Binx Bolling is an ordinary, even archetypal, 1950s American man. A New Orleans stock and bonds broker, Binx is “a model tenant and a model citizen […] [who takes] pleasure in doing all that is expected.” He also enjoys aspects of burgeoning consumerism, like regular moviegoing and trendy new cars, that characterize an increasingly mass-produced, generic American culture. However, deep down, Binx is dissatisfied with this shallow world and yearns to find transcendent meaning and happiness. To that end, Binx embarks on what he calls “the search” to overcome the “everydayness” of mundane existence—a frustrating process as he discovers that trying to get beyond everyday life leads to a feeling of disconnection as well. Through Binx’s efforts to overcome the everydayness of modern life, Percy suggests that meaning is found neither by passively accepting nor by escaping mundanity, but by seeking to connect more deeply with one’s everyday experiences.
Binx struggles to understand his place in the world and cope with “everydayness,” or the mundanity of everyday life. Binx often experiences a condition called “malaise,” or a sense of meaninglessness and disconnection from life, which Percy suggests is characteristic of life in the modern world. To overcome malaise, Binx goes on what he calls “the search”: “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” In other words, Binx sees modern people as being absorbed in their daily lives and oblivious to anything beyond them; if they weren’t oblivious, more people would embark on a search like his. Part of the malaise motivating Binx’s search comes from the feeling that modern life is generic, that places and the people who inhabit them are losing their distinctiveness.
Binx feels adrift and cut off from a sense of place and identity, which is particularly evident when he visits big cities like Chicago. Arriving in Chicago’s train station, he frets, “if only somebody could tell me who built the damn station […] so that I would not fall victim to it[.] Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person […] in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone.” Binx’s discomfort speaks to the idea that in 1950s America, places (and the people in them) were becoming increasingly generic and thus devoid of meaning. Cities appear indistinguishable from one another, and an individual can become “an Anyone” unless he connects somehow with the specific facts of a place.
Moviegoing is another aspect of mass-production in 1950s America. A moviegoer could easily “be lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking.” While at the movies, “It is possible to become a ghost and not know whether one is in downtown Loews in Denver or suburban Bijou in Jacksonville.” When everyone—in Denver, Jacksonville, and everywhere else in the United States—is watching the same movies, a specific someone can become a kind of mass-produced “ghost,” cut adrift from what’s local and specific. Again, Binx feels despair in a world in which everywhere and everyone is seemingly the same—in which mundanity and conformity stifle transcendent meaning.
Binx discovers that meaning is found by engaging more deeply with everyday life, not by trying to escape from it. Unlike people who use moviegoing as a means of escapism, Binx uses it as a way to deepen his engagement with life. He individualizes the experience of moviegoing (by getting to know the theater workers, for instance) and finds meaning in the experience by connecting to the context around the movies: the atmosphere, place, and people. At a bayou drive-in with his half-brother and girlfriend, Binx exults, “this ghost of a theater, a warm Southern night, the Western Desert […] My heart sings […] and there is great happiness between me and Lonnie and this noble girl[.]”) These everyday things, which could be considered mundane, become deeply meaningful to Binx—more meaningful than the mere escape of watching a movie.
The drive that Binx takes in his “fine new Dodge” with his secretary Marcia also exemplifies the modern world’s emphasis on consumption (he and Marcia are “like the American couple in the Dodge ad,” but as he drives, Binx finds that “the malaise quickly became suffocating”—emulating the anonymous couple in the ad seems to cut him off from real life, not to make life better as the ad promises). This contrasts with Binx’s subsequent drive with a later girlfriend, Sharon, which he finds meaningful and beautiful because this time, Binx is content with the “little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car,” and a charming woman. Instead of aspiring to the anonymous happiness promised by advertising, he finds a simple, specific happiness with Sharon that feels more genuine and sustainable. This underscores the idea that any experience can be meaningful, even those that are seemingly mundane—and it’s up to the individual to search for that meaning.
Reflecting on this car ride, Binx concludes, “It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way” instead of “the big search for the big happiness.” In other words, even ordinary experiences can be meaningful, and the “Little Way” or the “little happiness” of everyday moments aren’t less meaningful than the “big search” for an elusive happiness that transcends mundane experiences.
Binx’s “[settling] for the Little Way” prepares him to eventually settle down with his wife, Kate, at the end of the book. Kate has many anxieties about everyday life, and Binx, because of his long-practiced attention to the mundane, is able to coach her through these anxieties one at a time. Thus married life, which a younger Binx might have scorned as being mired in “everydayness,” actually becomes a way of continually seeking meaning in mundanity—through helping Kate navigate the little things of life—rather than drifting into a mass-produced lifestyle of “malaise.”
Related Themes from Other Texts
Modern Life and the Search for Meaning ThemeTracker
Modern Life and the Search for Meaning Quotes in The Moviegoer
Life in Gentilly is very peaceful. I manage a small branch office of my uncle's brokerage firm. My home is the basement apartment of a raised bungalow belonging to Mrs. Schexnaydre, the widow of a fireman. I am a model tenant and a model citizen and take pleasure in doing all that is expected of me. My wallet is full of identity cards, library cards, credit cards. […] It is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citizen and to receive in return a receipt or a neat styrene card with one's name on it certifying, so to speak, one's right to exist.
