[AUTHOR’S NOTE: As I predicted, this well-intentioned effort to re-read through the body of Dr. Percy’s work fizzled not long after this post first appeared. Who knows, maybe I will get back to it, along with Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy, another monumental literary achievement by a fellow Greenville native.] The first section of “The Moviegoer,” which is divided into seven chapters, sets the stage for the novel’s protagonist, John Bickerson “Binx” Bolling, a Korean War veteran and the scion of an aristocratic Creole family. The son of a physician father who was killed in World War II and absent nurse mother who left her son to be raised by his paternal aunt, Binx has settled on his own cure for malady of post-War modernity, a solipsistic quest to break free from what he calls everydayness punctuated by his superficial pursuit of the pleasures of the flesh with an ever-changing line-up of secretaries.

Binx, as the narrator, sets up his quest against the backdrop of the trappings of the high-modernism that characterized the work of writers like William Faulkner and T.S. Elliott – stoic concerns about the collapse of the pillars of Western Civilization and a firm belief in the necessity of pursuing a certain kind of honorable course of action despite its inevitable futility. As Binx’s Aunt Emily, his surrogate mother, explains: “A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.”

Supporting this tragic view of honor in the face of sure defeat, Binx’s narration abounds with references to knights, crusaders and Roman stoics, and the characteristics of such heroes are attributed to those around Binx, including his successful, Catholic Uncle Jules (his victory in the World is total and unqualified) and to a lesser degree his college friend Walter (a model to others, an arbiter of taste), who is engaged to Binx’s emotionally fragile cousin Kate. Yet, Binx rejects his Aunt Emily’s worldview, telling her he feels no obligation to make a contribution to the doomed fight against dissolution.

When I first read “The Moviegoer” three decades ago, during my time as an English major at Loyola University in New Orleans, I took Binx’s quest as it is ostensibly presented, as an honest effort to wrest meaning from a world revolving around rituals that have ceased to be relevant. I may have recognized the ironies embedded in the narrative tapestry Percy weaves, but I did not experience Binx as unstable or intellectually dishonest. Today, Binx strikes me as a detached, dreamy young man with a grandiose, self-important view of himself who propounds a diagnosis of the ills of the world around him that serves little purpose other than supporting his own bloated self-image. Here are just a few examples of his intense self-involvement:

Binx continually offers up a deprecating self-assessment — I’m not that smart– but he also claims that he would much rather luxuriate in his own deep insights than be stuck in the everydayness of life-transforming medical research. It never dawns on Binx that these endeavors are not mutually exclusive.

Binx eschews established communities, whether it be the respected Krewe of Neptune of which he remains a member or spending time with a group of good fellows who have gone in together on the purchase of a man-cave houseboat. Yet he admits, with little or no self-consciousness, that during college he was so intent on impressing Walter that he was willing to ridicule others within his own fraternity to gain Walter’s approval.

Binx abandons a group of friends, fellow war veterans, with whom he has made a connection hiking the Appalachian Trail because he cannot make them happy. Binx, distracted by his own fantasies and depressed feelings, assumes that because he cannot feel sufficiently connected with his friends that the connection is inherently unworthy.

In Binx, Percy has created an ideal postmodern anti-hero, a legend in his own mind in the parlance of our time (to paraphrase another popular and self-involved anti-hero). As the first section of the book comes to a close, Binx and Kate, his cousin by marriage who has survived her own tragedies and who has sought refuge in alcohol and drugs as well as creativity, take in a Mardi Gras parade but take their leave before Walter appears, opting instead for the New Orleans-based medical thriller “Panic in the Streets” in which the film’s physician hero must save the City from the threat of an infectious plague. The malady threatening Binx resides within his own consciousness, and Percy, the physician-turned-novelist, has set himself the tall task of rescuing Binx from himself, or at the very least to go down fighting.