The Adventures of Augie March 207and so you must be flexible. You kiss the woman and
you show how you love your fate, and you worship
and adore the changes in life. You obey this law.” For
Mintouchian, fate is simply what happens: It is the
journey through life. In response, Augie tells him,
“I have always tried to become what I am. But it’s a
frightening thing... I suppose I better, anyway, give
in and be it. I will never force the hand of fate to cre-
ate a better Augie March.” Although Augie suggests
he is giving in to fate and accepting determination,
he speaks of trying to become what he is, which is a
far more active view of fate. It does not accept that
one’s fate comes upon one naturally; rather, it must
be earned through struggle.
In the end, Augie rejects a traditional view of
fate as an end, seeing it instead as a process: “Other
preoccupations are my fate, or what fills life and
thought. Among them, preoccupation with Stella,
so that what happens to her happens, by necessity,
to me too.” Augie chooses his fate by choosing his
preoccupations, although he may quibble with the
amount of choice he had in his falling in love. Yet
even his earlier actions, while interpreted by others,
including his brother Simon, as aimless drifting,
Augie interprets as hard work leading you to your
fate: “[A]ll the while you thought you were going
around idly terribly hard work was taking place.
Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining,
moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing... And
none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s
internally done.” Therefore, one’s fate is not only the
end result of the pushing and heaving, but also the
process itself; it is the becoming what one is, and
the process of becoming is never finished. As Augie
opines, “It’s only temporary. We’ll get out of it.”
Richard Hancuff
identity in The Adventures of Augie March
Augie March’s triumphant declaration that he is
“an American, Chicago born... and will make the
record in my own way” immediately announces to
the reader the importance of identity, both personal
and national, to the narrative. The point is further
reinforced late in the novel, when Augie repeats
this statement of origins while explaining how he
has come to write the story of his life in a café in
postwar Europe. Augie argues a connection between
nonconformity and being an American: that inde-
pendence, the desire to “make the record in [his]
own way,” is also exhibited in his personal life, as
Augie fights against becoming what others expect.
Throughout the text, Augie seems to have many
admirers or acquaintances who want to thrust an
identity onto him, and while he seems amenable
enough to these plans at first, his mentor William
Einhorn tells him, “You’ve got opposition in you.
You don’t slide through everything. You just make
it look so.” With that observation, Augie con-
cludes that “I never had accepted determination and
wouldn’t become what other people wanted to make
of me.” Yet, while Augie realizes he does not want
to be shaped by anyone else, it is not because he has
a clear idea of his own identity: “I touched all sides,
and nobody knew where I belonged. I had no good
idea of that myself.”
Augie’s lack of clear goals should not be taken
as shiftlessness, which is exactly what his brother
Simon mistakes it for, telling Augie, “since you
won’t look out for your interests, I see I’m going to
have to do it for you.” Simon creates one more role
for Augie to play, but Augie is not seeking a role to
play so much as he desires to understand his place
in the universe: “I don’t want to be representative or
exemplary or head of my generation or any model
of manhood. All I want is something of my own,
and bethink myself.” He seeks a connection with
himself that he does not receive from any of the roles
offered by others, either as employee, adopted son,
or social-climbing husband, and in achieving that
understanding, he seeks to locate himself among the
received wisdom of the ages, frequently withdrawing
to the classics of world literature that he has either
received as damaged goods or come by dishonestly.
These compromised modes of access are important,
because they indicate not only the extent to which
Augie has fought for this knowledge, but also the
imperfection of the knowledge itself. As Augie
notes, “I see I met those writers in the big book of
utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by
hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of
nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?” In
other words, Augie recognizes the delicate balance
between theory and practice of life in achieving a
satisfactory identity.