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Chapter 4, Section 3
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
It’s too late to get a plane or train to New Orleans right before Mardi Gras, so Binx makes his excuses to the conference, and they take the bus home to ease Aunt Emily’s mind. Binx doesn’t mind leaving, and Kate is calm, sleeping most of the time. Binx reads Arabia Deserta while watching the Mississippi River valley rush by. He also observes the other passengers and talks with two of them: a romantic from Wisconsin and a salesman from Murfreesboro.
Whereas the train journey to Chicago was consequential for Binx’s and Kate’s relationship, the bus journey back to New Orleans is, for Binx, a kind of final experiment in the search. Reading the book about the Arabian Desert symbolizes Binx’s mindset—even a bus filled with Midwestern passengers can be explored like a foreign country.
Themes
Binx is curious about the romantic, a young man who sits gracefully reading a novel. The young man is shy and blushes terribly when Binx questions him about the book. Binx knows that a young romantic longs for just this kind of chance meeting on a bus, yet now that he’s experiencing it, the intensity is beyond him. He is a college student who has decided to go to New Orleans for a while to work on a banana boat; he hopes to meet a nice girl there. Binx has his doubts about this.
The two men Binx meets on the bus represent approaches to the world which Binx can appreciate from afar but not fully embrace. To Binx, the young romantic has lofty expectations of the world that will probably go unmet.
Themes
The salesman is easier to talk to. Binx finds him to be a metaphysician, more so than the romantic. He sells steel farming implements. Binx enjoys hearing the man talk about his product’s history and his sales techniques. The man also talks about his family in Murfreesboro, and Binx soon feels as if he’s always lived there. He concludes that businessmen are the best metaphysicians, though they’re unfortunately one-track metaphysicians. When Kate and Binx arrive in New Orleans, street cleaners are sweeping up the remains of the last Mardi Gras parade.
In contrast to the young romantic, the salesman is actually more grounded in the specifics of life and is therefore, according to Binx, more knowledgeable about the nature of existence. The only problem is that his knowledge is focused on one narrow slice of life and is therefore insufficient. Neither of these men represent an approach to modern life that Binx can embrace. It feels as though Binx’s search has availed little.
Themes
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