The Moviegoer by Walker Percy: A Review

Thesis Statement

The Moviegoer is one of the finest literary works of Walker Percy.

Introduction

Some novels simply do not go away. They lodge in your consciousness, expanding rather than disappearing after the last page is turned. Although there are countless other books waiting to be read, you find yourself returning to this one, hungry and perplexed, and even a bit uneasy about its effect on you. Its mysteries deepen with each reading. Your curiosity about it is never quenched. You cannot dispense with it.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy: A Review

The Moviegoer has proved to be just such a book for me, as it has for countless others. The writing of Richard Ford and David Gates, for instance, is unimaginable without this slim novel. I first read it while a college student, and have reread it a dozen times since. And each reading has had the same jolting effect on me. It's not that there is anything so special about the story itself. Set around the time of carnival in 1950s New Orleans, Walker Percy's first novel depicts a few days in the life of John Bickerson Bolling, known as Binx, a 30-year-old New Orleans stockbroker from a "good" family (Percy, pp. 34-89). As the story opens, he is undertaking the low-intensity seduction of his new secretary, a big-boned and suspicious southern girl who, like just about everyone else in the book, doesn't quite know what to make of her suitor. When his seduction fails, Binx visits his mother's new family at their summer lodge, using the opportunity to take his 14-year-old half-brother, Lonnie -- dying of a spinal affliction -- to the movies.

He then travels on business to Chicago with his emotionally brittle cousin Kate, who is in fact escaping the close scrutiny of her mother, Binx's formidable Aunt Emily, as well as her psychiatrist. The trip ends in disaster, with Binx's inconclusive lovemaking with his cousin in a train's sleeper causing further chaos. The novel's action concludes with Binx being called to the carpet by his aunt, who despairs of his feckless disregard for his privileged place in the world.

Despite this near plotlessness and the novel's beautifully effortless style, The Moviegoer is in fact one of the most profound novels ever written. Using the elusive thought of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard as his foundation, Percy traces with unforgettable precision an individual soul's passage through the world. His Binx is on a search that proves every bit as urgent as that of Bunyan's pilgrim, Christian, as he looks for a way of living that helps him avoid being "sunk in everydayness" (Percy, pp. 34-89). He sees the people around him -- draped in rectitude and tradition, believing their personalities are solid items and their values founded on eternal truths -- as being, quite simply, dead.

Binx's compulsive moviegoing becomes an unexpected remedy for this death-in-life. Through it, he is able to inhabit a sort of parallel dimension, where reality and unreality collide, creating a heightened sense ...