One of the most prominent and emerging problems that the common and modern man encounters in our society is the everlasting feeling of despair that we face in our everyday lives. Depression and despair have become more and more prominent in our culture for the last century, and there appears to be no end in sight. We can connect this feeling of despair to our materialistic lifestyles. Our society has started a movement that dismisses spirituality and focuses solely on a logical way of thinking. Through this, we gain a feeling of malaise. We feel dread and emptiness from doing day to day tasks over and over again. Writer Walker Percy plays with this idea of despair in his novel The Moviegoer. Mainly inspired by the existentialist views of the late philosopher Kierkegaard, Percy succeeds in creating a novel that represents the philosophical despair and isolation that man begins to face in the early 20th century. The novel is often compared to other existential stories of the time, such as Catcher in the Rye. The main character, Binx Bolling, is depicted as a young man living in New Orleans in the early 1960’s. He is average and admits to living through the everydayness…show more content… Kate seems to be in the same position as Binx; depressed, suffering from everydayness and malaise. On multiple occasions in the novel, she tries to overdose on medication, possibly to escape from the despair. Binx acknowledges their similarities, and finds grace in this, according to Hohman. “At last I spy Kate; her stiff little Plymouth comes nosing into my bus stop. There she sits like a bomber pilot, resting on her wheel and looking at the children and not seeing, and she could be I myself, sooty eyed and nowhere.” Alone, Binx and Kate are both trapped and isolated by their malaise, unable to completely settle within society. But together, their malaise and despair seem to dissipate, through their love for each other and
