Annotated Bibliography: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer Allen, William Rodney. “Self-Deception and Waking Dreams in Gentilly.” Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. 1986. 19-44. Print. In this essay, Allen explores the relationship between The Moviegoer and its American literary predecessors, arguing that while the book may be classified as the “best French existentialist novel in our language,” Percy’s novel draws a great deal of inspiration from the American, especially southern, literary tradition. This influence is most acutely present, argues Allen, in the theme, which he considers central to the novel, of the “search for self through the search for a father.” Throughout the novel, he argues, Percy makes repeated allusions to these authors: Binx’s collection of ID cards “recalls Ellison’s description of the invisible man’s briefcase full of scholarships, diplomas, and party membership cards”; much like the similarly fatherless Jack Burden of All the King’s Men, Binx seeks to find clues about his late father by a return to his mother’s house; Binx’s friend, Sam Yerger, is an unmistakable reference to Hemingway, who is characteristic of the stoical response to life embodied by his aunt Emily. Allen takes these allusions, and the central theme which all of them share, to be a key to understanding Binx’s search and transformation at the end of the novel. Binx, he claims, undertakes his “search,” without knowing what the object of such a search might be. What becomes clear as the novel progresses, Allen asserts, is that his father is central to Binx’s search. Inheriting his father’s dissatisfaction with life, his ironic detachment, and his insomnia, Binx seems doomed to play out his father’s history—that of despair leading to suicide. His memories of his father are so painful, however, that Binx is unwilling to acknowledge that his father is the key to self-understanding, and a chance to escape the malaise and live an authentic life; instead, he deceives himself by thinking that chasing women and moviegoing will cure him. Binx, Allen contends, secretly blames his father for his despair, but when he takes a trip to Chicago, he is reminded of a childhood experience in which, after his brother’s death, he, “through a child’s cool perversity or some atavistic recoil from an intimacy too intimate,” denied his father’s request of “perfect comradeship.” This moment, according to Allen is the turning point in the novel, in which Binx “realizes that he failed his father when the latter asked [him] for ‘his very life.’” Having previously live as an aesthete, in the Kierkegaardian sense, in this moment Binx has a life-altering “recognition of responsibility for others.” In his marriage to Kate, says Allen, we discover that Binx “has given up his life of evasions and begun the only genuinely worthy pursuit, in Percy’s Christian terms, of man—the search for God through giving one’s life to others.” By the end of the novel, Allen explains, “the lost, disturbed son, has metamorphosed into the protective father,” who looks after the feeble Kate and his brothers and sisters. Collins, John P. “Two Antiheroes: Meursault and Binx Bolling Viewed through Thomas Merton’s Literary Imagination.” Merton Annual 25 (2012): 113-123. In this essay, John Collins discusses Thomas Merton’s interpretation of Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, as well as the influence that these works came to have on Merton’s understanding of the power of literature as a means of exploring and conveying spiritual themes. During the 1960’s, Collins explains, Merton began exploring and