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theme is America, a fact which is not as clear in this new work as it
is in its predecessors, perhaps because of its very newness. The sheer
bigness of America as a theme and as a country has always made the
novelist's task difficult, which may be the reason that Thomas Wolfe
was so excited by trains, just as it certainly has something to do with
the fact that
U.S.A.
does not possess complete narrative unity.
In other American novels of the same seriousness and ambition,
the theme of America and of being an American is narrowed to a
region-Hawthorne is writing about New England, Faulkner is writing
about the South-or the novels are about Americans in Europe, which
is almost as true of Hemingway as it is of James; or there is, in any
case, a concentration upon a particular American
milieu.
Moreover,
the classic choice of the American writer has been either uncritical
affirmation on the one hand, or on the other hand some form of re–
jection, the rejection of satire in Lewis, the rejection of social protest
in Dos Passos, or the rejection of tragedy in Dreiser and Fitzgerald.
The point can hardly be overemphasized: Huck Finn is in flight from
civilization; Milly Theale is swindled of, above all, her desire to live;
Lambert Strether (or William Dean Howells) discovers in middle age
that he has not really lived at all; Lily Bart commits suicide; Richard
Cory blows out his brains;
J.
Alfred Prufrock feels that he "should have
been a pair of ragged claws"; Frederic Henry makes "a separate peace";
Quentin Compson has to say four times that he does not hate the
South; Clyde Griffiths is electrocuted; Jay Gatsby is murdered. There
are many other instances of the same kind, almost none of which can
be considered purely as tragedy, but more precisely as catastrophe: Clyde
Griffiths and Jay Gatsby perish because they are Americans, Agamem–
non and Macbeth because they are human beings.
The Adventures of Augie March
is a new kind of book first of
all because Augie March possesses a new attitude toward experience iI.
America: instead of the blindness of affirmation and the poverty of re–
jection, Augie March rises from the streets of the modern city to en–
counter the reality of experience with an attitude of satirical acceptance,
ironic affirmation, the comic transcendence of affirmation and rejection.
As he says at the very start: "I am an American, Chicago-born–
Chicago, that somber city-" (the adjective should make it clear that
to be an American is far from the same thing as being a 100 percent
American) "and go at things as I have taught myself, free style, and
will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted;
sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent ...," and
it is soon clear that Augie has identified America and adventure, an
identification which functions as both method and insight. Augie's style
