208 Bellow, Saul
While Augie’s personal journey is steeped in the
classical tradition, he remains cognizant but sus-
picious of the larger national identity that promises
a unifying community, a sameness of being. Of his
short stint at the city college, he tells us that “the
students were children of immigrants from all parts
... put through the coarse sifters of curriculum,
and also bringing wisdom of their own. They filled
the factory-length corridors and giant classrooms
with every human character and germ, to undergo
consolidation and become, the idea was, American.”
Augie’s eye remains not on the homogenized sum,
though, but on the parts that comprise it, and the
opposition in him celebrates the irreducible kernel
of individuality: “I had opposed people in what they
wanted to make of me, but now that I was in love
with her I understood much better what I myself
wanted.” Love crystallizes Augie’s sense of identity,
because Augie recognizes his own desire.
While the affair with Thea ends poorly, Augie
from that point defines his future and feels confident
in his choices, understanding his past as prelude to
who he is. He reasons, “I want a place of my own...
and I’d never loan myself again to any other guy’s
scheme.” Having reached that point, he announces,
“I have always tried to become what I am. But it’s
a frightening thing. Because what if what I am by
nature isn’t good enough?” The novel’s trajectory,
then, arrives at an existentialist understanding of
identity: One becomes who one is through an ongo-
ing and difficult process, because rather than fit
into anyone else’s preexisting schemes, Augie must
determine his own way in the world.
Richard Hancuff
sOcial class in The Adventures of Augie
March
Written during the great postwar expansion of the
middle class, The Adventures of Augie March evinces
a desire to remain outside class considerations, with
the protagonist Augie March associating freely with
heiresses, millionaires, waitresses, and thieves with
little concern for climbing any sort of social ladder.
However, as Augie wryly notes, “Everyone tries to
create a world he can live in,... But the real world
is already created.” Augie’s desire to escape class
considerations do not negate those structures, and
while he rejects them as constructions, he remains
subject to their power. Augie March’s family is poor,
but the household’s matriarch, Grandma Lausch,
remains “a snob about her Odessa luster and her ser-
vants and governesses,” which now exist only in her
memories. Augie learns through her how to deceive
the relief office, and she arranges jobs for Augie and
his older brother Simon, with nearly all their income
stretched to meet household expenses. While work-
ing for William Einhorn, a neighborhood real estate
speculator and businessman with dreams of greater
things, Augie experiences the subtle class distinction
between being a trusted employee and an equal: “I
wasn’t to think because we were intimately con-
nected and because he liked me that I was going to
get into the will.... It sometimes got my goat, he
and Mrs. Einhorn made so sure I knew my place.”
Interestingly, while annoyed, Augie is not resentful
of this treatment. and Einhorn remains an adviser
throughout the novel.
Augie’s involvement with the Renlings, who run
a suburban outdoor lifestyle store in the wealthy
suburb of Evanston, broadens his horizons beyond
the heavily immigrant and ethnic milieu of his
youth. While agreeing to hire Augie, Mr. Renling
tells him that “out there on the North Shore they
don’t like Jews.... They like hardly anybody. Any-
way, they’ll probably never know.” This introduc-
tion to exclusionary class distinction is reinforced
later through Augie’s realization of—though not
acceptance of—the fact that class behavior is closely
tied to appearance, “because of the way I presented
myself—due to Mrs. Renling—as if God had not
left out a single one of His gifts, and I was adver-
tising His liberality with me: good looks, excellent
wardrobe, mighty fine manners, social ease... all
in the freshest gold-leaf. And the trouble was that I
had what you might call forged credentials.” Augie,
obstinately concerned about being true to himself,
knows how to pass across class lines, but it brings
him discomfort.
His brother Simon, on the other hand, has no
such qualms, blithely announcing to Augie his plans
to marry into the wealthy Magnus family and that
Augie must follow suit, because he has “to have
some family. I’ve been told they’re family-minded
people. They wouldn’t understand or like it, the way