The Adventures of Augie March

“There he was able to see the celebrities in their furs or stetsons and alpacunas, going free in the midst of their toted luggage, always more proud or more melancholy or more affable or more lined than they were represented.”

Simon’s job on the newsstand at a busy station introduces him to another world. He comes face to face with “celebrities,” people who can afford the lifestyle that seems so distant and remote to Augie and Simon when they are young men. Grandma Lausch’s control over the family is eroding because Simon is beginning to learn of the world that exists beyond her dominion. He is beginning to question—in spite of the help she provides—whether her worldview will ever allow him to cross over into the world of the rich and powerful people who throng through the station.

“Winnie died in May of that year, and I laid her in a shoe box and buried her in the yard.”

The death of Grandma Lausch’s dog, Winnie, is a symbolic moment. The dog is dead and buried, as is the influence Grandma Lausch once held over the family. No one mourns the dog, and no one notices her health decline, just as no one halts the decline of Grandma Lausch’s influence. The loss of the old woman’s status is natural to the rest of the household, who is not saddened by the unavoidable unfurling of events. Augie buries the dog, and in doing so, he enters a new chapter in his life, one in which the domineering figure of Grandma Lausch is not quite so present.

“Like Grandma Lausch again, he knew how to use large institutions.”

Augie’s experiences with Einhorn are an escalation from his formative experiences with Grandma Lausch. They use the same tactics, exploiting the faceless bureaucracies of their society to improve their material conditions. While Grandma Lausch did so to support a struggling family, however, Einhorn does so to maintain his already considerable fortune. Grandma Lausch’s manipulation of “large institutions” is a desperate act of poverty, while Einhorn’s manipulation is a selfish hoarding of resources. To the ambitious young Augie, however, they seem exactly the same.

“It was the opening indication that the Commissioner had not left him as strong as he believed, but subject to the honor of lots of men he hadn’t always treated well.”

To a young man like Augie, Einhorn’s family fortune is impossible to comprehend. Einhorn’s family has access to wealth that is far beyond anything Augie could ever hope for himself, so much so that even being in their presence is a reminder of the vast gulf in social class between them. After the death of the Commissioner, however, Augie learns the truth. He discovers that Einhorn’s wealth is built on a fragile foundation, one that might reduce Einhorn to Augie’s exact situation should it ever collapse. The boundaries between social classes, Augie learns, are not as solid nor as immutable as he once believed. Even the great family fortunes are built on a bedrock of hope and deceit.

“I knew later that I had been lucky with her, that she had tried not to be dry with me, or satirical, and done it mercifully.”

As a gift, Einhorn takes Augie to a brothel, where Augie loses his virginity to a sex worker. Reflectively, Augie appreciates the older woman’s mercy. He treats his lack of sexual experience as an incumbrance that she helps him lift in the least traumatizing way possible. Einhorn is one of the many mentor figures in Augie’s life, and through his direction, this woman emerges as another mentor. She teaches Augie about the blunt reality of sex.

“I began to understand that I was with someone extraordinary, for it was a hot, prompt, investigative, and nearly imploring face.”

When Augie first meets Thea, he is more attracted to her sister than to her. She treats his indifference toward her pragmatically, which helps Augie realize that Thea is very different from most of the women he will meet in his life. Of all of them, Thea occupies a special place in his heart. Even in this early meeting, she ventures beyond the boundaries of social expectations and leaves a lasting impression on the young man. This impression lingers with him far longer than any residual feelings for her sister.

“I felt despondent that I had lost him.”

After returning to Chicago, Augie feels sad that he could not stay with his younger friend. For the first time in his life, Augie was the elder mentor to a younger man. As such, he hoped to guide Stoney toward a better future, but fate and circumstance conspired against him. Now, Augie is learning about the mentor relationship from a different perspective. His anger at being unfairly prevented from helping Stoney allows him to contextualize the random failures of his own mentors.