The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.
What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
All the stray bits and pieces of the past, all that is feckless and gray about people, she pulls together into an unmistakable visage of the heroic or the craven, the noble or the ignoble. So strong is she that sometimes the person and the past are in fact transfigured by her. They become what she sees them to be.
I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. He could do research for a thousand years and never have an inkling of it. By the middle of August I could not see what difference it made whether the pigs got kidney stones or not (they didn't, incidentally), compared to the mystery of those summer afternoons.
"I no longer pretend to understand the world." She is shaking her head yet still smiling her sweet menacing smile. "The world I knew has come crashing down around my ears.” […] For her too the fabric is dissolving, but for her even the dissolving makes sense. She understands the chaos to come. It seems so plain when I see it through her eyes. My duty in life is simple. I go to medical school. I live a long useful life serving my fellowman. What's wrong with this? All I have to do is remember it.
There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next. But now I have undertaken a different kind of search, a horizontal search. As a consequence, what takes place in my room is less important. What is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander in the neighborhood. Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
If I did not talk to the theater owner or the ticket seller, I should be lost, cut loose metaphysically speaking. I should be seeing one copy of a film which might be shown anywhere and at any time. There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time. It is possible to become a ghost and not know whether one is in downtown Loews in Denver or suburban Bijou in Jacksonville. So it was with me.
“Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck—people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell's death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.”
One minute I am straining every nerve to be the sort of person I was expected to be and shaking in my boots for fear I would fail—and the next minute to know with the calmest certitude that even if I could succeed and become your joyous and creative person, that it was not good enough for me and that I had something better. I was free. Now I am saying good-by, Merle. And I walked out, as free as a bird for the first time in my life […] I know I am right or I would not feel so wonderful.
[O]n my first trip to the Gulf Coast with Marcia, I discovered to my dismay that my fine new Dodge was a regular incubator of malaise. Though it was comfortable enough, though it ran like a clock, though we went spinning along in perfect comfort and with a perfect view of the scenery like the American couple in the Dodge ad, the malaise quickly became suffocating. We sat frozen in a gelid amiability. Our cheeks ached from smiling. […] I longed to stop the car and bang my head against the curb.
Joy and sadness come by turns, I know now. Beauty and bravery make you sad […] and victory breaks your heart. But life goes on and on we go, spinning along the coast in a violet light […] We pull into a bay and have a drink under the stars. It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.
Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man's world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. […] Losing Duval, her favorite, confirmed her in her election of the ordinary. No more heart's desire for her, thank you. After Duval's death she has wanted everything colloquial and easy, even God.
A good night: Lonnie happy (he looks around at me with the liveliest sense of the secret between us; the secret is that Sharon is not and never will be onto the little touches we see in the movie and, in the seeing, know that the other sees […]), this ghost of a theater, a warm Southern night, the Western Desert and this fine big sweet piece Sharon.
It was ten years ago that I last rode a train, from San Francisco to New Orleans, and so ten years since I last enjoyed the peculiar gnosis of trains, stood on the eminence from which there is revealed both the sorry litter of the past and the future bright and simple as can be, and the going itself, one's privileged progress through the world. But trains have changed. […] Our roomettes turn out to be little coffins for a single person. From time to time, I notice, people in roomettes stick their heads out into the corridor for some sight of human kind.
[…] [I]f only somebody could tell me who built the damn station, the circumstances of the building, details of the wrangling between city officials and the railroad, so that I would not fall victim to it, the station, the very first crack off the bat. Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff—tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets—in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone[.]
It pleases [the salesman] to speak of his cutter and of his family down in Murfreesboro and speak all the way to Union City and not once to inquire of me and this pleases me since I would not know what to say. Businessmen are our only metaphysicians, but the trouble is, they are one-track metaphysicians. By the time the salesman gets off in Union City, my head is spinning with facts about the thirty five cent cutter. It is as if I had lived in Murfreesboro all my life.
"Would you verify my hypothesis? […] First, is it not true that in all of past history people who found themselves in difficult situations behaved in certain familiar ways, well or badly, courageously or cowardly, with distinction or mediocrity, with honor or dishonor. They are recognizable. […] Such anyhow has been the funded experience of the race for two or three thousand years, has it not? Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. […] Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly?
"I did my best for you, son. I gave you all I had. More than anything I wanted to pass on to you the one heritage of the men of our family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women—the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life. Ah well.”
"What has been going on in your mind during all the years when we listened to music together, read the Crito, and spoke together—or was it only I who spoke—good Lord, I can't remember—of goodness and truth and beauty and nobility?" […] Don't you love these things? Don't you live by them?"
"No."
"What do you love? What do you live by?"
I am silent.
I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God's own importunate bonus? It is impossible to say.
"I've got to be sure about one thing […] I'm going to sit next to the window on the Lake side and put the cape jasmine in my lap?"
"That's right."
"And you'll be thinking of me just that way?"
"That's right."
"Good by."
"Good by." […] I watch her walk toward St Charles, cape jasmine held against her cheek, until my brothers and sisters call out behind me.
