Bigger Picture

What can I say about the Moviegoer…...well for one thing, it surprised me. I honestly didn’t expect it to end the way it did. I figured that Binx and Kate would get married but for some reason I saw her killing herself in the end, maybe on their wedding night or something like that. And his aunt was another thing that kinda caught me off guard, that dressing down she gave him then the turn around that she “ had become fond of me.” Both were events that I didn’t exactly see coming them nor the fact that Uncle Jules died. That more than anything was something that I didn’t like because Uncle Jules was one of my more favorite characters, I did call Lonnie’s death though, not that I’m proud of it.

Now as to the matter of Binx’s search, it is my belief that he found what he was looking for but it was in front of him the whole time. In fact, I might go so far as to say that he actually had it the whole time but he was so caught up in his whole “search” thing that he couldn’t see that he already had it. The thing that I think Binx has at the end is a sense of belonging with Kate and his mother’s side of the family. Mainly just a sense of having people depend on him. Kate for telling her what to do and his brothers and sisters for helping them cope with the loss of their brother. Plus, the loss of his favorite step-brother would probably influence this in one way or another. It just seems to me that Binx didn’t really know what he was looking for to begin with so by that same token he couldn’t really know when he found whatever it was that he was searching for.

I don’t think that Binx found religion in the same kind of sense that we normally think of it. What I think Binx stumbled upon is a kind of peace that envelops his life. The last paragraph of the first section in the epilogue even says, “...I am a member of my mother’s family after all and so naturally shy away from the subject of religion.” I say stumbled upon because by Binx’s reckoning, he hasn’t found anything, so he won’t admit that he might have actually found anything.

Going back to what I said about Kate depending on him, echoes of that kind of relationship are scattered throughout the novel, it almost every interaction that they share, Kate’s dependence on Binx is revealed more and more. I think that Binx himself comes to relish his role as Kate’s caretaker. To me, it seems like he feels that by helping Kate to work through her problems, he might be able to take care of his own.

Overall, I think that Binx at the end of the novel has accepted that his life is what it is and that as his aunt puts it, “...that the Bolling family had been going to seed and that I was not one of her heroes but and very ordinary fellow…” He seems to have some kind of self fulfilling prophecy with his aunt and her feeling towards him.