SOURCE: Gerson, Steven M. “The New American Adam in The Adventures of Augie March.” Modern Fiction Studies 25, no. 1 (spring 1979): 117-28.

[In the following essay, Gerson traces the transformation of Augie March in The Adventures of Augie March from an early American Adamic figure as defined by R. W. B. Lewis to a modern American Adam whose personality and outlook has been influenced by twentieth-century events.]

In the epilogue of The American Adam, R. W. B. Lewis contends that Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March is written in the tradition of the earlier American Adamic myth. According to Lewis, Augie March, the protagonist in Bellow's novel, is similar to the nineteenth-century Adams evident in Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman because Augie is as youthful, innocent, optimistic, and adventurous as are the earlier Adams.¹

Throughout much of Bellow's novel, Augie is similar to an early American Adam who seeks to make of America an earthly paradise, and Lewis's mention of Augie as such an Adam is justified. However, as Augie matures and experiences heartbreak in love, the dissolution of family ties, the stock market crash, labor conflicts between the AFL and the CIO, and World War II, he loses much of his youthful Adamic resilience and optimism. In fact, he becomes pessimistic, defeated, and broken, traits anathema to early American Adamism.

Nonetheless, inasmuch as Augie seeks paradise, he is still Adamic. But rather than envisioning paradise as the fulfillment of the American dream, Augie envisions paradise as an escape from modern American dilemmas. Thus, in The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow deviates from Lewis's traditional concept of the American Adam applicable to the nineteenth century and creates a distinctly new and different character—a modern American Adam whose personality has been shaped by twentieth-century horrors. An analysis of The Adventures of Augie March will reveal Augie's transformation from an early American Adam as defined by Lewis to a modern American Adam.

Lewis defines the early American Adam “as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history.” He also states that the image of the American Adam “had about it always an air of adventurousness, a sense of promise and possibility.”² Lewis assumes that Augie fulfills these characteristics of the old American Adam, inasmuch as Augie “takes on as much of the world as is available to him, without ever fully submitting to any of the world's determining categories.” He “struggles tirelessly … to realize the full potentialities of the classic figure … [of] ‘the simple genuine self against the whole world.’”³

The fact that Augie represents the Old American Adam is evinced clearly in the first sentence of the novel. Augie, the omniscient narrator, asserts, “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.”⁴ Immediately Bellow develops a character who is adventurous, optimistic, self-reliant, and “poised at the start of a new history.”

Moreover, in this first picture of Augie, he is similar to the Adamic figure in Whitman's poem, “As Adam early in the morning,”⁵ who is the consummate example of the innocent and adventurous American excited at the prospects of beginning life. Augie recalls a sermon preached by a “Reverend Beecher telling his congregation, ‘Ye are Gods, you are crystalline, your faces are radiant!’” (AM [The Adventures of Augie March], p. 83). Though Augie is “not an optimist of that degree,” he says, “I was and have always been ready to venture as far as possible” (AM, p. 83). As an idealistic youth, Augie is optimistic about his future and approaches all prospective experiences with an unflagging adventurousness.

The only qualification to his enthusiasm is that he questions how his desires can be fulfilled in Chicago, “that somber city.” As an Adamic figure, Augie regrets the fact that Chicago, with its “deep city vexation” and “deep city aims,” disallows the “nature-painted times, like the pastoral of Sicilian shepherd lovers” (AM, p. 92). He regrets that the city and the “crowd” yield “results with … difficulty,” for what he desires is “happiness,” “the misery-antidote” which he fails to discern in Chicago (AM, pp. 92-93). Augie “longed very much” for excitement, and he sees himself as an innocent youth untouched by the “vice and shortcomings” of the city or “the weariness of maturity” (AM, p. 92). Therefore, because Chicago fails to accommodate his idealistic desires, Augie yearns for the “Early scenes of life … beginning with Eden” (AM, p. 92).

Despite the squalor of his surroundings and the vexations of the city, Augie maintains an optimistic view and is unbeaten by life. As he says, he “lacked the true sense of being a criminal, the sense that [he] was on the wrong side of the universal wide line with the worse or weaker part of humankind” (AM, p. 48). It simply “wasn't in [his] nature to fatigue [himself] with worry” (AM, p. 11).

