The Adventures of Augie March

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1953

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-20

Chapters 21-26

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Symbols & Motifs

Books

Augie is the self-aware narrator of his own story. He knows the power of such stories, having spent so much of his life as an avid reader. While he grows and develops in many respects, a love of literature is one of the sole throughlines of his self-identity, something that is true of him at any age. For the underprivileged young son of an immigrant family, someone who grew up in great poverty, books represent a world beyond the dirty streets of Chicago. Whether reading to Grandma Lausch or discovering his own favorite novels, Augie is able to break out of his poverty whenever he picks up a book. Augie’s love of books—and, perhaps, his motivation to share his story with the audience—symbolizes an irrepressible desire to escape his immediate situation and journey somewhere else. Eventually, he travels far and wide in the real world. At all times, however, he continues to read books and reach new worlds.

In a more practical sense, books also symbolize the way Augie begins to synthesize the lessons he learns from the adults in his life. Grandma Lausch imbues Augie with a love of reading but also with a belief that he should break certain rules (and perhaps even laws) if it will help him survive. Similarly, Einhorn runs many schemes throughout his life, even though he criticizes Augie for stealing or explicitly breaking the law. Both Einhorn and Grandma Lausch teach Augie about the importance of an education. When he signs up for college, then, he discovers that he needs to make money, and he does so by operating a stolen book racket. He combines his love of reading, his capacity to run an illegal scheme, and his eagerness to learn in a criminal enterprise. Augie steals books and sells them to students who cannot afford high prices. He convinces himself that this is a benevolent act and that he is not simply enriching himself. That he spends so long reading so many of these stolen books himself also symbolizes his irrepressible desire to learn. Even when he has broken the law and has people waiting for these books, Augie cannot help but read them himself. The book-stealing operation is, therefore, a symbolic culmination of Augie’s childhood development.

Even when he is an adult, Augie always happens to find an interesting new book wherever he is staying. Whether he is with Thea in Mexico or Stella in Paris, he is always distracting himself with something to read. At these times, Augie is nominally successful. He has what he needs, but he still feels drawn to books as when he was young. Back then, he sought to escape his impoverished material conditions. As an adult, however, books become a distraction from the poverty of his emotional life. Augie struggles to maintain his relationships with women; even as a married man, he hints at problems in his marriage with Stella. Rather than confront these problems directly, however, he happily delves into a book. He reads to escape from emotional honesty, just as he once read to escape from poverty. To Augie, books are the perfect escape from any situation.

Caligula

When Thea tracks down Augie, she invites him to Mexico, where she plans to train an eagle to hunt lizards. She believes that this will pay for their lifestyle. Not only will the eagle help them earn money by hunting pests, but newspapers and magazines will pay to write stories about the eagle. They purchase an eagle, which they name Caligula. The eagle is a symbol of Augie’s relationship with Thea. Their relationship is built on excitement and energy, sharing the wildest of dreams as they hurtle through life on an absurd journey. This is captured in Caligula’s name, an allusion to the infamous Roman emperor, known for excess, tyranny, and violence. Thea, to Augie, is from the unknown world of the wealthy. She excites him through what she represents. Caligula embodies this; Augie never dreamed of owning an eagle or going to Mexico, but when Thea proposes that they do so, he is so excited that he cannot say no. He allows himself to be sold on an exciting, imagined dream rather than the practical reality of owning an eagle. He soon discovers that the reality of Caligula is very different from the infectious dream sold to him by Thea.

Thea is disappointed in Caligula. The eagle will not respond to her training, nor will it show the bravery and productivity that she needs. Evoking the real-life Caligula, she treats it cruelly, pelting it with rocks before growing disinterested in it and leaving it for Augie to deal with. As they spend more time together, Augie also realizes that he may not love Thea quite as much as he once believed. In his mind, he created an idea of Thea that was based on assumptions and romantic desires. Amid all the excitement of moving to Mexico and buying an eagle, he never stopped to question whether the version of Thea he had in his mind had any correspondence to the actual Thea. The reality of owning an eagle symbolizes this disconnect. When Augie is left alone with Caligula, he must confront the dull, demanding reality of training the big bird. He realizes that he has allowed himself to be sold a dream. Augie must reconcile the difference between the Thea he imagined and the Thea who actually exists, just as he must reconcile the difference between the dream of hunting with an eagle and actually owning an eagle. Caligula is a giant, demanding reminder of the mistakes that Augie has made.

When Thea and Augie break up, he leaves Mexico and Caligula, never returning to either at any point in the story. However, Caligula does not completely vanish from The Adventures of Augie March. Instead, the story about hunting for lizards in Mexico is added to the compendium of adventure stories that people recount back to Augie when they meet him. His absurd life now has another chapter, one that slowly comes to define him in the minds of others. While Augie might have learned that he is not cut out to train an eagle, other people are fascinated by his time with Caligula. In the same way as Augie once did with Thea, they create a false understanding of Augie based on an exciting story. Caligula becomes one in a string of absurd vignettes that define Augie’s life, echoing the way Augie built up a false understanding of Thea based on the rumors, hopes, dreams, ambitions, and excitement. He does not stop anyone from making the same mistake he once did, allowing them to believe the story. They consider his life exciting, his personality daring, and his past a litany of hilarious anecdotes. Augie may not see himself in this way, symbolizing the disconnect between his identity and his reputation.

Clothing

In the materialistic American society that Augie inhabits, clothes serve an important symbolic function. In his role as the narrator, Augie plays on this expectation. When he describes his family’s poverty to the reader, he focuses on their clothes, which are often secondhand or passed down from older neighbors. In this way, the audience becomes aware that the March family does not have enough money to afford new clothes, but also that the community in the Chicago neighborhood finds ways to support each other. While they may be underprivileged in a material sense, the secondhand clothes suggest that the people Augie remembers are rich in community spirit.

For some inhabitants of the low-income neighborhood, clothing serves as a constant reminder of the difficult situation. Almost as soon as Simon has any money of his own, he purchases new clothes. He struggles with money throughout his youth, but he insists on dressing better than his bank balance allows. Furthermore, he insists that Augie dress well. To Simon, better clothing is a visual repudiation of poverty. By dressing like he is wealthy, he hopes to manifest wealth for himself and his family. This is how Simon understands identity, believing that visual indicators such as expensive clothes inherently reflect a good person. Simon’s view is vapid and unsatisfying. He dresses in better clothes, especially after marrying his wealthy wife, but he is rarely happy. Simon accrues all the visual indicators of success without ever stopping to ask himself about his own emotions. At the end of the novel, he comes to Paris to visit Augie. He is dressed like the wealthy businessman that he always wanted to be, but his marriage is a depressing disaster that offers him nothing but bitterness. Simon only ever focuses on the aesthetics of success, using clothing to assure the world (and himself) that he is successful, even when he is not.

While Augie appreciates his brother’s financial help in purchasing expensive clothes, he is never truly invested in his wardrobe. Simon is not alone in telling Augie to dress better. Thea also purchases him new outfits on several occasions. When they begin dating, she makes sure that Augie is able to dress as she likes. She explicitly turns Augie into the kind of person she wants him to be rather than appreciating who he actually is. Ironically, Augie has a similar disconnect in his mind between the Thea he imagines and the one who exists. By outfitting Augie in entirely new clothes, however, Thea symbolically dresses him up as a more suitable partner. Their relationship is doomed, as neither of them has any real appreciation of the other’s identity. The clothing in which Thea dresses Augie symbolizes the doomed nature of their relationship and the emotional disconnect that they cannot recognize until it is too late.