The Moviegoer is Percy's most conscious and consistent attempt to express Kierkegaard's existentialism in concrete form: to depict an alienated individual struggling to find his way out. The epigram of the novel is from Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death: ". . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair." Binx Boiling, however, knows that he is in despair; he knows that his life is no longer working for him. He is on a search that "anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life." His search incorporates Kierkegaard's philosophical strategies to break-through everydayness — "rotation" and "repetition" — but, as a novelist, Percy gives the.....
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