Augie is able to avoid a sense of defeat primarily because he is consistently “too larky and boisterous” (AM, p. 11). Throughout the novel, he is usually able to overlook the faults in others, absorb his difficulties, and see his “crimes more tolerantly” (AM, p. 32). In fact, he is usually so affable and optimistic in the face of trouble that one character says to Augie, “‘A train could hit you and you'd think it was just swell and get up with smiles, like knee-deep in June’” (AM, p. 297).

Possibly because Augie reveals this adventurousness, optimism, and cheerful immunity to traumas, characteristic traits of the early American Adam, he is constantly challenged by “Reality instructors” who seek to deflate his affability. In Herzog, Bellow has his protagonist, Moses Herzog, confronted by cynical characters whom he calls “Reality instructors” because they seek “to teach” and “to punish” Moses with “lessons of the Real.”⁶ Bellow further states that these instructors hope to teach Herzog to “suffer and hate” and attempt to drag him “down in the mire of post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, next door to the Void” (H [Herzog], p. 93). Though the term “Reality instructors” primarily is related to Herzog, it also applies to the cynics in The Adventures of Augie March.⁷

The first such instructor Augie encounters is Grandma Lausch, a boarder in the March home, who, though “not a relation at all,” appropriates command of the house (AM, p. 3). Augie describes her as a Machiavelli (AM, p. 2) who enjoys making the Marches “take a long swig of her mixture of reality” (AM, p. 55). Primarily, her “mixture of reality” is “one more animadversion on the trustful, loving, and simple surrounded by the cunning-hearted and tough, a fighting nature of birds and worms, and a desperate mankind without feelings” (AM, p. 9). She preaches cynicism and ruthlessness as the only means of survival, while debunking Augie's type of optimism and innocence. Throughout Augie's youth, she commands his home by advocating her ideals: scheming, devising, intrigue (AM, p. 3).

When Augie is older and leaves the house to work, he escapes Grandma Lausch's cynical dogmatism, but encounters another Machiavellian instructor, William Einhorn. Augie states that if he had truly been Einhorn's disciple instead of an innocent optimist, he would have approached any important decision by asking himself, “‘What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhorn think?’” (AM, p. 65).

Initially, Einhorn is not a Machiavellian cynic advising deceit and cunning. Augie admits that “Einhorn had a teaching turn similar to Grandma Lausch's, both believing they could show what could be done with the world, where it gave or resisted, where you could be confident and run or where you could only feel your way and were forced to blunder” (AM, p. 73). But Einhorn's instructions, at first, enforce Augie's inherent optimism. Einhorn, a semi-corrupt entrepreneur who revels in the American system of free enterprise, compares the businessman to “the conqueror, the poet and philosopher” and assumes that business offers “a world of possibilities” (AM, pp. 72-73). By working for Einhorn as an all-purpose secretary, Augie flourishes under the atmosphere of hope and accomplishment pervading Einhorn's home and offices. Einhorn preaches optimistically about “the machine age and the kind of advantage that had to be taken of it,” and Augie gladly receives the lectures “from the learned signor” (AM, p. 78).

However, Einhorn's optimism is shattered by the stock market crash, in which he “was among the first to be wiped out” (AM, p. 117). After this debacle, Einhorn becomes like Grandma Lausch, a reality instructor overcome by cynicism and hoping to teach Augie of the “Void.” Augie states that Einhorn now

intended that, as there were no more effective prescriptions in old ways, as we were in dreamed-out or finished visions, that therefore, in the naked form of the human jelly, one should choose or seize with force; one should make strength from disadvantages and make progress by having enemies, being wrathful or terrible.

(AM, p. 204)

Having lost his wealth and position due to the crash, Einhorn also loses his sense of hope in the “possibilities” of America and preaches a version of cunning and deceit even more sinister than Grandma Lausch's.

After Einhorn, Augie is forced to endure the cynical instructions of Mrs. Renling, an influential and wealthy woman, who seeks to adopt him and his brother Simon. Renling, whose vocation seems to be to “coach” and “instruct” (AM, p. 146), constantly pesters Augie with what he calls “damnation chats” (AM, p. 153). Like the previous reality instructors, she seeks to demean Augie's persistent “splendor of morning” attitude by calling “out her whole force of rights, apocalypse death riders, church-porch devils who grabbed naked sinners from behind to lug them down to punishment, her infanticides, plagues, and incests” (AM, p. 153). Augie, however, manages to ignore her pessimistic instructions and maintain his optimism, just as he manages to ignore his brother's reality instructions. Though Simon tells Augie to make himself “hard,” Augie avoids Simon's cynical outlook, in which he “didn't fundamentally believe” (AM, p. 267).

