Traces the concept of the "axial lines" reference to Karl Jaspers' essay "The Axial Age of Human History," published in 1948 in Commentary, a journal to which Bellow occasionally contributed.

Sees AAM as a spiritual picaresque—a later form of the bildungsroman. Here the hero is consciousness rather than swashbuckling rogue, and as such is required to develop, deepen, strike through its first illusion to the truth, which, at the end of the road, it discovers to be its fate. But this novel begins with the aphorism that "Man's character is his fate" and ends with the aphorism transposed "man's fate is his character." The learning is in the transposition.

Bellow adapts the picaresque form into the novelistic idiom of the mid-twentieth-century. Augie is a typical picaroon in his insatiable quest for experience and limitless curiosity. Alter calls the Whitmanesque catalogue sentences crammed with vitality and his vision of the world "multiverse." By refusing to fall prey to the systematizers, Augie has appeal for the modern audience. Like the typical picaroon he is appealing to both men and women. Ultimately he is an atypical picaroon because Bellow is using also the bildungs-roman model of search for self-identity. Unlike the picaroon, Augie never seeks experience for its own sake.

Declares that AAM is the great American novel. Suggests that the quest ended there and that it entailed a chimera, or a pig with wings. It involved an answer to the question of whether Americans had an American identity or whether America was a continental holding-camp of Greeks, Jews, Brits, Italians, Scandinavians, and Lithuanians, together with the remaining Amerindians from ice-age Mongolia. Concludes that miraculously and uncovenantedly, Saul Bellow brought the animal home, dedicated it to his father, and published it in 1953. Its fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its calmness, and its promiscuity demonstrate its quintessential Americanness. A major critical treatment of AAM.

Places AAM in the Dreiserian naturalistic tradition.

Bromwich claims that AAM comes close to being a great novel, a rallying cry and a great portent. Augie as a drifter becomes dark angel of our representative mass fictions, and yet. Concludes that Bellow relies too heavily on the reader to infer his qualities. Adds strength to the traditions of the realistic novel.

Discusses Bellow's friendship with Ralph Ellison and notes the proximity in publication of Bellow's review of Invisible Man, and the publication of AAM. Both won a National Book Award, and both share many formal and thematic concerns—a picaresque structure, first-person narrator, a rejection of ideological absolutism in faces of individual morality. Treats the different ways the two novels negotiate between a desire for ethnic and racial self-expression, and a liberal universalist (and individualist) agenda. Shows how both authors strive towards that great mythic hold-all, the Great American Novel, or to adapt the Great Omni-American novel. Both are bildungsroman concerned with self-fashioning protest fiction as much as they are anti-Horatio Alger novels, since niether protagonist rises. Education and assimilation are treated with great irony by both writers; both turn back to writers of the American Renaissance, and the nineteenth century European novel; both adopted a classic liberal universalist tone rejecting assessments of themselves as ethnic writers. Also, both wrote in a symbolic vernacular, in a language of true middle-of-consciousness forged from double consciousness in order to evoke ethnic stereotypes of blackness and whiteness. Both simply wanted not to be cast into ethnic designations, yet it has happened to both of them. Concludes that neither author has been viewed as omni-American, but rather as of omni-world literature.

AAM belongs to the universal genre of the literature of the road, the moving American frontier. Sees AAM as Whitmanesque and picaresque. As pilgrim, traveler, Colombus in chains, Augie rediscovers America. Bellow's "axial lines" are the mood, matter, and mind of the pica resque in America, the point of return to the spirit of the country once conceived in liberty in 1776, matured through experience in 1865 and thoroughly revived in more recent years.

AAM is a modern romantic novel about a typically nineteenth-century explorer-discoverer somewhat removed from the civil state, who bears many resemblances to Melville's Pierre. Pierre may be seen as a tragic prototype for the less unfortunate Augie. Both are sensitive young men through whom the respective authors attempt to reveal "what is."Both have a vision of heroism and participate in youthful tragedy. Chapman details a convincing number of parallels in the two heroes, the philosophical issues discussed and in the major themes.

