In Walter Percy's novel The Moviegoer, John Bickerson Bolling is on a search. He describes this search as something very simple, "so simple it is easily overlooked" and that simplicity is both the great question and answer (13). To not be involved in a search is to "is to be in despair"(13). The search consists of 3 elements: certification, malaise and"everydayness."
Certification involves a place which is just a place until some sort of meaning can be ascribed to it. Binx is very interested in creating meaning. When he goes to a place such as a movie, he likes to talk to the owner and strike up a relationship with the ticket tender. If he does not know anything about the people or place than he runs the risk of just being a person who is "Somewhere and not Anywhere"(63). At a movie he could be lost and cut off in "danger of slipping clean out of space and time" if a connection was not made. Movie going creates for Binx a discovery of "place and time" and it tastes like okra (75)! Binx expresses the need for certification when his Uncle Jules asks him to go to Chicago. Binx feels a strange spirit-presence in new places which he later describes as the "genie-soul." A city has a feeling associated with it and it is easy to get lost in a new place that is not certified, where a person has to deal with new people each shooting out his own personal ray. Binx wonders how he can "deal with five million personal rays?"(99). Certification is the method Binx uses to feel a part of a place.
Certification is a result of the necessity felt by Binx to not slip into what Binx term "malaise." Binx describes malaise as "the pain of loss" which is where a person feels strangely removed from life (120). The malaise is a part of the phenomenon of what goes up must come down for when, "one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise"(121). To come out of the malaise of life one must do something that is shockingly human. Kate says wounded men are real. After the accident with her fiancee Kate asks Binxs, "Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck-people were so kind and helpful and solid"(81). People's true colors shine when they are forced out of what is comfortable to them. It is rare to find too great of a sinner in a malaisian's life. It is a high moment to be able to sin like a human (200)! He sees hatred as one of the few signs of human life in the world (100). Binx tries to find people living deliberately who take time to look around them and see the life. The small talk and bland lives people live remind Binx of death, he claims "We part laughing and dead"(102).
Binx has an understanding of the everyday as something that takes the wonder out of life. People sink into this everyday that is a part of the malaise. Binx notes this particularly in religion and relationships. The wonder is taken out of the language of religion where the words seem to be worn out (162). When people say what they believe on the radio show they all pretty much sound like peas in a pod (109). People sink into the everydayness of religion and forget to be a seeker of truth. It just becomes something they are called. This happens in relationships as well. Binx says your wife can easily become invisible to you since she is so familiar (121). Binx's mother manages the shocks of life through the ordinary. It is a means of making the bad things not so bad by sacrificing the elation of the good things "she wanted everything colloquial and easy, even God"(142). Sometimes the only thing to break the everydayness is disaster and the dung beetle.
In the end of the novel, Binx does not find a distinct answer for the search because there is not an answer, it is something to be carried with a person to continue discovery. Though Binx tries to keep himself above the everyday, he realizes part of the answer lies in the simplicity of the everyday. Kate chides Binx that it could be possible that "you are overlooking something, the most obvious thing of all"(83). It is the connections made that secure our place in the universe. It is not enough to simply exist but to move into the realm of another person's existence to find place. Binx claims there is only "one thing he can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons"(233). It is not found in doing one great thing for humanity and then calling it done or even in searching for the one great thing, but living in the everyday and giving it a "right to exist"(7).
