The Moviegoer Study Guide

Walker Percy was born into a well-off Alabama family, the eldest of three sons. His life was marked by tragedy: when Percy was 13, his father committed suicide (as Percy’s grandfather had also done), and three years later, his mother was killed in a car accident. He and his brothers then lived in Mississippi with their uncle William Alexander Percy (to whom The Moviegoer is dedicated). William Alexander Percy was an educated, cultured Southern gentleman who had a profound influence on his nephew. Walker Percy attended the University of North Carolina followed by medical school at Columbia University, where he became interested in disease pathology. While working as an intern at Bellevue Hospital, Percy caught tuberculosis, and it was while recovering that he began to write in earnest. Around the same time, he had become interested in philosophers Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Soren Kierkegaard, and he came to believe that the philosophical novel could diagnose the modern world’s diseases, much as a doctor diagnoses medical conditions. He ended up walking away from a medical career. Following in his Uncle Will’s footsteps, Percy (along with his wife, Mary Bernice “Bunt” Townsend) converted to Catholicism, which he believed truthfully addressed the modern world’s problems. While his young daughter attended a nearby school for the deaf, Percy spent his days alone in a New Orleans house and worked on The Moviegoer, which, to his surprise, won the National Book Award. Percy ultimately wrote six novels and published a variety of essays touching on topics such as race, ethics, Christian thought, and language. Percy also taught at New Orleans’s Loyola University, where he mentored younger writers.

Binx is a veteran of the Korean War, which was fought between 1950 and 1953. The United States fought on the side of South Korea against the Communist North. Both North and South claimed to be Korea’s only legitimate government, and neither side accepted the border established at the peninsula’s 38th line of latitude. Under President Truman, the United States intervened following North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950, concerned to contain Communism in East Asia and deter the aggression of Communist governments elsewhere. Despite several years of catastrophic fighting, including Korean cities destroyed and many civilians killed, the border at the 38th parallel remained in place, and an armistice agreement was signed in July 1953, although North and South Korea are still technically at war. The Korean War occurred while the United States was enjoying an economic boom following the previous decade’s Second World War. In the novel, this growing affluence is evident—Binx sometimes refers to the ubiquity of advertising and the images it puts forward of the desirable life as in, for instance, a Dodge car ad—images that don’t always line up with reality.

Percy’s other novels include Love in the Ruins (1971), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). Percy was strongly influenced by the existential philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, whose Christian philosophical essay Fear and Trembling (1843) became available in English in 1919; Kierkegaard’s essay The Sickness Unto Death may have influenced Binx’s concept of malaise, or despair, in the novel. Flannery O’Connor, a fellow Southern Catholic writer, is known like Percy for a recurrent anti-modernist theme in her fiction, as seen in novels such as Wise Blood and stories like Everything That Rises Must Converge. Percy helped get John Kennedy Toole’s prizewinning A Confederacy of Dunces published in 1980 after Toole’s death. Finally, though protagonist Holden Caulfield is twice Binx’s age, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, with its themes of alienation and coming of age, has some resonances with The Moviegoer.