Augie's final reality instructor is Mimi Villars. Like the other instructors, she berates Augie about how he “wasn't mad enough about abominations or aware enough of them, didn't know many graves were underneath [his] feet, was lacking in disgust, wasn't hard enough against horrors or wrathful about swindles” (AM, p. 233). She, too, tries to teach him her cynical viewpoint and tries to drag him down into the mire of nihilism. Augie, however, rejects her instructions. Though she asserts that “most people suffer,” Augie can only tell her “about how pleasant [his] life has been” (AM, pp. 284-285). He maintains an optimistic concept of life; he is unable to believe that “all was so poured in concrete and that there weren't occasions for happiness” (AM, p. 285).

Despite the instructions by Grandma Lausch, Einhorn, Mrs. Renling, Simon, and Mimi, all of whom attempt to destroy Augie's youthful and innocent views, Augie continues to illustrate traits of the early American Adam. He is adventurous, optimistic, and unbeaten by his experiences. He is self-reliant and chooses to approach life with his rosy attitude rather than be determined by the cynical instructions of his associates. Eventually Einhorn realizes that Augie is defiant and says, “‘But wait. All of a sudden I catch on to something about you. You've got opposition in you’” (AM, p. 129). Augie agrees: “I did have opposition in me, and great desire to offer resistance and to say ‘No!’” (AM, p. 129). He states, “No, I didn't want to be what [Einhorn] called determined” and “wouldn't become what other people wanted to make of me” (AM, p. 130). Primarily, Augie resists being beaten or tormented or made cynical; he chooses to maintain a youthful optimism even in the face of tribulation.

At one point in the novel, Augie clarifies his position further. He believes that there are two ways of approaching life. One can accept the “reality” of every day occurrences and thus submit to drudgery and the commonplace, or one can rise above normalcy and seek a more “triumphant” life. That Augie assumes life can be divided into only these two categories hints at his naiveté. That he chooses to ignore what he considers normalcy and yearns for adventure accentuates his role as the youthful optimist. He says,

I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else—that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness, or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding. Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go, oatmeal and laundry tickets and all the rest, and insist that all moments be raised to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreariness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic. So there's a schism about it, some saying only this triumphant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no debate, and I made speed into the former.

(AM, p. 216)

What Augie does is describe a dichotomy between “reality” and fantasy; he ironically states that no one can really believe in the “periodic” triumphant life, but that one should surely accept “the daily facts” propounded by reality instructors such as Lausch, Einhorn, Renling, Simon, and Villars; then he asserts that he does choose triumph over reality, adventure over normalcy, and optimism over the “despair-harness.”

An interesting scene in the novel which further reveals that Augie is like the early American Adam, living innocently before the fall, occurs when Augie first encounters Thea Fenchel, an Eve-like temptress. Augie has gone to a resort with Mrs. Renling where he sees and falls in love with Esther Fenchel, Thea's sister. Esther pays little attention to Augie, but Thea is attracted to him. One evening, Augie goes into an orchard to brood over Esther, and in the garden he hears

someone light coming near, a woman stepping under the tree into the dusty rut worn beside the swing by the feet of kids. It was Esther's sister Thea, come to talk to me, the one Mrs. Renling warned me of. In her white dress and her shoes that came down like pointed shapes of birds in the vague whiteness of the furrow by the swing, with lace on her arms and warm opening and closing differences of the shade of leaves back of her head, she stood and looked at me.

(AM, p. 160)

In this Eden-like setting where Augie has gone to find solace from his defeated love for Esther, Thea intrudes and tries to seduce him. Beneath the “orchard leaves” she kneels beside him, seductively touches his feet and ankles with her thighs, and says she has fallen in love with him (AM, pp. 161-162). Augie, the always innocent fantasist, is astonished that she would challenge his love for Esther by professing her own love for him. He stands up to leave and says to her, “‘Now, Miss Fenchel. … You're lovely, but what do you think we're doing? I can't help it, I love Esther’” (AM, p. 162). Thea, however, is adamant and attempts to pursue him. Recognizing her intentions, Augie “had to escape from the swing and get away in the orchard” (AM, p. 163). He retreats further into the garden rather than confront Thea's seduction. In doing so, he exemplifies the type of innocence characteristic of the early American Adam.

