This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 48, number 03 (2025).
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[Editor’s Note: This essay contains spoilers for Walker Percy’s novels The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming, and Lancelot.]
In 2008, Senator Entertainment released The Informers, a film widely criticized as both salacious and nihilistic for its portrayal of the lives of America’s (1980s) economic elite, especially the feckless moral confusion of its young adults. Near the end, a scene unfolds in which two young men, Graham and Martin, sit on a bluff overlooking Los Angeles. They have spent the film swapping sex partners and doing drugs, but as they converse, Graham expresses his dissatisfaction with their lives.
Graham: I need something, Martin.
Martin: You need some [expletive] ’ludes.
Graham: No, I need something more than this!
Martin: Graham, what else is there? You already have everything.
Graham: I need someone to tell me what is good. Okay? And I need someone to tell me what is bad. Because if nobody tells you these things, Martin, then how do you know what’s good and what’s bad?1
For Graham’s moral confusion, the film provides little guidance, opting instead to document his helplessness; his love for his girlfriend, Christie, provides the only tenuous hint that an ethically serious life is possible. Fortunately, Catholic novelist Walker Percy takes a more serious approach to this problem as he explores the existential confusion — relational, spiritual, and political — that plagues the modern world.
Walker Percy and the Southern Context
Percy was, by birth and rearing, well situated to chronicle this problem. A self-described child of the prosperous New South — the technologically oriented economic system that replaced the stoic agrarianism of the early twentieth-century Southern planter class — he was raised, in part, by an uncle from that class, one who embraced its stoic values and sought to pass them on to Percy. Of Southern stoicism, Percy contends,
This morality was paternalistic and Stoic in character and…derived little or none of its energies from Christian theology….The greatest weakness of the Stoic morality was its exclusively personal character and its consequent indifference to the social and the political commonweal. The Stoic took as his model, either consciously or unconsciously, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who wrote in his Meditations: “Every moment think steadily, as a Roman and a man, to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity and a feeling of affection and freedom and justice.” Such a moral ideal, lofty as it is, has largely to do with the housekeeping of one’s interior castle, specifically the maintenance of its order and the brightness of one’s personal honor.2
In Percy’s view, the stoic philosophy that prevailed in the South before WWII crumbled for two reasons. First, although its votaries decried racist brutality and prided themselves on treating Black people well, they did not and could not recognize the equality of these same people. Second, Southern stoicism lacked the spiritual resources to withstand the materialism of the post-war technological economy.3 As a techno-scientific vision of human flourishing edged out older ways, a vacuum of meaning enveloped the South — and the rest of the modern world.
Yet Percy is adamant that a nostalgic revival of the old ways is insufficient for the questions of our time. Southern stoicism, a neo-classical humanism, was grounded only by the personal commitment of its aging votaries, who responded to the problem of spiritual desiccation only by redoubling their commitment to their tradition.
Meanwhile, scientific humanism appropriated the methods of the sciences to address questions the sciences cannot answer, precisely because these questions are existential and, thus, highly personal. Although he held the sciences in high regard, he realized they could tell him nothing about himself as a unique, particular individual living in a particular place and time. Of his own training in psychiatry, Percy says,
It dawned on me that no science or scientist, not even Freud, could address a single word to me as an individual but only as an example of such-and-such a Southern type or neurotic type or whatever….There was a huge gap in the scientific view of the world. This sector of the world about which science could not utter a single word was nothing less than this: what is it like to be an individual living in the United States in the twentieth century.4
For these questions, literature and philosophy, and sometimes religion, are better suited: How to be a human being? How to live well day-to-day? How to overcome boredom, ennui, malaise, and depression? How to know and do what is good?
