Repetition, What do you Think?

Several times throughout Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer Jack “Binx” Bolling speaks of repetition. Not in the sense of practicing lines for a play or throwing a ball, but in acting out an experience in the same manner in a separate period of time. The first repetition he presents in the novel is on a fine winter night fourteen years previous he had gone to see a western movie entitled The Oxbow Incident at a movie house on Feret Street. It was now fourteen years later and the same time of year, and with camphor berries popping underfoot he watched another western movie, Picayune, in the same theater (possibly the same seat) and claimed it a successful repetition. These repetitions, Binx feels, isolate the time period between them and stitch the events together such as, “peanuts in brittle” (p. 80).

He later recalls a distasteful repetition of a Nivea Crème advertisement. He remembered seeing the exact same advertisement in a magazine on his father’s desk twenty years before. It was the, “same woman, the same grainy face, the same Nivea Crème” (p. 80). Binx then proceeds to say that none of the events over this 20 year period could have mattered, “the thirty million deaths, the countless torturing, uprooting and wanderings to and fro” (p.80), because nothing about the crème had changed.

Some may call it déjà vu, but there has been several times in my life that I find myself doing the exact same thing in the exact same place. The feeling is eerie. It could be the way the light is coming off the water as I play catch with a best friend or any number activities, but these happenings often make the hair on my arms prickle. My brain at that moment recalls an exact memory and it’s almost as if everything else around me fades away; making me unsure which time period I am actually in.

Have you ever experienced a repetition or déjà vu? How do you feel about it? Or how do you feel about Binx’s experiences?