His Adamic role is finally accented when, following the scene with Thea, Augie goes to a pier to wait for his brother Simon, who is planning a vacation near the resort at which Augie and Mrs. Renling have stayed. While he waits for his brother to disembark from a ship, he watches other vacationers and describes them as “Tough or injured, … bearers of things as old as the most ancient of cities and older; desires and avoidances bred into bellies, shoulders, legs, as long ago as Eden and the Fall” (AM, p. 164). The implication is that these vacationers have suffered the ramifications of the fall from Eden and thus are “Tough” and “injured.” By juxtaposing these characters with Augie, who has just retreated into the garden to avoid consummation of “desires,” Bellow underlines Augie's role as an innocent Adam.

However, despite Augie's attempts to remain innocent, optimistic, adventurous, and unbeaten; despite his attempts to remain like the early American Adams, he encounters a number of devastating occurrences which finally shatter his idealism. First, his friend, Mimi Villars becomes pregnant, attempts to have an abortion, procures the services of an incompetent doctor, and almost dies from his butchering. Second, an acquaintance of Augie's sees him helping Mimi, assumes he is the father of the child, and runs to tell Lucy Magnus, Augie's fiancée, that Augie has been unfaithful. Though Augie is not the father but only has attempted to aid Mimi, Lucy and her parents break off the engagement. Next, Simon, who has chosen Lucy for Augie because she is wealthy, is offended that Augie has compromised himself and lost this chance at an economically promising marriage. In his anger, Simon more or less disinherits Augie and says he never wants to see him again. Though Augie is able to stand up under the pressures rather well, he suffers a final indignity which crushes his optimism. He is caught in a squabble between the AFL and the CIO, is beaten by agitators, and has to hide to avoid being killed.

After these traumas, Augie loses much of his innocence and states that he “was no child now, neither in age nor in protectedness, and [he] was thrown for fair on the free spinning of the world” (AM, p. 318). Though his reality instructors had been unsuccessful in shaking his optimisim, the traumas he suffers succeed in forcing him to realize that life is brutal and that no one can remain as idealistic and youthfully innocent as he had been.

Augie recognizes that his initial innocence has been destroyed, and he finds “That in any true life you must go and be exposed outside the small circle that encompasses two or three heads in the same history of love. Try and stay, though, inside. See how long you can” (AM, p. 318). Once Augie concludes that he has lost Eden, he no longer is like the early American Adams; Bellow proceeds to depict Augie as a modern Adam who is defeated by life and who seeks to escape the world by envisioning a new Eden in which he can hide. Before, he had retreated into the garden to avoid Thea's seduction so that he could maintain his youthful innocence. Now, Augie has to seek a new Eden in which he can retrieve the innocence he has lost.

Ironically, Thea offers him his first vision of escape in Eden. Thea plans to go to Mexico to get a divorce, and she “assumed that [Augie would] go to Mexico with her” (AM, p. 350). Augie, having been wounded by reality, “never seriously thought of refusing” her primarily because he thinks Mexico will allow him to escape his traumas (AM, p. 350). He concludes this because Thea has suggested that in Mexico they will experience “something better than what people call reality” (AM, p. 353). To this suggestion, Augie thinks, “Very good and bravo! Let's have this better, nobler reality” (AM, p. 353). That Mexico will be paradisiacal for Augie is further indicated when we learn that Thea's house in Mexico is called “‘Casa Descuitada,’”—“Carefree House” (AM, p. 383). The implication is that Mexico will obliterate Augie's cares by allowing him a return to innocence in a new Eden.

However, as Patrick Morrow states, Bellow is a hopeful artist who has come to “believe that man's living within society is preferable to self-imposed alienation.”⁸ Bellow asserts that it is impossible to escape reality by envisioning paradise and that one must adapt to the world rather than attempt to flee it. To accentuate this assertion, Bellow surrounds Augie's trip to Mexico with portents and eventually depicts Mexico as a pseudo-paradise which is actually hellish. For instance, even before Augie departs for Mexico, he is made uneasy by his friends' warnings not to go. “Nobody, then, gave the happy bon voyage I'd have liked. Everybody warned me. … I argued back to myself that it was just the Rio Grande I had to cross, not the Acheron, but anyway it oppressed me from somewhere” (AM, pp. 360-361). Immediately the tone is set. Though Augie hopes to find a paradise in Mexico, Bellow equates the trip to one into hell.

