206 Bellow, Saul
the nature of race: Oroonoko is a prince, and he is a
prince whether African or European.
Victoria E. Price
BELLOW, SAUL The Adventures of
Augie March (1953)
When it was published in 1953, The Adventures of
Augie March established Saul Bellow (1915–2005) as
a leading American writer. Augie March announces
in the first sentence that he is “an American, Chi-
cago born... and will make the record in my own
way.” Both a picaresque—an episodic tale that
follows a young protagonist’s adventures—and a
bildungsroman—a coming of age novel tracking
the protagonist from youth to adulthood—the novel
follows Augie’s life from the late 1920s to the years
following World War II.
After several odd jobs, Augie joins the neigh-
borhood magnate William Einhorn, whose empire
crumbles in the Great Depression, but who forms
a reference point throughout the novel, not least
because he gives Augie a set of fire-damaged classics
to which he retreats occasionally. Augie then works
for the Renlings, outdoor lifestyle purveyors, in
nearby suburb Evanston, although that relationship
fails when they insist on adopting him.
Back in Chicago, Augie lives meagerly while
his brother Simon marries into Charlotte Magnus’s
wealthy family. Simon’s plans for Augie to follow
suit are thwarted when Augie helps his neighbor
Mimi obtain an abortion. Disowned by Simon,
Augie joins Thea Fenchel, whom he met while with
the Renlings, on a trip to Mexico. Their relation-
ship dissolves after Augie helps a fellow expatriate,
Stella, escape her lover. He then returns to Chicago,
where the eccentric millionaire Robey employs him
to research a grand project that never materializes.
When World War II breaks out, Augie enlists
in the Merchant Marine and locates Stella in New
York, where the two marry. Torpedoed in the Atlan-
tic, he drifts for days with an unbalanced fellow
Chicagoan before their rescue. As the novel ends,
Augie and Stella are living in Paris, where she pur-
sues an acting career and he brokers shady deals in
the disheveled atmosphere of postwar Europe.
Richard Hancuff
Fate in The Adventures of Augie March
From Augie March’s early declaration that “a man’s
character is his fate, says Heraclitus,” Saul Bellow’s
novel explores the ground between the passivity of
fate and the active creation of existentialism. Fate
is predetermined, an external force acting upon the
individual, although Heraclitus muddies the waters
by suggesting that one’s fate is not external but,
rather, stems from character of the individual. By
the novel’s end, Augie has added his own twist to
Heraclitus, arguing that “it is obvious that this fate,
or what he settles for, is also his character.” More
than inverting Heraclitus’s maxim, Augie defines
fate as “what he settles for,” perhaps best understood
as one’s choice in life. Augie has spent the better part
of the novel resisting what others have tried to make
of him, rejecting fates that are not his own, and in
those actions he essentially denies the notion of fate
as passivity; for Augie, fate must be worked for.
After a conversation with William Einhorn,
Augie states, “I never had accepted determination
and wouldn’t become what other people wanted to
make of me.” While Augie maintains an ease in his
relations with others that leads the Renlings to want
to adopt him—“there was something adoptional
about me,” he explains—and Thea Fenchel to tell
him, “You’re so happy when somebody begs you
to oblige. You can’t stand up under flattery,” Augie
does not see his behavior as his fate, either leaving
or sabotaging his relationships when they become
too constricting. The best summary of his attitude
arrives as advice from his friend Manny Padilla, who
is financing his education by stealing textbooks: “I
don’t have larceny in my heart; I’m not a real crook.
I’m not interested in it, so nobody can make a fate
of it for me. It’s not my fate.” Like Manny, Augie
embarks on his experiences as means to an end or
as experiments, but not as integral components of
his character.
Late in the novel and deeply in love with
Stella Chesney, Augie shares deep conversations with
Mintouchian, a man Augie describes as “another of
those persons who persistently arise before me with
life counsels and illuminations.” Among the parables
Mintouchian relates is a meditation on change and
fate: “You make your peace with change. Another city,
another woman, a different bed, but you’re the same