Binx's Despair In The Moviegoer

As an outstanding southern writer after WWII, Walker Percy shook off the traditional southern literary modes. He no longer limited his literary eyeshot only in the South, but broadened it to the whole America, even to the whole world. His works break away from the lament over the lost Old South, and follow the needs of present men. They have a vivid artistic representation and in-depth exploration of modern men's existence predicament. His fictions as well as non-fictions reflect his religious, philosophic, and ethical meditation on modern men's problems, such as their alienation, essence, existence, life meaning. Therefore they have significant realistic and reference values.With the unprecedented development of technology after the WWII, traditional American culture was torn to pieces under the impact of modern politics and economy. The death of God and deviation from the past threw people into the unprecedented epoch rupture. Without the restrictions of faith, ethics, and traditions, Americans were absolutely free, but such freedom deprived them of their existence foundation. Consequently, they were cast away on the affluent land. Senses of loss, turbulence, breakup, anxiety, and rootlessness haunted these free men. The consciousness of inauthentic self usually intensified the aforementioned senses into despair. As a result, despair became a typical social mentality and spiritual crisis in the latter half of the 20th century. Percy, a writer full of social responsibility and creation zeal, mused over those issues in his every novel. Under the direction of Kierkegaardian existentialism and Catholicism, he successfully created Binx's despair, and vividly showed modern men's spiritual predicament in his most famous novel, The Moviegoer. In this novel, Percy's understanding of despair and suggestion for its solution meet modern men's needs and are the distillate of his religious, philosophical and ethical thoughts. Therefore, with Binx's despair as its central research object, the thesis interprets this...