Binx Bolling and the Search in The Moviegoer
Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), is the story of Binx Bolling, a bemused wanderer living in Gentilly, Louisiana, and managing a branch of his uncle’s investment firm. In his spare time, he seeks aesthetic experiences via movies and sexual-romantic experiences via serial dating. He has a contemplative sensitivity for the various suburban theaters in which he watches movies and a genuine if mercurial appreciation of the women he dates.5 His habits are his way of resisting the banality that he calls “everydayness.” But sometimes, they become part of his “search” for the significance of his existence. Binx describes his “search” as “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life….To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”6 As far as Binx can tell, most people are in despair, having accepted mental health, professional success, and sexual intimacy as the whole of a good life. And he is himself often on the brink of it. Thus, at 29, he remains uncommitted to either person or place, afraid that a committed life will become a banal one. He is determined to resist malaise, a terrifying evacuation of meaning and goodness from his life, that threatens to subsume him.7
Binx does not know what is good, and he knows that he does not know. At most, he can sometimes perceive faint signs that God may exist. One night, at his mother’s fish-camp, he reflects that his mother and half-siblings (good Catholics) think he has lost his faith, while his father’s family (good Stoics) believe they know what a good life is. Of both Binx says,
I don’t know what either of them are talking about….The best I can do is
lie rigid as a stick under the cot, locked in a death grip with everydayness, sworn not to move a muscle until I advance an inch in my search….Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference. Is this God’s ironic revenge? But I am onto him.8
Of course, he quickly becomes unsure of whether he is onto God or not. His own apathy and the intrinsically ambiguous nature of signs trouble and confuse his search. Only Aunt Emily, proud member of the Southern elite, is confident she knows what is good — the Stoic-Roman values of the traditional Southern upper class.
The gap between Binx’s ambivalence and Emily’s certainty creates a comical conflict centered on her stepdaughter Kate, Binx’s cousin-by-marriage. Kate suffers from anxiety so intense that she cuts herself off from the social world, often hiding in her bedroom for weeks. Unsure of what is good, she suffers a collapse of agency. During one such episode, Emily asks Binx to intervene and bring Kate back to normal living. Binx, however, secretly in love with Kate, ends up sleeping with her and contracting an engagement.
Furious that Binx slept with her neurotic stepdaughter, Emily contrasts the behavior of herself and her social class to his:
The charge is that people belonging to my class think they’re better than other people. You’re damn right we’re better. We’re better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a minority group and blackmail the government.9
Aunt Emily is proud, self-disciplined, honest, and generous. Animated by a sense of noblesse oblige, she follows a strict ethical code that requires she cultivate her intellect, the arts, and the Stoic virtues. She takes Marcus Aurelius as her model for the good life. But Binx is unconvinced. His tryst with Kate reveals the gap between what Aunt Emily thought him to be — Stoic gentleman — and what he actually is — confused seeker, who fights the malaise by aesthetic and romantic dalliance.
His engagement, though, is a genuine move from dalliance to commitment, showing he is willing to anchor Kate and be anchored by her. Despite his ambivalence toward Stoic ethics, Binx is strengthened in his decision by Emily herself, whose moral conviction reveals the insufficiency of his ambivalence.10 Personal commitment is as much as Binx can manage, though. Reflecting on his decision to marry Kate and embark upon a solid career, he says, “There is only one thing I 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.”11 He is aided as well by the mundane Christianity of his Catholic family and others like them. Observing a Black man returning to his car from an Ash Wednesday service, Binx reflects,
It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?
It is impossible to say?12
Impossible or not, when Binx’s young brother Lonnie dies, he comforts his young siblings by affirming to them the Christian hope of the resurrection.13 And when he finally settles on marriage and a medical career, he does so, in part, because the Christian claim that God is present to us, sacramentally, in the material world has come to seem possible.
It is a tenuous beginning.
Binx is certain neither of an absolute transcendent Good nor of God. He is merely aware that if such exist, he is most likely to stumble upon them by committing himself to a particular, common life and to the particular people in his life — his wife, his siblings, and his patients. In his family’s earthy, unprepossessing religiousness, in the ardent faith of Lonnie himself, and especially in the goodness of Kate, revealed to him by the love he has for her, Binx — though not a convert — receives a sign of the substantial good that could be worth his allegiance.
