Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer is one of the most complex novels I’ve read in a while. When the subject of its complexity came up in class today, it was mentioned that there was nothing beautiful in it, so as I finished it, I sought to find things that I thought were beautiful within this dense, circular, funny, and all the while sad story. One of the first things I noticed about the narrator, Binx, was his conversational tone. There were several passages in the novel (particularly the beginning) that felt as if Binx was talking specifically to me, or perhaps writing in a journal. For example:
“Truthfully, it is the fear of exposing my own ignorance which constrains me from mentioning the object of my search. For, to begin with, I cannot even answer this, the simplest and most basic of all questions: Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? That is to say: Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?
On my honor, I do not know the answer, (14).”
The established voice is also very humorous. Later, on page 14, when Binx realizes that he is staring at a woman near him on the bus and sees her face change to one of annoyance, he says: “…she gives her raincoat a sharp tug and gives me a look of annoyance–or do I imagine this? I must make sure, so I lift my hat and smile at her as much as to say that we might still become friends. But it is no use. I have lost her forever.” I also thought this quote, among numerous others, were very revealing of Binx’s character. He is very engaged with the people around him, even if for his own “selfish” purposes, but simultaneously very disconnected with them. On pages 74 and 75 he says,
“I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see. Do not misunderstand me. I am no do-gooding Jose Ferrer going around with a little whistle to make people happy. Such do-gooders do not really want to listen, are not really selfish like me; they are being nice fellows and boring themselves to death, and their listeners are not really cheered up… My mother often told me to be unselfish, but I have become suspicious of the advice.”
On page 47, when Aunt Emily is playing what used to be hers and his favorite Chopin piece, he says, “In recent years I have become suspicious of music. When she comes to a phrase which once united us in a special bond and to which once I opened myself as meltingly as a young girl, I harden myself.” It is also revealed, later, when Binx and Sharon visit his mother, that she shares this trait, of “veer[ing] away from intimacy,” (149).
While he is disconnected from and engaged with the people around him, he also has a desire to please them, or perhaps a feeling that he is unable to please anyone. On page 41, as he discusses his friends from 8 years ago, he says, “What good fellows they were, I thought, and how much they deserved to be happy. If only I could make them happy.” And, again, on page 76, in reference to his aunt, he says, “She takes a great deal of trouble with me. I wish I were able to please her better.”
These quotes also show the romantic in Binx: nearly all of the details he provides about his interactions with the people in his life, as well as his surroundings and encounters with the world, are comprised of sensory images or sensitive feelings. My favorite quote from the novel, found on page 12, says, “In a better world I should be able to speak to her: come, darling, you can see that I love you.” Though it is not a sensory detail, and though Binx’s feelings of love towards women are complicated, I thought it to be such a beautiful line and a rather strange thing to think of someone he glanced at on a bus. Binx is quirky and isolated from people while at the same time being immensely concerned with how they view and affect him. I think that everything about his character in this novel makes him relatable to the people that read it because at some point in our lives, we all feel that we are stuck in “everydayness,” we are all selfish, all disconnected, to some extent, from those around us. I think a large part of Binx’s charm is that what happens to him in this novel, his emotions and experiences (maybe besides war), are things that happen to everyone.
JBell: You did such a wonderful job this term with your posts about the texts we read. All four of them were interesting and insightful and approached the texts in distinctive, creative ways. I enjoyed reading through them again today.