“He was furious with the owners, especially if the animal was a chienne de race, and its aristocracy was not respected, and he wanted the office to slap an extra charge on them for letting them into the club in this state.”

Augie’s brief time working with the dog service is a microcosm of his experiences with high society. Augie takes issue with any dog that is not pedigree, believing that mongrels and dogs from less reputable backgrounds are inherently worse than their better-bred equivalents. Some of the aristocrats whom Augie encounters have similar views about people, as they are willing to dismiss those like Augie because he does not come from pedigree stock. They evaluate everyone—from people to dogs—based on their ancestry rather than the content of their character.

“You can’t let your life be decided for you by any old thing that comes up.”

When Augie helps Mimi recover from her abortion, she provides one of the most direct critiques of Augie’s directionless life. Whereas others offer similar criticism, they do so without empathy. People like Simon criticize Augie’s listless path through life due to annoyance, whereas Mimi does so from a place of sincere concern and empathy. She is one of Augie’s closest friends for this reason, as she understands and pities him like no one else.

“I think not, Sophie. There is this other girl.”

A recurring feature of Augie’s life is his apparent inability to settle happily into one relationship. Whenever he seems to get along with a woman, he admits that there is always “this other girl” (308). The other girl may not be defined or specific, but she represents the great unknown and the unlimited potential of Augie’s imagination. He cannot settle for what he has, especially when he can imagine something even better. Even when this imagined woman does not measure up to his expectations, he simply invents a new object for his affection.

“I thought, How could anybody ever tame him?”

Augie’s relationship with the eagle is an analogy for his relationship with Thea. The plan to hunt lizards with eagles is absurd and unfeasible, but Augie latches onto it anyway because he is swept up in his passion for Thea. Likewise, he does not stop to think about his whirlwind romance with Thea. Augie cannot tame her, but he refuses to ask himself such a direct question because he is too impulsive and passionate to be introspective. His wonder at the size of the untamable eagle is a harbinger of his disastrous relationship with Thea.

“I assumed we’d get married when the divorce came through.”

The drive through Mexico is a difficult time for Augie and Thea. Even though he has convinced himself that they are in love, they argue often. He is deathly afraid of Caligula the eagle and unsure of Thea’s actual plans. Instead, he invents a comforting version of the future that is not supported by evidence. Even though he assumes that Thea will marry him after her divorce, he has no proof of this. He prefers not to ask, as fantasy is more fun for Augie than reality. He would rather live on the terms of an unspoken promise than seek clarity and risk shattering the comforting illusion of happiness.

“Caligula is a bald American, the strongest and most savage kind.”

Caligula is not a good hunter. The eagle is cowardly and nervous, but Augie defends the bird as though he were defending himself. The eagle’s training—which Thea quickly loses interest in—is an analogy for Augie’s attempts to find his place in the world. There is a version of Augie that everyone wants to believe in, a person who is driven, ambitious, and accomplished, but this version is imagined. Augie has not yet reconciled this difference, as he has not yet reconciled the difference between the reality of the cowardly Caligula and the defensive description of the bird that he gives to other people.

“I wondered if there was something we might do in Chilpanzingo instead of hunting snakes. But she didn’t say there was.”

Augie falls in love with an imagined version of Thea that has ceased to exist. He continues to invest in this potential, even after discovering their incompatibility. Augie does not want to spend his life hunting snakes with Thea, nor does he want to abandon the lifestyle that he imagines they might share. He stays with Thea and travels further with her on the promise of what might transpire, ignoring all contradictory evidence of who she really is and what she really wants.

“You’re not special. You’re like everybody else. You get tired easily.”

Thea’s fantastical actions and plans suggest that she is trying to carve an identity for herself as being distinct from everyone else. She is insecure about her ordinariness, so tries extra hard to be extraordinary. Before, Augie overlooked Thea for her more attractive sister. Ever since, Thea has tried to elevate herself by turning her life into a novelistic enterprise. She had hoped Augie might understand this, as his past has a novelistic quality of its own. She hoped for them to write a story together, only to find that Augie (and, she fears, herself) is just “like everybody else” (396).