Will Barret’s Journey in The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming
In two other novels, The Last Gentleman (1966) and The Second Coming (1980), Percy probes the life of Will Barret, another existentially befuddled character. In the first, he is a young Princeton dropout plagued with mental fugues. Because of these fugues, he muddles about the country, waking in unfamiliar cities with little sense of how he got there. His faulty memory is a sign of existential rootlessness. The son of an Old South lawyer whose despair over the collapse of stoic values led him to commit suicide, Will cannot accept the Stoic tradition as relevant for life in a world devoted to science and technology. His father’s way led to death, and he wants to live. But after three years of psychoanalysis, intended to help him learn exactly that, Will concludes that modern science cannot help him either because it cannot address the particular problems that arise simply from being himself. So, he quits therapy and begins his own search for meaning.
Through a series of chance events, including falling in love with Kitty Vaught, a girl he spots through a telescope, Will ends up travelling across the United States in a small RV with Kitty’s younger brother Jamie who is dying of leukemia. Will also becomes intrigued with Kitty’s older brother Sutter Vaught, a physician who has ruined both marriage and career. Although an especially good diagnostician, he is also an alcoholic, a philanderer, and a philosopher of pornography who believes there is a deep spiritual hole at the center of modern bourgeois culture and refuses to live by its values. He contends that sex and science, raised mistakenly to an ersatz metaphysics, have become the twin poles of immanence and transcendence — the abstractions of science answered and anchored by orgasm. Only the formula does not work.14 After reading Sutter’s diagnosis of modern ennui, Will concludes that Sutter can tell him something about how he should live in the world.
Sutter, though, is a better diagnostician than healer. He knows the modern world is spiritually diseased but does not know what to do about it. To his sister Val who, in the face of modern aimlessness, has converted to the Catholic faith, become a nun and now works with poor, Black children in rural Mississippi, he writes, “I accept the current genital condition of all human relations and try to go beyond it.”15 However, he demonstrates no certainty about what, if anything, might exist “beyond it,” concluding his reflections to Val by saying, “The only difference between me and you is that you think that purity and life can only come from eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. I don’t know where it comes from.”16 This forthright admission of his own uncertainty may be Sutter’s most honest moment. But such honesty is as far as he gets. When his brother Jamie dies of leukemia, Sutter, though present for his death, abandons him immediately thereafter to go on a casual date, leaving Will to make the funeral arrangements. In short, Sutter can offer no guidance. And since Val’s ascetic Christianity only bewilders Will, it makes even the faith of the local priest, who baptizes Jamie at her behest, implausible to him.17
Thus, the novel ends with Will having missed the primary clue to transcendence offered him on this adventure. Returning briefly to his childhood home, he stands in the yard touching an old, rooted oak tree, still alive despite the death-by-suicide of his father and the death of Southern stoicism. Reflecting upon his father, he says
Wait. I think he was wrong and that he was looking in the wrong place….It was
not in the Brahms that one looked and not in solitariness and not in the old sad poetry but…here, under your nose, here in the very curiousness and drollness and extraness of the iron and the bark that — he shook his head — that —.18
But here the passage ends. Of it, Percy himself wrote,
Wil Barrett…sees something in the bark, the same extraness as he calls it, gratuitousness, but for him it is an intimation, a clue to further discovery. And it is not something bad he sees but something good. In terms of traditional metaphysics, he has caught a glimpse of the goodness and gratuitousness of created being. He had that sense we all have occasionally of being onto something important.
As it turns out, he missed it. That was as close as he ever came.19
The “extraness” of the tree suggests that the ordinary, everyday things of an ordinary, everyday life can yield a glimpse of transcendent Good. Rather than taking such created things as signs, however, Will resorts to convention as an end in itself, declaring he will settle down, marry Kitty, and make a positive contribution to the world, since doing something is better than doing nothing.20
In The Second Coming, set some twenty years later, Will has dropped the questions of his youth and ridden the tide of convention to a life of professional success. He has not married Kitty but Marion Peabody, a woman of fabulous wealth, devoted to works of charity and the Episcopal church. After a brilliant Wall Street legal career, he has retired early to the mountains of North Carolina where he spends his days playing golf and drinking bourbon. Until Marion dies and the old questions come flooding back.
