Kierkegaardian misreadings of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer

In 1974, Walker Percy interpreted his own novel, The Moviegoer, as both an illustration and a test of Kierkegaard’s existentialist theology. As part of this reading, Percy confessed reservations about Kierkegaard’s schema, asserting that a Thomist understanding of faith as eminently reasonable was preferable to Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith emerging from deeply private despair. Many critics have followed Percy’s lead and argued for a Thomist Catholic resolution to an otherwise Kierkegaardian novel. Yet Percy made the novel, perhaps intentionally, truer to Kierkegaard’s schema than critics have recognized. This article recognizes new signs of Binx’s despair, and the possibility that his leap into faith is absurd rather than rational.