Walter Percy’s The Moviegoer is the fascinating depiction of a bizarre bird, Binx Bollings, a New Orleans’s stockbroker, who is driven by a search. There are two kinds of searches Binx is concerned with, a vertical search and horizontal search. Through them, Binx strives to transcend “everydayness,” as well as existential despair, hopelessness, and malaise. He fears being content in life because he does not want to loose his individuality and become invisibly dead—a fear he eventually accepts. In this paper, I shall argue that Binx Bollings abandons the vertical search because the vertical search is his descent in hell, similar to Dante’s Inferno, and once he reaches his circle of Hell, he is stuck in an eternal horizontal existence—unlike his step-brother, Lonnie, who truly transcends everydayness, and ascends in the vertical search due to grace.
The search is first mentioned as a type of curiosity. As Binx recalls,
I remembered the first time the search occurred to me. I came to myself under a chindolea bush. Everything is upside-down for me, as I shall explain later. What are generally considered to be the best times are for me the worst times, and that worst of times was one of the best. My shoulder didn’t hurt but it was pressed hard against the ground as if somebody sat on me. Six inches from my nose a dung beetle was scratching around under the leaves. As I watched, there awoke in me an immense curiosity. I was onto something. I vowed that if I ever got out of this fix, I would pursue the search.
Binx recognizes the possibility of another type of search, the horizontal search, which consumes most of his actions. While the vertical search is scientific, materialistic, mathematical, disinterested, objective, universal, ...
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...usiness of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus? It is impossible to say.
Finally, when Lonnie, Binx’s stepbrother, who is a devout Catholic, dies, he says, “I have conquered the habitual disposition.” Lonnie conquered the habitual disposition of hopeless everydayness, of living a life in the static, dead existence of sin, by living in the grace of God. A grace Binx denied, thus, causing himself to live in the hellish search, bound in despair.
Works Cited
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy I: Hell, trans. Dorothy Sayers. New York: Penguin Books, 1949
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. New York: Vintage International, 1988
Alghieri, Dante. "The Divine Comedy: Inferno." The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces: Expanded Edition In One Volume. Gen. Ed. Maynard Mack. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. 1032-1036.
"They were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone (Norton Introduction to Literature 48).
Lahiri, Jhumpa. “Hell-Heaven.” The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 638-651. Print.
John “Binx” Bolling is a 1960s version of Dante, a man awoken in the middle of his life beginning a desperate and philosophical search for meaning. Like The Inferno, The Moviegoer is set in a Catholic liturgically important time and spans the length of a week. The reader meets Binx on Mardi Gras, the last day of Epiphany season, and on Ash Wednesday, a day of repentance and reassessment in Catholicism, he begins his search. The meaning of Binx’s search is questioned from the onset of the book. He addresses the reader by saying, “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” Binx’s search
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Notes Allen Mandelbaum and Gabriel Marruzzo. New York: Bantam Books, 1980
Inferno, the first part of Divina Commedia, or the Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, is the story of a man's journey through Hell and the observance of punishments incurred as a result of the committance of sin. In all cases the severity of the punishment, and the punishment itself, has a direct correlation to the sin committed. The punishments are fitting in that they are symbolic of the actual sin; in other words, "They got what they wanted." (Literature of the Western World, p.1409) According to Dante, Hell has two divisions: Upper Hell, devoted to those who perpetrated sins of incontinence, and Lower Hell, devoted to those who perpetrated sins of malice. The divisions of Hell are likewise split into levels corresponding to sin. Each of the levels and the divisions within levels 7,8, and 9 have an analogous historical or mythological figure used to illustrate and exemplify the sin.
Inferno is the first and most famous of a three part series by Dante Alighieri known as the Divine Comedy that describes his journey to God through the levels of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise written in the early fourteenth century. Scholars spanning over nearly seven centuries have praised its beauty and complexity, unmatched by any other medieval poem. Patrick Hunt’s review, “On the Inferno,” states, “Dante’s extensive use of symbolism and prolific use of allegory— even in incredible anatomical detail—have been often plumbed as scholars have explored the gamut of his work’s classical, biblical, historical, and contemporary political significance” (9). In the story, each of the three main characters, Dante, Virgil, and Beatrice, represent
Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno of Dante. Trans. Robert Pinskey. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994. Print.
Alighieri, Dante. "The Inferno." The Divine Comedy. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: First New American Library Printing, 2003.
Binx is deathly afraid of being pulled into everydayness. That is to say that he does not want to fall into the trap of a daily, weekly of life long rut. He does not want to settle for just living just an existence. He wants to be noticed, to have the ability of excitement on a daily routine. To work hard and start a family and fight for what he thinks is a grand life. Only to realize years later that such a routine was estab...
The time period this work takes place in is a very gloomy and frightening time. He wakes up in a dark place by himself and in fear, which makes things worse. A common theme we can relate this dark place to is when we fall off of the path of God. Since God represents all things good, the dark is the exact opposite. Since everything is not so clear in the wood he his describing, the path back to God is even more difficult to attain.
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy, Inferno. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Print.
Dante’s The Divine Comedy illustrates one man’s quest for the knowledge of how to avoid the repercussions of his actions in life so that he may seek salvation in the afterlife. The Divine Comedy establishes a set of moral principles that one must live by in order to reach paradise. Dante presents these principles in Inferno, where each level of Hell has people suffering for the sins they committed during their life. As Dante gets deeper into Hell, the degrees of sin get progressively worse, as do the severity of punishment.
Dante, Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Robin Kirkpatrick. New York, USA: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2012. Print.
because of what his father told him as a young boy. His father said "he 's a true saint of God, a remover of worries and troubles, were it not for him I would have died miserably. This remark had stuck in his mind for years but became