcival is not a pitiable character like Wing Biddlebaum, or a tender and sweet character like Doctor Reefy, or a sad character like Elizabeth Willard. Doctor Parcival is not really likable at all.
The Philosopher: An Overview
The main character in the story of “The Philosopher” is one Doctor Parcival. He is described as “a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a yellow mustache.” He wore a dirty waistcoat with cigars stuck in its pockets, he had black and irregular teeth, and his left eye was always twitching. He had come to Winesburg from Chicago about five years prior. He was often drunk, always dirty, and although he set up practice in town, he rarely had many patients. For some reason, though, he took a liking to George Willard.
It is also clear in the story that Doctor Parcival is somewhat of an enigma. No one really knew anything about him. He called himself a doctor but only had a few patients. He also told tales about himself that were probably not true and liked emphasizing to people like George that he really was a mystery because he wanted people to be intrigued by him and admire him.
One time, when he was talking to George, he claimed to have once been a reporter, but then quickly told George that maybe he was just concealing his true identity. He further egged George on by saying, “Have you ever thought it strange that I have money for my needs although I do nothing?” Then he quickly pivoted to telling George about an unsolved murder than had taken place in Chicago and said, “Perhaps I was one of those men.”
Another time, Doctor Parcival told George about his parents and let it “slip out” that his father had been insane and kept in an insane asylum in Dayton, Ohio, and then hinted that George should look into it to see whether or not he was telling the truth. Still another time, he told the story of his brother, who was a railroad painter, who drank away a lot of his money and never let anyone else in the family touch his money. But then, once he left for good, Parcival and his poor mother would receive packages in the mail, like groceries, dresses, or shoes.
Parcival then told George that while he was a reporter, he at one time studied to be a minister and would always be praying: “I was a regular ass about saying prayers.” And while he’d give the money he earned as a reporter to his mother, he would steal a few dollars from his brother’s pile of money to go spend on candy and cigarettes. Then, when his father died, he went to the asylum and prayed over his father’s body: “Let peace brood over this carcass!’
Whether or not any of what Doctor Parcival told George was true, we are never told. But it clearly Doctor Parcival wanted George to wonder about him. Let’s face it, the very way he said, “I was a regular ass about saying prayers,” and his actual prayer over his father about “peace brooding over this carcass” certainly should throw up some red flags as to the veracity of Parcival’s stories. Still, we never know for certain.
What George came to realize, though, was that Doctor Parcival “had but one object in view, to make everyone seem despicable.” Indeed, Doctor Parcival actually told George, “I want to fill you with hatred and contempt so that you will be a superior being,” and went on to say how much his brother hated Parcival and their mother, and how that he was a superior being to them. Then, out of nowhere, Parcival told George that his brother was dead: “Once when he was drunk, he lay down on the tracks and the car in which he lived with the other painters ran over him.”
The story ends with a little “adventure” Doctor Parcival had. He claimed he was writing a book, but one August morning as he was getting ready to see George in his office, there had been an accident on Main Street: a team of horses had gotten frightened by a passing train, broke loose from a buggy and ran off. There was a little girl in the buggy, the daughter of a farmer, who was thrown out of the buggy and killed. Three other doctors in town rushed to the scene, but Doctor Parcival refused to go. The narrator, though, tells us that no one in the town even noticed that Doctor Parcival had not come to the scene.
For some reason, though, when George got to Doctor Percival’s office, Percival was “shaking with terror” and convinced that word would get out and the people of the town would be enraged that he hadn’t got to the scene of the accident and they would try to hang him: “It may be put off until tonight, but I will be hanged. Everyone will get excited. I will be hanged to a lamp-post on Main Street.” He then whispered to George, “In the end I will be crucified, uselessly crucified.”
His immediate concern then became never being able to write his book. And so, he told George the central idea of his book: “Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.”
The Philosopher: My Thoughts
The way I see it, there are two ways we can see Doctor Parcival. Either he really did do something horrible in his past (like murder a man in Chicago) and is so arrogant that he just has to drops hints to people regarding how slick he was to get away with it, or he is just a big-talking nobody who just makes things up and tells tall-tales so that people think he really is someone mysterious and great.
I tend toward the latter. We’ve all met people like Doctor Percival before—those who have a self-inflated ego and who also go out of their way to tell people how great they are…but never actually do anything worth really admiring.
There simply is nothing to Doctor Parcival. He’s all talk, and nothing more. He thinks he is superior to everyone; he looks at everyone else with contempt. Why is that? Perhaps deep down, it is a sense of self-loathing that he projects on everyone else. It reminds me of the poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Miniver Cheevy.” Miniver Cheevy is a man who is always dream of knighthood and the romantic life of chivalry and who is convinced that he should have been born in those times because everything around him in the present day was beneath him. And then at the end of the poem, we have these lines:
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking
Instead of actually doing anything with his life, Cheevy sits at a bar and sneers at everything around him, because he has convinced himself that he is better than everyone else. The same can be said of Doctor Percival. He wants George to think that he once studied to be a minister, but what real minister says things like, “I prayed my ass off?” or “Let peace come over this carcass?” For that matter, it becomes highly doubtful that he even is a real doctor.
The real surprise, though, comes at the end, in the way he reacted to not going to the accident. Even though no one in town even took notice of him not being there, he had convinced himself that the entire town was going to hang him because he didn’t come to help. The juxtaposition of his over-inflated sense of self-importance and the complete ambivalence of the town towards him could not be more striking. Nobody really cares about him, but he is sure they are filled with rage at him…simply because he didn’t hurry to the scene of an accident?
Finally, what are we to make of the “central thought” of the book he never got around to writing? “Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.” Given the circumstance of what is going on in the story, it is clear that Doctor Percival views himself as a Christ figure and fears he’s going to get crucified. The illogical problem with his “central thought,” though, is that everyone is Christ. If that’s the case, how can the people who seemingly want to crucify Percival also be Christ? If that’s the case, how can Percival look down with contempt on everyone else? His central thought, like his entire life, reeks of self-delusion, arrogance…and fear. I have to think the fear stems from the fact that Parcival knows deep down he’s a complete sham, and he is terrified of getting found out, even though the reality is he is so insignificant, no one really pays attention to him and his tall tales in the first place.
One more thing: I’ve always wondered if his name holds any significance. In the Arthurian legends, Sir Parcival is one of the Grail knights. In the original tale by Cretien de Troyes, Parcival is a Welsh country-bumpkin who has tremendous ability, but who is so clueless and naïve that he misses the chance at attaining the Grail. Perhaps in some way, that applies here to Doctor Parcival.
