The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer is the debut novel by Walker Percy, published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in 1961. It won the National Book Award and became the author's most famous and most widely praised work, establishing him as one of the major voices of Southern literature. Over time it has been recognized in several reference lists: Time included it among its 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, the Modern Library placed it sixtieth among the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and The Guardian listed it among the one thousand novels everyone should read.

The book is strongly shaped by existentialism, especially by Søren Kierkegaard, whom Percy read extensively. Unlike many darker, didactic existentialist novels, including some of Percy's later ones, The Moviegoer has a light and poetic tone. It also draws on Dante, paralleling the life of its protagonist with that of the narrator of the Divine Comedy.

The protagonist, John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling, is a young stockbroker in postwar New Orleans, a week short of his thirtieth birthday. The decline of tradition in the South, his family's troubles and the wounds of the Korean War have left him estranged from his own life. He daydreams, struggles to sustain lasting relationships and finds more meaning and immediacy in movies and literature than in his routine. The deliberately loose plot follows his need for spiritual redemption: at Mardi Gras he breaks away from everyday life and sets out on a compassless journey, a search for God that takes him through the French Quarter, to Chicago and along the Gulf Coast. On the way he reflects on the people and things he meets, and he is repeatedly pressed to define himself in relation to friends, family, lovers and his career, though he prefers to remain vague and open to possibility.

The novel has been read as a modest reaffirmation of the Judeo-Christian idea of the human being as a pilgrim rather than a fully integrated individual. Its reception has stressed both its unusual view of the ordinary and its sensitivity to boredom and despair. Terrence Malick worked on a film adaptation in the 1980s that never materialized, and his 2015 film Knight of Cups was partly inspired by the novel.