With these questions comes a memory he has avoided his whole life. His father, disgusted that America had exchanged stoic virtue for economic prosperity, had tried to kill not himself only but Will also in what Will had, until this moment, regarded as a hunting accident. In response, Will realizes two things. First, his father’s attempt to murder him disoriented and confused him more than his father’s later suicide did, for it implied that Will’s own life was not worth living. Second, his father should have considered more seriously whether the semi-Christian beliefs that saturate the South are true or not. If there is a God, thinks Will, then maybe life can be worth living, even in the midst of modern trivialities. He resolves to find out.21
Further complicating his troubled quest, Will stumbles, by chance, into a relationship with a much younger woman, Allie, who has recently escaped a mental hospital and taken up refuge in an abandoned greenhouse. As it happens, she is the daughter of his old girlfriend Kitty Vaught; and each is the other’s second chance. Before their relationship can solidify, though, Will concocts an experiment to prove definitively that God does or does not exist. He will hide himself in a cave and wait for God to give him an unmistakable sign of His presence in the world. If God does not, he will starve to death in the cave and God’s non-existence will be proven. If God does give him a sign, he will return to the world and make another attempt at a meaningful life, perhaps even begin to take seriously the claims of the Christian faith.22
Fortunately, a comedic mishap interrupts Will’s experiment. While in the cave, he develops a tooth-ache, the pain driving all metaphysical thoughts from his mind as he seeks to escape the cave and relieve his pain. Dizzy from lack of food, he tumbles — literally — out of the cave and into Allie’s greenhouse, landing directly on one of her potting tables. As she nurses him back to health, the two fall in love. Although surviving the cave and falling in love yields only ambiguous evidence for God’s existence, Will achieves clarity about modern life: it has come to seem a living death only because people treat secondary things — sex, wealth, ideology — as if they are primary. “The name of this century is the Century of the Love of Death,” observes Will. “Death in this century is not the death people die but the death people live….Why do men settle so easily for lives which are living deaths?”23 He then enunciates an impressive litany against death, naming and rejecting living-death in its many modern forms. In sum, he declares, “Death in the form of isms and asms shall not prevail over me, orgasm, enthusiasm, liberalism, conservatism, Communism, Buddhism, Americanism, for an ism is only another way of despairing of the truth….To know the many names of death is also to know there is life. I choose life.”24
Choosing life, Will commits to Allie in marriage and begins a tentative journey toward faith. In his face-to-face encounter with Allie and in the love that springs fresh between them, he finds a sign of divine grace sufficient to convince him to go on living. Or, in Allie’s words to Will, “Kissing you is a delight but not a rounded and closed-off delight….it is an opening-out delight and a wanting.”25 In the goodness of each other, Allie and Will taste and see that both life and love are good. In their experience of “opening-out delights” are hints that maybe God is too.
Lancelot Andrewes Lamar: Authority, Violence, and Neo-Stoicism
But not all of Percy’s questing characters have so snug an ending to their story. In Lancelot (1977), his most chilling novel, Percy develops the character of Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, a man whose disgust with the modern world leads him to blow up his own house in an act of nihilistic murder. Subsequently, he articulates a nostalgic dream for an authoritarian utopia wherein the intrinsic ambiguity of human moral life is replaced by a rigid, binary political structure, the will of a few powerful men committed to neo-Stoic ideals determining the social standing of each person. Thus, this novel explores another vulnerability of modern life: the appeal of authoritarian domination for people who, expecting to thrive in the modern world, find themselves losing to others in the individualized pursuit of happiness.
Lance begins to hate the modern world when he discovers that his wife Margo has been unfaithful. He blames fluctuating notions of truth, self, and reality rather than his own neglect of Margot or his conflation of sex with the fullness of love for her infidelity and her decision, finally, to leave him.26 Left holding the short end of the be-true-to-yourself stick, Lance blows his perfectly restored antebellum mansion to smithereens with himself, his wife, and her promiscuous, moving-making friends in it. Only he survives, blasted through the air “like Lucifer blown out of hell.”27 The court finds him temporarily insane and sentences him to a mental hospital. Here, Lance tells his story and develops his complaint to his old friend Percival, who is now both a Catholic priest and a psychiatrist working on Lance’s ward.
