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
Lately Binx has been wondering if everyone is actually dead. People sound like automatons who are just repeating stock phrases without any choice in the matter. Binx finds it cheering to go to the library to read political periodicals. He doesn’t know whether he’s liberal or conservative, but he finds the groups’ mutual hatred inspiring. In Binx’s eyes, only “haters” seem to be truly living.
Because Binx ponders everything so carefully, other people’s speech sounds lifeless to him. At least political vitriol shows an awareness that there are things worth fighting over, instead of dull complacency.
Themes
Today, as Binx emerges onto the library steps, he finds Nell Lovell. She tells Binx that now that she’s an empty-nester, she’s taking philosophy courses in the mornings, and she and Eddie have been confirmed in their values. She adds that they’ve agreed on a common life-goal: to make a contribution that “[leaves] the world just a little better off.” Binx just nods and listens, discomfited by Nell’s youthful earnestness, which seems merely “dead” to him.
For Binx, the lively Nell Lovell is a case in point, not an exception. That’s because she’s gone to the trouble of studying philosophy without altering her existing value system at all—the opposite of a search. Her goal to change the world for the better also sounds like Aunt Emily’s summons to “duty,” and to Binx, it’s just as meaningless.
Themes
