In Walker Percy’s National Book Award–winning novel The Moviegoer, the protagonist, a restless and dislocated stock broker, Binx Bolling, sets out on a search. It’s the eve of his 30th birthday, and his trips to the movies and flings with his various secretaries have failed to satisfy him. Adrift in a world where tradition is breaking down and all grand narratives have been rejected, Binx is a modern everyman figure.

What is Binx searching for? That is not entirely clear. But if it’s unclear what Binx wants to move toward, it is more clear what he wants to move away from. He seeks to escape from what he terms, “the malaise,” a kind of peculiar modern ennui made up of several different parts. At one point, this phenomenon is defined more specifically as: “the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost.”

At other times, it is related to “everydayness,” as when Binx says: “everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible … now nothing breaks [everydayness] but disaster.” Indeed, Percy repeatedly refers to this idea that modern people are dead in their everydayness, and that it is only in moments of true catastrophe, when everydayness suddenly disappears, that people come alive and discover who they really are.

One of Binx’s love interests, Kate, makes this observation when she says to Binx, “Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?” and Binx himself extends this idea near the end of the book when he muses:

Is it possible that—for a long time I have secretly hoped for the end of the world and believed with Kate and my aunt and Sam Yerger and many other people that only after the end could the few who survive creep out of their holes and discover themselves to be themselves and live as merrily as children among the viny ruins. Is it possible that—it is not too late?

Thus a part of the malaise is the sense that, when caught up in mundane routines and formalities and expectations of life, “everyone becomes an anyone.” Kate and Binx are continually afraid of slipping through the cracks of time and place to find that they are nobody in no particular place—the world seems filled with an epidemic of depersonalization, the loss of humanness, which is replaced in a kind of desperation by a hollow humanism.

This loss of humanness is epitomized by Binx’s observation that people have difficulty even sinning properly:

Christians … keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. … The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human.

Percy suggests by all this that modern man has no strong root, no clear sense of where he is or who he is—he has lost connection even with his own human nature. This is a significant part of the malaise.

Binx’s search, then, is in opposition to the malaise, which is a combination of the knowledge and experience of tragedy, a loss of humanness and identity, and the tyranny of everydayness—all of which can perhaps be summarized as despair. Binx seems to be searching for the answers to whom and what he is in an existential sense, as well as a means of coping with the tragedy he encounters and of escaping a life of pure mundanity. This is an approximation, however. The exact nature of the search is never defined in the absolute.

The question, then, is where does the search lead Binx? Is it successful? Like Binx himself, I hesitate to answer too dogmatically. What we can say is that Binx does not have a mountaintop vision or a moment of eye-splitting brightness and insight. Not overtly, at least. His epiphany, if we can even use the term, is much more subtle. Binx himself says:

I have not the inclination to say much on the subject. … I have not the authority. … [I]t is not open to me even to be edifying. … [It is] much too late to edify or do much of anything except plant a foot in the right place as the opportunity presents itself.”

My interpretation of this passage is that Binx hesitates to impart some kind of sage wisdom (“my search led me to this understanding of the meaning of life”); he seeks not to edify, as he puts it, yet this does not mean that the search had been absolutely void. There is the hint of something beneath the surface here, something that Binx knows but is unwilling to say. Perhaps he cannot say it. Binx is an extremely intuitive character, and whatever he has learned or found through his search has been an experience of his entire being, and not necessarily one that is easily articulated in words.

We know, of course, that Binx has found Kate. That is certainly one result of the search. But I hazard that it goes deeper than this.

From his choice of Kate over the continuation of endless affairs with secretaries, we can note some kind of change in Binx. He chooses to marry and go to medical school, to embark on a serious career. These things seem at first glance to be mundane, the very thing Binx has been trying to escape. Thus his embracing of them indicates that his attitude has shifted in some way—he has discovered some kind of meaning within the mundane, a meaning that he previously could not grasp.

We can speculate as to whether Binx recovers his Catholic faith or not. Binx remains quite suspicious of religion, even at the end. Yet when he speaks to his step-brother and sisters about the death of one of their siblings, he speaks of the reality of a general resurrection.

Of course, one can argue that he is merely trying to comfort them and doesn’t actually believe what he says, but there is no narrative hint that we are to take his words as mere show here. Further, in the section just before this, Binx observes a man go into a Church, using this image as a metaphor to explore why mankind exists, and he considers the possibility of God:

It is impossible to say why [the man] is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?

It is impossible to say.

Impossible to say, but Binx does not rule out any explanation.

The religious question aside, I think we can infer that Binx has found one thing by the end of the book: hope. In the face of the despair and malaise that he has warded off for the whole book, he seems to end with some kind of hope. As mentioned above, Binx wonders near the end of the novel, “Is it possible that … it is not too late?”

He suggests that, after all, maybe it is not too late in his own life and in the collective life of humanity to rediscover what it means to be human. Not too late to begin to live. Not too late to love. Not too late to sin, and maybe begin not to sin. In a word, not too late to hope.

That, I think, is one of the most beautiful things to take away from this masterful novel, and a message the world could stand to hear right now.

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