Throughout Percy Walker’s first novel The Moviegoer, narrator Jack “Binx” Bolling spends much of his time engaged in an intense inquest into the contents of his navel. He 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?
Binx’s success in his search is questionable. At the close of the novel, he has settled into a married life with Kate, a terminus similar to those of the films that he so adores but notes as always ending “in despair.” He says such because of the sentimentalizing of quotidian lifestyles—being “sunk in everydayness,” as he puts it—depicted in many of the films he sees, something he considers a muddled attempt at the search he is conducting himself (Walker 13). If the 29-year-51-week-old Binx met the 30-year-old version of himself, it is likely that he would bemoan his doomed fate.
If, however, the object of Binx’s search changed over the course of the week before his thirtieth birthday, then perhaps he was more successful in his search. Binx appears adrift at the beginning of the novel, unsure of what to do with himself. He has frivolous amours with his secretaries; he spends much of his time going to movies; and he seems generally unhappy. At the novel’s opening, Binx sought the end-all, be-all answer to everything in the life’s small things—the pile of items he puts in his pockets every morning, the curve of his secretary’s neck, the “certification” of his neighborhood. By its close, however, Binx has accepted that the small things in life, though beautiful, do not provide the answers to his questions. This understanding thrusts him forward in his search, but it does not reveal all. To Binx at 30, life is more about the relationships with his friends and family than about the beauty that surrounds us daily.
Binx seems to abandon the search after this realization and after marrying Kate. He states in the epilogue, “As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject…further: I am a member of my mother’s family…and so naturally shy away from the subject of religion.” Binx concedes that the search ultimately points to God but has decided that he is content with the knowledge he has already gained in his search.
To answer the question at hand, was Binx successful in his search? I would say yes, but only to an extent, but his failure in attaining the ultimate object of his search was the product of his own choosing. He gained some new insight, saw the light at the end of the tunnel, and chose to get off at a stop before exiting that tunnel.