Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March treats journey or exploration as a metaphor. Adopting a picaresque narrative, Bellow puts the story in the first person recollected style, wherein the protagonist narrates his own tale in his own idiom and from his personal experience in a tone of informal intimacy. Though Bellow does not literally borrow from the Spanish predecessors, he retains some of their major techniques. While the reliance of Bellow on the picaresque reflects his disenchantment with the current trend in the modern fiction which emphasizes the deracination of the individual in the mechanized society of our times, the narrative technique, largely episodic in nature, does provide him with the necessary tool to review the values and perspectives as an antidote against the current fear that our civilization has already reached a terminal point.

Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March treats journey or exploration as a metaphor. Though primarily a picaresque narrative, Bellow does not literally borrow from the Spanish predecessors; however, he retains some of their major techniques which account for the picaresque element in the novel at the structural level. He makes a departure from the tradition, for an apotheosis of human spirit stands at the center of the novel. The reliance of Bellow on the picaresque relates to his disenchantment with the current trend in the modern fiction which emphasizes the deracination of the individual in the mechanized society of our times. This restructuring and remolding of the picaresque provides the novelist with the necessary tool to review the values and perspectives as an antidote against the current fear that our civilization has already reached a terminal point. It also invalidates the theories of fiction that propagate death; it counterbalances the psychosis of alienation which the poseurs of romantic despair seem to cultivate. More of this in a moment.

The first cursory reading of The Adventures of Augie March reveals that it is basically episodic. It is a congregation of several episodes in chronological order, in fact a traditional picaresque novel supported by some internal principles of structure. Augie is centrally located in all the episodes which are woven around his personality, and this fact provides internal unity to the novel. Conscious of the demands of the picaresque tradition, Bellow puts the story in the first person recollected style. The protagonist narrates his own tale in his own idiom and from his personal experience in a tone of informal intimacy and with uncanny accuracy of detail.

Saul Bellow's, Augie March, Picaresque, Spanish predecessors, Spanish Picaresque, Bellow's Protagonist, Black-Marketing, Picaresque Rogue, Joseph's Conviction, Dangling Man, Mysterious Trade, Shakespeare's Richard II, Modern Fiction Studies.