This portentous atmosphere is furthered when we learn that Thea, the temptress earlier in Augie's life, plans to travel to Mexico “with snake-catching equipment” (AM, p. 357). In fact, once Augie and Thea are in Mexico, Thea spends much of her time collecting snakes or visiting “snaky” areas (AM, p. 395). After a while, she has collected so many snakes and deposited them at her home that Augie says their porch became “a snake gallery” (AM, p. 402), and they “seemed in the age of snakes among the hot poisons of green and the livid gardenias” (AM, p. 395). In this sense, Thea compliments her earlier role as an Eve-like seductress who promises Augie, the Adamic character, pleasure, but who actually threatens his safety in Eden.

The final portent surrounding Augie's supposedly paradisiacal venture into Mexico is that Thea takes with her an eagle which she plans to train to hunt iguanas. Though the eagle is Thea's idea, the chore of handling it is relegated to Augie. Forced to spend a great deal of time with the eagle, which he names Caligula, Augie becomes almost possessed by it. Just as Thea is a snake-like temptress, who corrupts Augie's paradise, Caligula, who glides “like a Satan,” is a demonic invasion into Eden (AM, p. 377). The eagle becomes almost a demon reminder to Augie of his mortality. As he says, “In the most personal acts of your life you carry the presence and power of another; you extend his being in your thoughts, where he inhabits. Death, with monuments, makes great men remembered like that. So I had to bear Caligula's gaze” (AM, p. 374). Rather than finding Eden in Mexico, Augie resides with the satanic eagle whose gaze he must endure and whose deathly emanations enter and inhabit his thoughts.

These incidents which cloud Augie's quest for paradise prove to be portentous inasmuch as his stay in Mexico is disastrous. Not only does he suffer an accident in which his skull is cracked, but also Thea and he drift apart, fight, and end their relationship. Thea leaves him alone at her “Casa Descuitada,” and for days he feels like one of “the damned” (AM, p. 445). Rather than retrieving his lost innocence, optimism, and adventurousness as he had hoped to do in the new Eden, he finds no solace. In fact, his having sought escape in paradise leaves him even more wounded than he was before he left for Mexico. Alone in Mexico, he says,

suddenly my heart felt ugly, I was sick of myself. I thought that my aim of being simple was just a fraud, that I wasn't a bit goodhearted or affectionate, and I began to wish that Mexico from beyond the walls would come in and kill me and that I would be thrown in the bone dust and twisted, spiky crosses of the cemetery, for the insects and lizards.

(AM, p. 447)

Perhaps one of the reasons Augie suffers so in Mexico is that his expectations are excessively romantic. He assumes that Mexico will be paradisiacal; when this assumption proves fallacious, he is destroyed. If he could learn to adapt to reality rather than seek escape, he possibly could avoid such pains. After Thea leaves him, he comes close to recognizing his penchant for fantasy and thus adapting to life. He states, “my invention and special thing was simplicity. I wanted simplicity and denied complexity” (AM, p. 449). At this point in the novel, he realizes that he has desired to hide from the complexity of life; he continues to say that “whoever would give [him] cover from this mighty free-running terror and wild cold of chaos [he] went to” (AM, p. 449).

With this realization, he decides to find Thea, ask for her forgiveness, and start a more realistic life with her. However, the more he thinks of her, the more he dreams of a perfect, paradisiacal life that the two could share. “Imagining how this would be, I melted, my chest got hot, soft, sore, and yearning. I saw it already happening. It's always been like that with me, that fantasy went ahead of me and prepared the way” (AM, p. 450). Rather than adapt to reality, Augie again chooses to fantasize about life with Thea.

Though Augie and Thea never get back together, his dreams of paradise continue. Later in the novel, he tells a friend of his that he hopes to buy “‘a piece of property and settle down on it’” and start a school (AM, p. 508). Because his friend is leery of the idea, Augie attempts to remove his friend's fears. Augie states that his idea is not fantastic. “‘Oh, I don't expect to set up the Happy Isles. I don't consider myself any Prospero. I haven't got the build. I have no daughter. I never was a king, for instance. No, no. I'm not looking for any Pindar Hyperborean dwelling with the gods in ease a tearless life, never aging—’” (AM, p. 508).

