Nicolas Lichtle Lichtle itibaren Boyle, Co. Roscommon, İrlanda itibaren Boyle, Co. Roscommon, İrlanda

The Moviegoer's fictional "Binx Bolling" is about to turn 30. He contemplates life, apathy, and the escape of movies. It's a book about the search for meaning and the malaise that comes with it. Walker Percy's writing is heavily influenced by modernism, Christianity, and the South. Some felt Percy's moviegoing was a sign of his easy-going nature. He felt movies were a complex escape,...and more intense, more real, than everyday life. In an interview, Percy commented, "For a lot of people, the movies provide important moments, maybe the only point in the day, or even the week, when someone (a cowboy, a detective, a crook) is heard asking what life is all about, asking what is worth fighting for – or asking if anything is worth fighting for." For an analysis of Dostoyevsky's influence on Percy's writing, see the essay below: ----- Kelly Cotter 2004 Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Influence On Walker Percy (passage truncated because of site's word limit) During his senior year of high school (1933), Walker Percy read Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Sitting on his front porch in Mississippi, he read the book straight through in three to four days. Four years earlier, Percy’s father had killed himself, and Brothers was a book about four brothers who wanted to kill their father. During his sophomore year of high school, Percy’s mother had died in a car crash, and this nineteenth century Russian novel contemplated the question of whether there can be a God in a world in which innocent people suffer. Percy would later refer to The Brothers Karamazov as the book that had opened the most possibilities for him (Elie 19). By combining literature and philosophy, it showed how a novelist could respond to ideas. At first Percy himself would become like Dostoyevsky character; later, his most famous protagonist, Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer, would mimic Dostoyevsky’s narrator in Notes from the Underground. Paul Elie, in his book The Life You Save May Be Your Own, compares Percy’s decisions with The Brothers Karamazov’s Ivan. While Percy was drawn to literature, he abandoned it for science – like Ivan. In 1934, Percy entered the University of North Carolina and obtained a chemistry degree. He later went to medical school at Colombia College in New York. It is remarkable that this famous twentieth century author received a medical degree before eventually transitioning to a literary career. Elie surmises, however, that because Walker Percy grew up in the home of his father’s cousin, a renowned southern poet, and alongside his best friend, who at the time was more advanced in literary studies than Percy, that Percy sought to escape their influence by seeking a different vocation (20). No one in the Percy lineage had been a scientist or doctor, and Walker Percy sought a way of life – like Ivan Karamazov – in which he could draw his own conclusions. ----- Percy struggled with a family lineage of depression and suicide; his father killed himself when Percy was thirteen. He fought to defeat his inherited depression. Like Ivan, who struggled with his father’s corrupt nature, Percy fought through the depression by becoming a constant seeker. Ivan was a seeker, too, and did not accept the religious norms of his culture. Percy, though a scientist, was a doubter and a searcher. He contemplated the meaning of life – he searched in medicine and eventually in literature. ----- Walker Percy, now characterized as a Southern Catholic writer, can also more adequately be referred to as a man concerned with a “search.” Dostoyevsky was also a man known for this quest. It is because of this search, this devotion to art without a sense of having “found,” that we have two existential novelists, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, propelling our own journey. '