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
Binx wakes up abruptly at 3:00 a.m., feeling haunted by scattered dreams. He has been sleeping on a cot in a corner of the porch, but the pleasant spot feels “used up,” and Binx is now overcome by his enemy, “everydayness.” Everydayness makes his search feel impossible; only disaster disrupts it. Everydayness is something which began in cities and has now infiltrated everywhere, even the corners of swamps.
As often happens, Binx’s happiness is later disrupted by malaise; his environment feels inescapably ordinary, and he can’t break through it just because he wants to. Though Binx blames “everydayness” on the generic atmosphere of big cities, it spreads everywhere.
Themes
Nobody in Binx’s family understands his search. His mother’s family thinks he has lost his Catholic faith, but Binx never believed in God to begin with. Even if the arguments for God’s existence are true, God doesn’t make a difference in Binx’s search. His father’s family, on the other hand, thinks that God isn’t necessary for a good life, but that only idiots and scoundrels fail to attain the good life. Binx can’t understand either perspective. In his notebook, he jots some “starting points” for the search—essentially, that he can’t rule out God’s existence, yet he also doesn’t believe that God can make any difference.
Binx’s malaise makes him think about God again. For him, the problem is not necessarily God’s existence; Binx just doesn’t see how God’s existence, if real, makes any difference in life. But the alternative presented by Aunt Emily is no better; it makes a meaningful life feel more accessible, yet shames those who don’t achieve it. Binx feels as if he’s at an impasse between those two value systems.
Themes
