The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow - Jeffrey Meyers (essay date March 1977)
Jeffrey Meyers (essay date March 1977)
SOURCE: Meyers, Jeffrey. “Brueghel and Augie March.” American Literature 49, no. 1 (March 1977): 113-19.
[In the following essay, Meyers explicates the symbolic role that Pieter Brueghel's painting The Misanthrope plays in The Adventures of Augie March.]
In chapter ten of The Adventures of Augie March (1953) Augie describes Padilla's technique of stealing books and remembers
an old, singular, beautiful Netherlands picture I once saw in an Italian gallery, of a wise old man walking in empty fields, pensive, while a thief behind cuts the string of his purse. The old man, in black, thinking probably of God's city, nevertheless has a foolish length of nose and is much too satisfied with his dream. But the peculiarity of the thief is that he is enclosed in a glass ball, and on the glass ball there is a surmounting cross, and it looks like the emperor's symbol of...
[The entire page is 2221 words long]
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