The Malaise Inside Me: Thoughts on the Moviegoer
Throughout Percy Walker’s first novel The Moviegoer, narrator Jack “Binx” Bolling is a Walter Mitty wiling away his time (and the novel’s pages) with day-dreams, remembrances, and meditations on the mundane, movies, and the malaise. He terms this enterprise the “search,” nebulously defining it in its own terms, stating that “to become aware of the search is to be onto something.” However unclear it may be to the reader at first, Binx pursues the search diligently until his thirtieth birthday. What was it that he sought? Did he find what he was seeking?