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Chapter 3, Section 7
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
At Aunt Emily’s house, Sam Yerger is waiting for Binx. He gestures Binx into the basement to talk. Sam is a sturdy, rumpled, good-looking man whose mother was married to Binx’s uncle’s law partner. Sam has worked as a journalist and successful author, and Binx always enjoys Sam’s visits when he’s passing through New Orleans on a lecture tour. Now, Sam tells Binx that he needs Binx’s help getting Kate out of here. He’s hatched a scheme to move Kate to New York to see a famous doctor, and he wants Binx to take her there. He believes she will finally “find herself” there.
Binx’s visit to the Smiths gives a respite from the differing pressures of Aunt Emily’s world and Kate’s suffering. As soon as he gets back, he’s jarred by the urgency of her situation. Sam, a family friend, believes he can rescue Kate from herself if he can just get her into the right environment.
Themes
Binx is baffled, so Sam backtracks to explain what’s happened to Kate. Last night, when he arrived, Kate was in an exalted mood, and they’d had hours of fascinating conversation. The next morning, Kate didn’t come out of her bedroom. Eventually, Sam had to break Kate’s door down, where they found her deeply asleep, and Aunt Emily was unable to wake her. When she finally woke up, she was angry and violent. Dr. Mink came and treated her for a pentobarbital overdose. Sam tells Binx to act like nothing unusual has happened. Meanwhile, Binx’s relatives Uncle Oscar and Aunt Edna have made an ill-timed visit.
In Binx’s absence, Kate has reached a crisis point, climbing to a high, falling into a depression, and, it’s implied, becoming suicidal. The situation contrasts sharply with the relative peace of Binx’s trip away from New Orleans. While someone like Lonnie Smith has tools to help him make sense of suffering, someone like Kate—situated more firmly within modern culture and values—is comparatively lacking in such tools.
Themes
When Binx comes into the house, Aunt Emily is cheerful, and he wonders if Sam has exaggerated the whole story. Uncle Oscar and Aunt Edna are visiting from Feliciana Parish for Carnival. Aunt Edna is 65, stout, and attractive; Uncle Oscar, the fourth of the Bolling brothers, is a country storekeeper. They’ve inherited the old family homestead. Binx finds Kate, nicely dressed, sitting in front of a fireplace within view of the dining room. When she asks, he immediately admits that he knows what happened last night.
Binx doesn’t let himself be drawn into the others’ plans for how to help Kate; he knows her struggles better than they do and is instinctively honest with her. He’s also unfazed by the expectation to maintain a cheerful face in front of visiting family, able instead to focus on the problem in front of him.
Themes
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Sam has begun a monologue at the dining room table, occasionally interrupted by Oscar’s less enlightened remarks and Edna’s scolding. Kate observes to Binx that Sam is gentle and kind. After their conversation last night, she felt elevated. Hours later, however, she woke up and thought about Binx’s suggestion of marriage and decided maybe it was possible, if only she didn’t ruin everything. She recalls a time, while Binx was away in the war, that she stayed with an old classmate of Aunt Emily’s in Memphis. The woman, opera singer and writer, treated Kate kindly, but Kate had nothing to say to her, and Kate finally fled back to New Orleans. Remembering this, Kate became anxious about what was coming next for her, so she mixed a drink and took some drugs. She claims she didn’t want to kill herself, but only wanted a “lift,” or to break out of things.
The cultured dinner conversation in the dining room takes place at the same time as, and within view of, Kate’s and Binx’s conversation, suggesting that their values, even their lives, are on a different track from the older generations of Bollings. Meanwhile, Kate is frightened of taking new steps in her life and, because of a track record of false starts, fears that if she does, they won’t work out. That’s why she panics in the face of opportunities to change her life, like Binx’s proposal.
Themes
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Binx and Kate don’t join the others in the dining room. Kate asks Binx if she can come along with him to Chicago and if they can leave tonight. Maybe after that they can go out West for a while and live in a little town, she suggests. Binx is sleep-deprived and feeling tired, so he gives Kate some money and tells her to make the arrangements. She heads off with a sense of efficiency and purpose. Binx drowses in the porch hammock and later notices that Sam has handed him the bottle of Kate’s pills for safekeeping.
Kate wants to flee her current situation, echoing her behavior after the car accident. When she is sufficiently motivated—like by the possibility of freedom—Kate is able to take initiative and handle errands in public, in contrast to her shy, fearful demeanor when she’s anxious.
Themes
