The Moviegoer has a narrator that is passive. He only observes the things going on around him and reflecting on those things. To me, I think this passivity and apathy towards the everyday shows that he only floats about the world never fully interacting or communicating with it. “Lonnie grins at me with the liveliest sense of our complicity: let them ski all they want to. We have something better. His expression is complex. He knows that I have entered the argument as a game played by his rules and he knows I know it, but he does not mind.” (163)
For most of the book, observations like this one are common. For me, I found this style of writing to be non-engaging and quite frankly boring. I couldn’t quite seem to grasp on to the book and really examine it because all the observations the narrator makes are of the banal.
I think that is the point of this book, something that I had missed when I first read it. Perry makes it seem boring because of the narrator’s point of view that everything is boring. Nothing makes sense to the narrator because the ordinary just doesn’t mean something to him. “Tonight is Kate’s supper with the queens and I shall not see her. I drank beer and watch television, but every minute or so thoughts of Sharon, my big beautiful majorette from Alabama come crowding upon my head.”(107) Not only is this an ordinary scene, we also get a sense of how he sees people. To him, I feel like people are just toys to him, something to keep him occupied until he finds something else to occupy him. The way in which he speaks about Sharon seems to me like how he would speak about a new object. Overall, I think the narrator is not only passive and apathetic, but also likes to objectify people.