Value Systems Theme Analysis

Part of Binx’s personal search for meaning includes assessing the moral codes others live by, and the ways other people find meaning in their lives. Two of the most prominent codes that Binx encounters are religion (specifically his mother Anna Smith’s Catholicism) and the Southern American commitment to honor and duty (exemplified by his Aunt Emily). But for Binx, neither honor nor religion are, by themselves, fitting solutions to the problem of his search for meaning. Both, in their own way, sidestep the question of meaning altogether. For that reason, he rejects both—at the novel’s end, he seems to be lacking a moral code altogether. In the Epilogue, however, Binx’s daily life has become oriented more around his care for other people than around his individualistic search for meaning. Though his views remain ambiguous, he seems to have adopted elements of both his aunt’s and his mother’s outlooks. Through Binx’s exploration of different avenues of morality and meaning, Percy suggests that while people should be skeptical of wholesale approaches to life, one must ultimately figure out a value system to live by.

Binx’s Aunt Emily represents a characteristically Southern insistence on heroism (fulfillment of honor and duty). Aunt Emily sees people as fitting into distinct categories: “All the stray bits and pieces […] she pulls together into an unmistakable visage of the heroic or the craven […] sometimes the person and the past are in fact transfigured by her. They become what she sees them to be.” Aunt Emily gathers the details about a person into a tidy narrative, and in Binx’s case, she sees an exceptional person who just needs the right encouragement in order to fulfill his heroic potential. Aunt Emily further contends that while she doesn’t understand the world’s seeming decline, she does believe that people are called to resist evil no matter what: “In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. […] To do anything less is to be less than a man.” Heroism lies in action; standing apart from the action is cowardice. However, understanding the underlying meaning of his experiences is deeply important to Binx. Because Aunt Emily’s philosophy insists on action for its own sake, it repels Binx.

Religious faith offers another way of looking at the world, but it’s no more helpful to Binx than his aunt’s insistence on action. Binx sees his mother’s Catholic faith as simply a tool for getting through life: “it strikes me that my mother uses [God] as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man's world […] the canny management of the shocks of life […] she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad.” In Binx’s mind, faith takes the edge off of life’s events—and, in that way, reduces their significance. It allows people to avoid wrestling with life’s good and bad, instead settling for a measure of detachment from those events. (For instance, “the shocks of life” are somehow God’s will, so one doesn’t need to seek out their meaning too deeply.) Binx’s mother thinks that Binx has lost his Catholic faith, but Binx maintains that he’s never had faith to begin with: “The proofs of God's existence may have been true for all I know, but it didn't make the slightest difference. If God himself had appeared to me, it would have changed nothing.” For Binx, lack of faith isn’t primarily a matter of theological argument. Rather, his concern is that faith—even if it were factually provable—doesn’t resolve the mystery of existence. Faith can be a means of avoiding deeper questions, and for Binx, God’s very existence feels irrelevant to the mystery of life.

By the end of the novel, Binx does not appear to embrace either his aunt’s or his mother’s philosophies for dealing with life. Binx fails to fulfill Aunt Emily’s code of action: he takes his suicidal cousin, Kate, to Chicago without telling anyone where they’ve gone. Furious, Aunt Emily scolds her nephew at length: “in all of past history people who found themselves in difficult situations behaved in certain familiar ways, well or badly, courageously or cowardly […] Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. […] One may simply default. […] Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave.” After the Chicago trip, Aunt Emily finds that Binx isn’t the heroic figure she had imagined him to be—he hasn’t even succeeded in acting cowardly. According to Aunt Emily’s value system, Binx has failed to fulfill his obligations to others.

In fact, Binx doesn’t seem to live by any clear moral code. Aunt Emily presses, “I wanted to pass on to you […] a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly […] the only things that really matter in this life.” When she asks if their long talks about “goodness and truth and beauty and nobility” have meant anything to Binx, he doesn’t know what to say. Aunt Emily demands, "What do you love? What do you live by?" Binx is again “silent,” suggesting that he doesn’t love or live by anything that he can define in words.

However, in the Epilogue, Aunt Emily’s disillusionment seems to free Binx to act. He doesn’t accept either religion or a Southern code of manners and duty. In the end, Binx marries (itself an act that’s both religious and dutiful) and seems to accept elements of both Catholicism and heroism: he devotedly cares for his wife, Kate, and for his grieving half-siblings. He assures his siblings that, in accordance with Catholic teaching, their dying brother Lonnie will someday be resurrected, free of paralysis and chronic illness. Even though it’s not clear that Binx himself embraces belief in God or traditional Southern values, his actions suggest that he has, after all, found meaning in his life and a moral code to live by.