"The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy

Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s the “Moviegoer,” introduces the reader to the “the search.”  He says, “What is the nature of the search?  You ask.  Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me, so simple that it is easily overlooked.  The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. . . . To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”  The allusion to “despair” is from Soren Kierkegaard’s "The Sickness Unto Death" and it is presented as the following epigraph to the novel: “. . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.”

It would be a fool’s errand for me to attempt to explain Kierkegaard’s philosophy.  Binx says a few more words about the “great Danish philosopher” in the Epilogue to the novel.  Binx in the end says, “As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject.” However, regardless of his inclination it seems he has been on a search for authentic meaning in life. And Kate, Binx’s wife, seems to suffer despair though she is unaware of it.

Kierkegaard is called “the father of existentialism.” He is also a Christian existentialist, which in my view is an oxymoron.  Twentieth-century existential philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, articulates the factual limits of being in his book “Being and Nothingness.”  Sartre is more in harmony with the actuality of existence.