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Chapter 1, Section 2
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
Uncle Jules is at lunch, along with Kate and her fiancé, Walter, and everyone is smiling. Binx and Uncle Jules get along well because Binx has become a successful moneymaker: he has a knack for selling the stocks that Jules underwrites. Uncle Jules and Walter get along well because Walter was once the manager of Jules’s beloved Tulane football team. Binx sees him as the only person he knows “whose victory in the world is total and unqualified.” Jules is wealthy, well-liked, generous, and a good Catholic.
Uncle Jules is everything that Binx isn’t—successful, secure in what he believes, and comfortable in his place in the world. Though Binx has discovered a knack for Jules’s business, he doesn’t fit in with the men of the family otherwise. In fact, the family atmosphere seems to offer little space for those whose “victory in the world” is less complete, which also describes Kate.
Themes
Kate has a “brown-eyed look.” It’s not unprecedented for Aunt Emily to ask Binx to help Kate. When Kate was a friendless 10-year-old, Emily asked 15-year-old Binx to try to help Kate overcome her shyness, but Kate had only given Binx that same, brown-eyed look. Binx studies Walter, who is only 33 but is already a senior partner at a new firm. Amid the banter, Kate abruptly sighs and leaves the room. Walter follows her, but Uncle Jules continues eating as if nothing has happened.
Kate’s struggles date back to childhood, implying that they didn’t originate with the car accident and that Binx, too, is intimately familiar with them. The family leans on Binx to help Kate as her parents are unable or unwilling to do. Her wide-eyed look appears when she’s having an especially difficult time. Walter’s eminence in his field contrasts with Binx’s relative lack of success, despite being only a few years older.
Themes
After lunch, Walter tries to talk Binx into rejoining his Carnival krewe, which includes men from New Orleans’ 10 wealthiest families. Walter’s ease and grace remind Binx how, in college, Walter was the campus’s trendsetter. In their fraternity, young pledges strained to win Walter’s approval. When Binx was a freshman, joining a fraternity had been very important to him. When Binx was a new candidate, he offered to pledge Delta on the spot, and Walter warmly welcomed him and introduced him to the other men.
Binx and Walter spent their youth together, and Binx used to admire men like Walter and desire their approval much more than his present attitudes would suggest. He even aspired to such conventional things as fraternity membership. Now, joining a krewe—a sort of rough equivalence to a fraternity—no longer appeals to Binx, suggesting that his values and his desire for approval have shifted significantly.
Themes
In the end, however, Binx wasn’t much of an asset to the fraternity. His college years were undistinguished; he didn’t win a single honor, and he spent most of his time daydreaming on the fraternity house porch. Back in the present, Binx resists Walter’s prodding to rejoin the krewe and go hunting with his group of friends. Making conversation, Walter asks him what’s wrong with the world these days. Binx starts to tell him about his search, but Walter changes the subject. This is what usually happens when somebody asks Binx “what’s wrong with the world.”
Though Binx aspired to conventional things like fraternity membership, he didn’t actually seem to be a good match for them, suggesting a disconnect between conformist culture (like that found in a college fraternity) and his actual temperament. This suggests that while Binx’s “search” was slow to take shape, he’s always felt social pressure to fit in and to act like something he isn’t.
Themes
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After the Korean War, a group of friends, including Walter and Binx, bought a houseboat. But Binx quickly found all the hunting, fishing, card-playing, and drinking to be dull. In fact, Binx hasn’t really had friends since he first returned from the war. Around the same time, he started hanging around with two men, a poet and an eccentric musician, and they decided to hike the Appalachian Trail together. Although he was happy at first, Binx quickly grew depressed. He wished his friends well and moved to Gentilly.
Binx has always felt somewhat alienated from his peers, even from those he’s considered friends. The activities that feel meaningful to them don’t feel worthwhile to Binx. By extension, his alienation suggests that for Binx, neither conventional nor more eccentric pursuits have proven sufficient to help him cope with the suffering he faced in the war, which goes unresolved.
Themes
Binx has lived in Gentilly ever since, constantly lost in wonder. Occasionally his eccentric old friends stop by whenever they’re in New Orleans, and Binx continues wishing them well. But Binx just stays home and watches TV. At least television doesn’t distract him from wonder.
Binx’s life now is a paradox. On one hand, it’s a much more conventional life than others’, yet he implies that he “wonders” more than his vagabond friends do, even while engaging in activities that seem like escapism. This suggests that Binx’s search for meaning has to do with one’s attitude toward life more than one’s position in life.
Themes
