The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Published 1962 · 241 pages · 68,373 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is The Moviegoer to read?

The Moviegoer scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
Percy writes in an educated Southern vernacular — precise and elegant without obscurity. Kierkegaardian terms (malaise, rotation, repetition) appear as load-bearing philosophical concepts rather than decoration. Readers encounter no invented language and few archaic words; the occasional medical or philosophical term is accessible through context.
Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
Binx Bolling narrates in clear, conversational sentences with occasional longer meditative passages. Percy's syntax never approaches Faulknerian subordination or Jamesian hypotaxis — the prose is readable throughout. Sentence structures match Binx's cool, detached persona: controlled, ironic, seldom syntactically demanding.
Abstraction: 68 out of 100
Kierkegaard's stages of existence (aesthetic, ethical, religious) and concepts like 'rotation,' 'repetition,' and 'the search' structure the entire novel philosophically. Percy grounds these in concrete New Orleans scenes — a trip to the movies, a streetcar ride — but the philosophical frame is constant and unavoidable. Closer to Brothers Karamazov in embedding debate within drama than to the pure social observation of Gatsby.
Information density: 55 out of 100
The novel is compact (under 250 pages) and each scene carries multiple loads: social comedy, philosophical meditation, and character revelation simultaneously. Percy references Kierkegaard, Sartre, and mid-century American consumer culture with compression. Not encyclopedic like 2666 or War and Peace, but never slack — every scene earns its place.
Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
Binx performs detachment as a survival strategy, and readers must read against his self-presentation throughout. His philosophical 'search' is never defined by the text — what it would mean to find it, or whether he has, remains unresolved. Binx's cheerful tone masks suffering that Percy expects readers to diagnose from behavioral clues, not explicit statement.
Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
Movies function as Binx's mechanism for feeling real — places gain authenticity only after being 'certified' on film, and the act of moviegoing stands in for authentic spiritual search. Kate's suicide attempts and her erratic behavior carry the weight of genuine existential crisis against Binx's more ironic alienation. The symbolism is present and meaningful without reaching the density of Moby-Dick's whale.
Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
Binx describes his malaise with clinical amusement while Percy means every word of it seriously — the ironic gap between narrator's tone and actual condition requires constant recalibration. Percy uses Binx's movie obsession as simultaneous comedy and tragedy: the man who watches films to feel real is the one who cannot feel. The novel operates at a register closer to Gatsby than to the sustained satire of The Sellout.
Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
The ending delivers plot closure — Binx marries Kate, his brother Lonnie dies, he begins medical school — but withholds philosophical resolution entirely. The 'search' Binx describes in the opening pages is never answered or abandoned; whether his life change constitutes conversion or capitulation is left open. Percy ends with an epilogue that answers nothing about what Binx has actually found.
Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
The novel unfolds in linear first-person narration over roughly one week before Binx's thirtieth birthday. Flashbacks to Korea and childhood appear briefly but do not disrupt chronology. Unlike Pedro Paramo or Infinite Jest, the structure makes no formal demands on readers — Percy's philosophical complexity operates entirely through voice and theme, not form.

How The Moviegoer is regarded

The Moviegoer holds a literary regard score of 73 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where The Moviegoer sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (126 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Moviegoer scores 72 out of 100. A second mythos, irony, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
It is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citizen and to receive in return a receipt or a neat styrene card with one’s name on it certifying, so to speak, one’s right to exist.
Symbol: Formal
My wallet is full of identity cards, library cards, credit cards.
Mythos: Quixotic Comedy ii (comedy ii)
In June Kate and I were married.
Genre: Confession + Novel
As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject.

Where the story of The Moviegoer takes place

  • New Orleans and Gulf Coast, Mardi Gras week 1960, with a coda a year later (1960 to 1961), the main setting
  • Korea, Chongchon River, war flashback (1950 to 1951)
  • Chicago, Stevens Hotel convention, Mardi Gras 1960

5 things that are true of The Moviegoer, with the passage for each

  1. The novel opens with an epigraph from Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death.

    is unaware of being despair.

  2. Binx has had three secretaries in succession, named Marcia, Linda and Sharon.

    I have had three secretaries, girls named Marcia, Linda, and now Sharon.

  3. Binx sells Ford stock and buys American Motors at 26½ on a hunch.

    I sell my Ford common and buy American Motors at 26½.

  4. Sartalamaccia finally buys Binx's duck club for twenty-five thousand dollars.

    In August Mr. Sartalamaccia purchased my duck club for twenty five thousand dollars.

  5. Binx's half-brother Lonnie dies a few days after his fifteenth birthday.

    The following May, a few days after his fifteenth birthday, my half-brother Lonnie Smith died of a massive virus infection which was never positively identified.

Scenes in The Moviegoer that Frye would name

41 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free. Kate's pivotal discovery in Merle Mink's office.
Pathos, untitled
The following May, a few days after his fifteenth birthday, my half-brother Lonnie Smith died of a massive virus infection which was never positively identified. Lonnie, the book's saintly victim, dies in the coda.
Displacement, untitled
Holden has turned down Toulouse shedding light as he goes. An aura of heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it. A movie star behaves as a near-divine figure whose reality blesses those he passes.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. The aunt names Binx's nature, that he may simply default, and withdraws her trust.
Epos, untitled
Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal. The aunt's oration on class and the common man.
Cognitio, untitled
As soon as she accepted what she herself had been saying all those years, that the Bolling family had gone to seed and that I was not one of her heroes but a very ordinary fellow, we got along very well. Social reconciliation with the aunt once she recognizes who Binx is.

Books that share these scenes with The Moviegoer

About the author

Walker Percy