Though Percival utters only a few brief lines in the novel, his patient listening prompts Lance to divulge his plans and motives in full. He will find a new social order based upon tight, binary categories such as lady or whore. He will separate the women of virtue from the women of vice, who will remain available for men’s sexual pleasure. He will draw sharp distinctions between men of strong neo-Stoic virtues and all others. These men of virtue will hold power. And he will enforce his new code with scrupulous, inflexible rigor. Unsurprisingly, in this moralistic regime, the women experience the worst of the control. Lancelot cannot tolerate being vulnerable to the agency of a woman, and to the uncontrollability of the world that such agency reveals. In the absence of a clear, culture-wide sense of good, he invents his own ideal and dreams of imposing it upon others. He justifies his plan by comparing himself to the old Southern-stoic gentry who established plantations in the southern wilds and to the old Roman Stoics who expanded their empire over the Mediterranean world.28
Fortunately, Percival disconcerts Lance. His long silences, rarely broken except to ask Lance if he loved Margot, are disturbing enough to make Lance acknowledge at least one possible alternative to his plan, one that is essentially Christian. This way seeks cultural renewal through the slow, tedious work of spiritual renewal in the lives of average people. It requires patience as each person works out the meaning of his or her own life. It is difficult work because real human beings are a complex mix of vice and virtue. It is the sort of work one might expect from a committed parish priest.29 And it reveals Lance’s either/or categories to be both false and oppressive. As Margot, choking on the gas about to blow up their house, says to him, “With you I had to be either—or—but never a—uh—woman.”30
Percival, though, is not the only counter-voice. Anna, a fellow patient, is recovering from a brutal gang-rape that left her nearly comatose. Healing slowly, she begins a tentative relationship with Lance. However, his fetish for the transformative power of violence leads him to conclude that rape has somehow restored her to a new virginity. Gravely offended, Anna rebuts his notion, demanding that he acknowledge reality: violence cannot change what she is. It cannot create nor can it restore; it can only destroy. Disturbed by her fury, Lance becomes even more uncertain of his plan. His unease allows the reader to hope he will exchange his terrifying dream for a relationship of real love with Anna, whose generous spirit is his best chance for a new life.31
Ordinary Life, Divine Grace, and Romantic Love
The struggle to know God and choose the good, though hardly new, seems especially acute right now, as does the temptation to treat relative goods — sex, wealth, intellect, politics — as if they are ultimate goods. Fortunately, Percy’s novels suggest that we best recover the good by returning to an ordinary life, its banality overcome, not by wealth or pleasure or power, but by the breaking-in of divine grace, of which romantic love itself might be a sign.
Stephen Mitchell holds a PhD in humanities from Faulkner University. He teaches English at Covenant Day School and Covenant College.
NOTES
- The Informers, directed by Gregor Jordan, written by Bret Easton Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki (Senator Entertainment, 2008).
- Walker Percy, “The Failure and the Hope,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991), 332.
- Percy, “The Failure and the Hope,” 331–36.
- Walter Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” in Signposts in a Strange Land, 212–13.
- Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (Vintage International, 1989), 73–75.
- Percy, The Moviegoer, 13.
- Percy, The Moviegoer, 13.
- Percy, The Moviegoer, 145–46.
- Percy, The Moviegoer, 223.
- Percy, The Moviegoer, 228.
- Percy, The Moviegoer, 233.
- Percy, The Moviegoer, 235.
- Percy, The Moviegoer, 240.
- Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 279–82.
- Percy, The Last Gentleman, 281.
- Percy, The Last Gentleman, 282.
- Percy, The Last Gentleman, 299–303 and 402–406.
- Percy, The Last Gentleman, 332.
- Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” 221.
- Percy, The Last Gentleman, 381–85.
- Walker Percy, The Second Coming (Picador, 1980), 131–48.
- Percy, The Second Coming, 184–95.
- Percy, The Second Coming, 271.
- Percy, The Second Coming, 273–74.
- Percy, The Second Coming, 328.
- Walker Percy, Lancelot (Picador, 1977), 147–53 and 165–70.
- Percy, Lancelot, 246.
- Percy, Lancelot, 153–60 and 175–80.
- Percy, Lancelot, 176–79 and 256–57.
- Percy, Lancelot, 245.
- Percy, Lancelot, 86, 159 and 251–52.
