‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’

The US writer Walker Percy (1916-1990) is best known for his novels, which, influenced by philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre, often centre on existentialist themes. His debut and best-known work is The Moviegoer (1961), which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962. The novel follows a young man named Jack ‘Binx’ Bolling who, in the wake of the Korean War, wanders the streets of New Orleans, trying to derive meaning from the world around him. In these brief animated excerpts from the book, Bolling discusses having an epiphany that reveals what he calls ‘the search’ – the somewhat enigmatic notion that ‘everydayness is the enemy’ of a meaningful life, in which one pursues deeper truths about their existence.