The Fate of Augie March

This is an essay in the process of becoming. I encourage you to critique.

“Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can’t use he often can’t see. But the real world is already created and if your fabrication doesn’t correspond then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn’t try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent” (378).

Augie March tells his story in The Adventures of Augie March as a journey to make a worthy fate for himself. He is acutely aware of his own development in the novel; they are staged as a retrospective look back at his young life as his own memoirs written by a still young adult. Fate, it seems, is something that is unclear. His experience with it is akin to traveling in a thick fog. As he stumbles over something he recognizes it. Sometimes he is lucky enough to recognize it before he has trampled it, as if he approached it slow enough to know it by touch. Things are revealed to Augie along his unrelenting travel down his foggy and winding path and he is keen enough to take them as they are; that is, lessons, glimpses, sensations of the character of the path, his path.

“Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse.” [i]

If it could be said that Augie was an educated person, it must be held that the education came from his experience of trying many different things. In so doing, Augie sets the limits and boundaries to his fate, his character, through an endless series of trials. It would be easy to call Augie’s transitions between jobs or women “failures” in the sense that he repeatedly goes against the prevailing ideology surrounding him about how to “get ahead.” Namely, the kinds of decisions that Augie makes are not financially forward, secure, or even sound. But the sense of failure can only be tacked on by the other characters in the book (or perhaps by readers who agree with them). But for Augie the decisions he makes are sound because necessary. “After all, I wasn’t in any special business, but merely trying various things on” (206). Augie learns by paying heed to the knocks he is dealt. Because his life is hardly systematic or regimented in the way that an educational system compartmentalizes knowledge, his education is diverse but grouped, one experience relevant to all the others. All of his observations, conclusions and resolutions on things like money, wealth, living, etc. are relevant to Augie’s prevailing concern of how to become what he is.

“But a man’s character is his fate.” [ii]

This is one of the first statements of the book and it comes to us from Heraclitus, Augie tells us so. We know immediately that much of Augie’s life is informed by Western thought and Western thinkers. Later on, Augie tells us about a whole volume of classic texts, a set of books that he is given after they are damaged in a fire. Later still, he tells us about the book fevers he has in his bedroom, intense periods of book devouring, and in fact he sits down and reads the set of these texts. I submit that this aspect of Augie’s education is especially important because of Augie’s character. He seldom enjoys the experience of a quiet existence, much less rest. During these book fevers Augie is forced into a bodily stillness. By Augie’s own admission his body is maybe all that he is (473). The physical stillness puts him into a state where he can decipher the “axial lines” of his life. “And since I never have any place of rest, it should follow that I have trouble being still, and furthermore my hope is based upon getting to be still, and furthermore my hope is based upon getting to be still so that the axial lines can be found ” (514). So there is a tie between Augie’s discovery of his orientation and Heraclitus among the other thinkers and writers that he reads in the time that they share together. Perhaps it is not too far to leap to observe that the logic Augie uses to refuse many of the opportunities he has along the way that would have made him a wealthy man. It would be a gross error to think that Augie is opposed to having lots of money. His objections aren’t to the dough itself, but more the compromises and renunciations that are demanded of him to get it. One of his earliest opportunities for becoming a wealthy man, or at least an heir to a fortune, came when his employers, Mrs. Renling and her husband, proposed to adopt him. For Augie, renouncing his family, even though it wasn’t an “average” family or a family that provided money for him, was impossible. Augie’s method of discovery, the method of trying different things, stumbling down his foggy path even though it is unclear to him where he is going, contains a philosophical stance, if not, a kernel of wisdom. It is a kind of answer, or a response to how one becomes what one is.

“In the peculiar fate of people that makes them fat and rich, when this happens very swiftly there is the menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality” (214).

Augie’s life is full of encounters with the fat and rich, he witnesses his brother become this. The tendency of the rich, in Augie’s experience, is to lead a split existence. For his brother Simon, his start came by marrying an heiress and being lent the money to start his own coal business. Simon’s heart is cold and he carries on with at least one mistress. His power over her is his money, she is nothing special to him because it’s not her that he wants, it’s woman. Simon typifies what Fredrich Nietzsche calls “real man.” “A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). To Augie, this view of man and woman misses the entire point of their attraction. For Augie, the bond between him and the women in his life is an insight into the character of his fate. He says once, “The inevitability that brought us together … was greater than the total of all other considerations.” The women of Augie’s life are not objects of play, but people whom he loves. “I tried to tell her that I had looked all my life for the right thing to do, for a fate good enough, that 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” 318. Love is a clarity to Augie. He finds it inevitably along his path and as he experiences it he recognizes it as part of who he is, unlike his repeated stumbling over wealth which he rejects not because of the dough involved, but because of the “menace of the dreamy state that plunders their reality.” Wealth deprives the wealthy of love.

[i] Heraclitus, Fragments, 7.
[ii] Pg. 3