Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Moviegoer, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Value Systems
Women, Love, and Sex
Modern Life and the Search for Meaning
Loss, Suffering, and Death
Summary
Analysis
That night, Binx sleeps fitfully as usual. He has not slept soundly since he was injured in the war. Whenever he’s about to fall into a deep sleep, he is always jolted by the fear that something will happen and he’ll miss it—though he isn’t sure what “it” is. At dawn he walks through the silent suburbs toward the lake, thinking of his father. His father also suffered from insomnia and often prowled around at night. Binx’s mother was no help, further discouraging his father by making a glib joke of the situation.
Binx’s experience in the war was more traumatic than he readily admits—it alerted him to the necessity of a search, but it also causes physical wakefulness, which seems to overlap with the search in some way (the trauma of his experience is entwined with his fear of missing life’s meaning). Binx has such wakefulness in common with his father, and both of them feel misunderstood in their wanderings.
Themes
Unlike his father, Binx does not try to sleep, obsess over his health, or try to cultivate so-called stimulating hobbies. He thinks that such things make people complacent in their despair. He would rather fathom mystery. He thinks about the haunted-looking suburban houses and his father’s hopeless face. When he gets home, he falls asleep in the cul-de-sac next to the house.
Binx doesn’t try to find a solution for his insomnia or do anything that might distract him from his search. He fears ending up like his father—unsatisfied in life and thus not truly living, like a house in which nobody is at home. He has to keep looking.
Themes