However, Augie kids himself by debunking his own idea. Despite his claims to the contrary, what he envisions is a paradise in which he will have a chance at beating “‘life at its greatest complication and meshuggah power’” by starting “‘lower down, and simpler’” (AM, p. 510). What he actually desires is a pastoral Eden. “What I had in my mind was this private green place like one of those Walden or Innisfree wattle jobs under the kind sun, surrounded by velvet woods and bright gardens and Elysium lawns sown with Lincoln Park grass seed” (AM, p. 575).

Because a number of characters in the novel see that Augie is a dreamer who will not adapt to reality, they try to correct him of his excessive idealism. Unlike the reality instructors who tried to force their cynicism on Augie, characters like Padilla and Clem Tambow simply try to teach Augie to be more realistic. Padilla tells Augie that he wants too much,

and therefore if you miss out you blame yourself too hard. But this is all a dream. The big investigation today is into how bad a guy can be, not how good he can be. You don't keep up with the times. You're going against history. Or at least you should admit how bad things are, which you don't do either.

(AM, p. 481)

Padilla recognizes that Augie is detached from reality and is unable to adapt to the world. He does not necessarily want to drag Augie down into the “mire” or the “Void” as did the reality instructors; he simply wants Augie to get in step with history and at least see the world clearly.

Clem Tambow tells Augie “practically the same thing” (AM, p. 481). He states that Augie's ambitions are too general and that Augie is “‘not concrete enough’” (AM, p. 483). He says to Augie, “‘What I guess about you is that you have a nobility syndrome. You can't adjust to the reality situation’” (AM, p. 484). Because of this, Tambow fears that Augie is “‘going to ruin [himself] ignoring the reality principle and trying to cheer up the dirty scene.’” He believes that Augie “‘should accept the data of experience’” (AM, p. 485).

Considering Augie's experiences in Mexico, one can assume that it would be better for him to overcome his naive idealism and see the world clearly. However, Augie never is able to adapt to life. On the contrary, despite his traumatic experiences throughout the book, the novel ends with Augie “grinning again”:

That's the animal ridens in me, the laughing creature, forever rising up. … I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.

(AM, p. 599)

Patrick Morrow says that Augie's comments at the end of the novel reveal that Augie has succeeded in adapting to the world, “accommodating through the comic, specifically by his good-natured grin.”⁹ Such a comment is difficult to accept inasmuch as Augie has grinned throughout the novel but has met with one dilemma after another. His grins seem to be not an accommodation but a naive and juvenile inability to perceive the facts of life and assess them maturely. Ihab Hassan supplies a more acceptable interpretation when he says that the novel offers “no proper ending.” Whereas Morrow assumes that Augie's “good-natured grin” allows him to adapt successfully to the world, Hassan states that at the end of the novel, Augie is still one of the uninitiated. “Augie remains, like Huck, uncommitted, suspended, as it were, between native innocence and hard-earned knowledge, poised for the next adventure which, though it may not actually repeat a former escapade, guarantees no final knowledge or repose.”¹⁰

The implication of Bellow's ending is that for Augie there is always some unknown land, some distant horizon that is fertile ground for his imagination and for his desire for escape in a paradise. At the end of the novel, Augie is searching for peace and happiness; though he might be “a flop” like Columbus and end up “in chains,” as a modern American Adam he will not discount the possibility of a new Eden. He chooses to ignore reality and live in dreams; he fails to adapt to the world.

Notes

1. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 198.

2. Lewis, p. 1.

3. Lewis, p. 198.

4. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953; rpt. New York: Avon, 1977), p. 1. Subsequent quotations from this novel will be designated parenthetically by the abbreviation AM and page numbers.

5. Walt Whitman, “As Adam Early in the Morning,” in Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose (1921; rpt. New York: The Modern Library, 1950), p. 92.

6. Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964; rpt. New York: The Viking Press, 1967), p. 125.

7. Tony Tanner, in Saul Bellow (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), pp. 45-46, 94, and Brigitte Scheer-Schäzler, in Saul Bellow (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972), pp. 35ff. supply lengthy discussions of the extent to which the phrase “Reality instructors” applies to numerous characters in Augie March who give the innocent protagonist their debased, cynical views of life.

8. Patrick Morrow, “Threat and Accommodation: The Novels of Saul Bellow,” The Midwest Quarterly, 8 (Summer 1967), 389.

9. Morrow, p. 402.

10. Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 311.