The Moviegoer | Themes & Symbolism

The Moviegoer Significant Topics

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 philosophical strategies concrete form.

Put colloquially, Binx likes to have sex with his secretaries and go to the movies.

True to his Christian existentialism, Percy carries his reader...
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