The Adventures of Augie March (1954)

Bellow’s third novel was heralded as one of the most remarkable novels in the history of American letters. Moving from the staid prose and elegant formalism of Dangling Man and The Victim, Bellow composed The Adventures of Augie March as an exuberant ode to the wild world of his Chicago youth. While Bellow continued to be interested in literary modernism, The Adventures of Augie March was less interested in exploring the world of an alienated modern hero trapped in the absurdity of the modern city, as many modernist novels were, than in providing a rollicking and nostalgic romp through the world of the young rogue Augie and his family.

Colorful characters and baroque, almost Dickensian, descriptions of places and people characterize this novel. Loosely based on Bellow’s early observations of his ragtag next- door neighbors in the working-class Chicago Jewish neighborhood in which he spent most of his childhood, The Adventures of Augie March tells the story of the March family, particularly brothers Augie and Simon March, and their fatherless clan. Their boarder and de facto matriarch Grandma Lausch, who rules over her adopted family with an iron fist and the help of her pet poodle, Winnie, dominates the Marches.

The plot of The Adventures of Augie March is a convoluted one. Bellow’s narration takes Augie from Chicago to Mexico and back on a series of realistic but enchanted adventures. Contrary to Bellow’s more plot-driven early novels and short stories, The Adventures of Augie March proves a chance for Bellow to demonstrate the power of his descriptive gifts. Augie’s neighborhood in Chicago is rendered in minute detail. Bellow seems to have memorized every lamppost and backyard plot in the area and given it a name. Influenced by French existentialist fiction, like that produced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March focuses on the power of the individual to shape his/her own life in a landscape otherwise devoid of meaning. Young Augie’s only allegiance is to his romantic ideas of the self, ideas that, Bellow insists, are eminently transportable, unlike the business ideals espoused by others in his neighborhood.

Most strikingly, in The Adventures of Augie March Bellow abandons formal English for a playful and idiomatic Yiddish-inflected American English. The first lines of this novel are famous precisely because they herald Bellow’s embrace of an ordinary American literary voice. Bellow introduces Augie to the reader with the following words: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”. In interviews, Bellow said that he had written his wild third novel with its uniquely American protagonist as a lark of sorts, an attempt to get away from his stilted and unfinished manuscript “The Crab and the Butterfly.”

As does Heraclitus, the heroic figure invoked in the opening lines of The Adventures of Augie March, Augie embraces the idea that his fate is determined by character, rather than by biology or environment. Influenced by the Chicago immigrant milieu that Bellow depicts in his 1953 novel, the character-dic- tating-fate adage takes on added weight. Although set in the same depression era Chicago as “Looking for Mr. Green,” The Adventures of Angie March suggests that it is possible for a poor young boy to escape the bonds of his childhood into the wide world. Like George Grebe in “Looking for Mr. Green,” Augie is a man in search of his fate. In seeking a purpose in life, he tries out a series of ever-more-strange jobs, from dog groomer to smuggler and boxing coach, without ever realizing his dreams of being a teacher. Unlike Grebe’s, however, Augie’s tale is, for the most part, a hopeful one.

Bellow sees his childhood Chicago through a nostalgic veil. Grandma Lausch, boss Einhorn, Five Properties, and Dingbat, some of the colorful characters who make up Augie’s world, are directly out of Bellow’s experience growing up in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. These characters’ every quirk becomes a part of the fairy tale landscape of the novel.

Part of what is so subversive and powerful about Bellow’s work in The Adventures of Augie March results precisely from the fact that the reader is left without a clear idea of how to classify the novel. Is it a fairy tale, as some of the characters and plot points of the novel suggest, or an immigrant saga? In The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow experimented with a number of literary forms, from the Bildung-sroman (the coming-of-age novel) to the picaresque adventure tale.

His combination of Yiddishisms and wild multiple noun and verb sentences with mythical and biblical allusions simultaneously locates Bellow within the pantheon of English literature and the life of the street he celebrates throughout his groundbreaking novel. In the end, however, the reader is left to question the success of Augie’s unquenchable quest for freedom. Bellow suggests that Augie’s desire for love, symbolized by his affair with Thea Fenchel, is not compatible with his driving refusal of commitment of any sort.

For Discussion or Writing
1. The Adventures of Augie March is the first novel in which Saul Bellow attempts to provide his readers with a comprehensive idea of America and American life. As many critics have pointed out, the title of Bellow’s 1953 novel, as well as the playful hero Augie, call to mind the quintessentially American novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Why might Bellow have sought to invoke Mark Twain’s novel and the archetypal hero Huck in his depiction of an immigrant boy’s adventures? How does the historical period in which Bellow’s novel is written necessitate a revision of the Huckish protagonist’s adventures? How might we compare these novels?

2. How does Bellow’s preoccupation with the manner in which American business culture structures the possibilities for the individual in American society emerge in The Adventures of Augie March? Using Bellow’s later novella, Seize the Day, discuss the way in which Bellow uses the relationships among family members to depict the choices available for youth in America during the time in which he was writing. How does Bellow write social conflicts onto familial relations in these two works?

3. Augie is the ultimate proponent of freedom at all costs. Any attempts by a boss or love interest to pin him down send the young, prototypically American hero into flight. How does Augie prefigure a host of subsequent American literary heroes, most notably the highly eloquent and commitment- phobic heroes of Philip Roth’s oeuvre, such as Nathan Zuckerman and Alexander Portnoy? Why might such a character be appealing to a postwar American literary audience?

4. The conflict between determinism and freedom is a central theme in The Adventures of Augie March from the first pages of the novel, when Bellow invokes the classical hero Heraclitus to emphasize young Augie’s insistence on avoiding being determined by his background. Why would this theme take on particular significance for an immigrant author? How does Bellow revise this common theme of myth by locating his story in an immigrant neighborhood in depression era Chicago?

5. Many commentators have noted the muscular and vivacious prose style and narrative voice Bellow embraces in The Adventures of Augie March. How does Bellow’s use of language affect our reading of the novel? How does it construct the tone of Augie’s adventures?