“That was how it was. Nothing as I had foreseen it.”

Augie finally recognizes that there is a difference between the real Thea and whom he fell in love with. The latter was his own creation, an identity that he projected onto her because he never paid attention to her actual identity. He fell in love with the idea of falling in love, swept along in a rush of excitement and emotion. These unfamiliar feelings lulled him into a false sense of security. Only by being rejected is he finally able to recognize his flawed thinking.

“But it fell through, and when it did I was very glad.”

Augie very nearly becomes involved in a plan to pose as the nephew of the famous exiled Russian, Leon Trotsky. He has heard of Trotsky as a world-famous figure, and he is keen to meet him, but the plan falls through. Augie is relieved because—as he did with Thea—he has constructed a version of Trotsky in his mind, and meeting the man might dispel this impression. Augie recognizes his tendency to project his aspirations onto people, so he does not want the disappointment of having his good impression of Trotsky to be proved wrong.

“The house stunk. The books were falling off the shelves. The busts of great men were lost up near the ceiling. The black leather chairs on casters were aging well, but aging.”

When they first met, Augie considered Einhorn one of the finest men he would ever meet. Augie returns from Mexico to find the once-grand Einhorn and his once-grand home in a rundown state. In contrast to the newly wealthy Simon, Einhorn is struggling financially. He is a relic of a bygone era and a symbol of society’s shifting nature. Einhorn’s fate illustrates the way American society is in flux, so any wealth or greatness can be lost due to the rigors of time.

“I can’t always be connected with ridiculous people. It’s wrong.”

As he grows older, Augie begins to discern the absurd nature of his existence. He recognizes that he repeatedly encounters “ridiculous people,” though he still fails to recognize that he is the common denominator that links them together. Augie is unable to recognize his own ridiculousness, existing always on the cusp of becoming something without ever actually doing so. He observes the absurdity of others without observing his own absurdity.

“Also I wished somebody would die and leave me everything.”

Augie’s lack of direction is demonstrated by his complete inability to conceive of a successful future in which he is the willing agent of his own fate. When speculating about how he might become rich, he does not think about business ventures or hard work. He imagines instead that he will come across money in the street or inherit a fortune from someone else. In these situations, Augie plays a passive role. Wealth is delivered to him without him actually having to do anything. Augie cannot imagine a world where his actions help him achieve his ambitions.

“Also she owed money, she said.”

As they plan their impulsive marriage, Sophie reveals everything about herself to Augie. She tells him that she owes money. These debts are both financial and metaphorical and are also not limited to Sophie. The debts are the regrets, traumas, and memories they have both accrued over the years. These hidden debts have the power to shape the couple’s future, but Augie assures her that they will deal with the situation together. While the financial debts can be paid, the emotional debts are more difficult to reconcile.

“I will never force the hand of fate to create a better Augie March, nor change the time to an age of gold.”

Augie’s conversation with Mintouchian helps him clarify his search for an identity, if not quite the identity itself. In discussing their aspirations and the ways they aspirations shape their identities, Augie concludes that he should accept his true self as it is. He should not attempt to change himself to fit his preconceptions of the world, and he should stop pretending to be the person people want him to be. Instead, he will be the real Augie March rather than trying to make the “better Augie March,” whom everyone is so desperate for him to become (485).

“March, this is what my experiments are leading toward. I am going to create a serum—a serum like a new River Jordan.”

Being stranded with Basteshaw provides the audience with a complete contrast to Augie. For years, Augie has drifted between professions, women, and aspirations as he attempts to locate his place in the world. In contrast, Basteshaw knows exactly what he wants to do with his life, even when he is lost at sea. Basteshaw’s absurd dedication to an overwrought and impossible plan is juxtaposed with Augie’s lack of plans, suggesting that the presence of a plan is not in any way morally superior.