We Still Live Within the Mediated, Alienated World of “The Moviegoer”

Paul Elie does a wonderful job explaining the book. This novel indeed takes everydayness and "makes it the subject of fitful philosophical inquiry", which is for many the most rewarding type of fiction.

Almost all readers understand the novel as an exploration of "the sickness of modern Western society". However, that theme is present incidentally owing to the book primarily being an examination of man's existence as a created being, which many readers and reviewers miss. Elie very importantly includes Percy's own words explaining that he set out to persuade the reader of the Christian concept "that man is more than an organism in an environment... He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim".

How does Percy do this? He explores human solitude, being "alone [while] in a crowd", as felt by his main character Binx, a materialist and skeptic who is suddenly drawn to "the pilgrim’s search outside himself, rather than the guru’s search within" (in the book referred to as The Search).

I ultimately disagree with the wording of Elie's conclusion, as I think would Percy. Binx is befuddled by the mystery of existence, as many of us spend time being. But I don't think Percy means to draw attention to the existence of The Search only to suggest we must forever be searching. I wrote about this aspect of the book in 2015 which you can read here: http://liamk.org/moviegoer/

Fascinating that it beat out both "Catch-22" and "Franny and Zoey" for the award in 1961. Perhaps, as the author implies, it was its introduction of experience outside of the Heller/Salinger milieu that readers found refreshing for a change.

I hoped this would be an article on the issues surrounding the classification of certain people as ‘moviegoers’.

> “one a bad imitation of Thomas Mann,” he later said, “the other a worse imitation of Thomas Wolfe—which is very bad indeed.”

I wonder if he has read about mimetic theory by René Girard?