Finder and Maker Reversed in The Moviegoer Essays

Finder and Maker Reversed in The Moviegoer Walker Percys novel The Moviegoer chronicles a week in the life of stockbroker Binx Bolling, and his eventual marriage with his step-cousin Kate Cutrer. More than that, it sketches Binxs peculiar philosophy, and Kates equally strange orientation, and their eventual transposition. Binx begins as an enjoyer of reality, a searcher, or finder of relief from tedium, and Kate as a frantic searcher who becomes a maker of crises to relieve her post-modern ennui. But by the end of the novel, their beginning positions are almost reversed, muddled together to form a more healthy relationship. Both Binx and Kate are self-aware characters in a world of actors, the only ones to realize the†¦show more content†¦Even Binxs father is said to have died at Crete, in the wine dark sea (p. 20) -- a cliche as old as Homer. Where Binx and Kate differ is in their responses to this world. Binx is content to glide through life: he managed to go to college four years without acquiring a single honor (p. 31) and his aunt Emily tries to summarize his behavior, saying that one finding oneself in one of lifes critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on ones heel and leave. Exit. (p. 193) This diagnosis is not strictly true -- after all, Binx spends some time making another moviegoer (p. 120), his crippled cousin Lonnie, happy (pp. 142-6). But he does pass through life as a selfish observer, and his family makes it easy for him -- as an eight-year-old, he is told to act like a soldier (p. 2) (obey orders unquestioningly and without emotion?), and when family troubles with Kate break out he is instructed to show up, knowing nothing, come looking for her and fetch her down to dinner (p. 152). His is an act of inn ocence, of inactivity, a gathering of information. Yet he takes pleasure in the very act of observing, and it is thus that he escapes ennui, the malaise. Binx has a pathological need for information: about the movie theaters he attends and their employees, about whatever city he visits (such as Chicago, where he longs for a source of information