With Salinger, Bellow is the forerunner of a more maturely intellectual and spiritual America. The theme complex in AAM is a pentagonal pattern concentrating on character—fate, power, money, love, and urbanization. Underlying these are thoughts about masculine and feminine personality, history, nature, society, and civilization. All of these are dealt with in a complex relation to the action of the novel and produce splendid unity.

Discusses first the Americanist tradition of AAM and then the great tradition of the European novel, which nourishes the language, the technique, the form, and the moral and spiritual bent of the book. Begins with the picaresque traditions and moves forward historically through the sentimental novel, bildungsroman, Goethe, and the modern tradition of the poetic novel.

What distinguishes this book from the older picaresque novels is its moral awareness. This is the source of its human richness. In contrast with the older picaros, Augie has interest in and affection for those around him. The fundamental tone of the novel is "matter of factness" rather than joviality. Unlike the conventional picaro, Augie lacks humor and does not live peacefully within his own skin. AAM is really a confessional novel that uses the picaresque form. Augie, unlike Holden Caulfield and the Invisible Man, is the prisoner, not of innocence, but of "un-innocence."

Discusses what has been enlarged upon in the notebooks or discarded for a clear perception of Bellow's intention in the actual novel. A fine comparison by one of the few critics to deal with Bellow's original manuscripts. Likens Augie to Whitman in his evasion of self-definitions. Points out that Augie, while possessing the will to moral certitude, more often embraces love as his chief function. Both in its inception and in its final form the novel manifests an unresolved tension between love and use. Linguistically AAM points to activity, event, and history. The novel is best understood as a writer's expression of a particular historical moment, the revisionist liberal early 1950's. As ingenue Augie's expectations exceed his consumations. Critics have exaggerated the optimism of the book. Bellow was one of the first to register the loss of the power of positive thinking.

Augie is similar to the nineteenth-century Adams evident in Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. However, events in the last half of the novel leave him pessimistic, defeated, and broken—traits that are anathema to early American Adamism. Yet he does envision paradise as the fulfillment of the American dream and paradise as escape from modern dilemmas. This Adam differs from R. W. B. Lewis's model because his consciousness has been shaped by twentieth century horrors. Augie is actually Bellow's deliberate transformation of an early American Adam into a modern one.

Bellow's form is right for his content, but his content is not always right for his form. Augie is not a substantial fictional creation. There is too much emphasis on milieu and no dynamic focal point. Bellow's dual purposes create confusion. He is torn between nostalgic re-creation of an old world he has known and writing a cohesive novel. Details the points of similarity between Tom Jones and AAM. Finally points up the differences between Fielding's comic epic and Bellow's comic romance.

Locates Bellow among activist writers (belief in energy and vitality) such as Roth, Gold, Percy, Engel, Baldwin, Algren, Donleavy, Kerouac, Kesey, Pynchon and Wright Morris. AAM is the seminal work behind these more recent contributions. Attributes much of the activist energy in AAM to its rhetorical novelty. Relates this to technical issues arising from the use of the picaresque form and point of view problems. Accuses Bellow of lacking an accurate ear and of periodic rhetorical self-indulgence.

A crucial chapter for background material on Alexander Von Humboldt. Has relevance for source studies in both HG and AAM.

Compares The Great Gatsby and AAM in terms on how they draw strength from America, their optimism, and principles. Argues that in this novel for the first time, an immigrant is acting like a pioneer, a rightful discoverer. Discusses at length Augie's sense of his own American identity, his patriotism, and awareness of his own eligibility. Wanderlust, Augie's fundamental theme, appears in the earlier novels, while all the novels that came after it drew their confidence, lift, and breath from it.

Discusses the conditions in Paris under which the novel was written and its relationship to the early unpublished manuscript entitled "The Crab and the Butterfly." Jones goes on to criticize the novel for its reckless strategy of flinging a hero out across the surface of a very large work, at which point he tends to lose the focus of his material. Questions also the nature of the hero with his circular motions and demented jabbering in the face of alternating demands. Comments also on the pitch of the prose. Finally, man and his city have become superficies to the novel's many successes and to its potential.

Discusses AAM as a novel about all the forces that compel, condition, and shape mankind, including such things as decay, death, and the shaping power of other human wills. Calls the book a naturalistic novel of ideas.

AAM presents a richly comic pattern of aspiration and disaster all cast in unmistakable tones of hyperbole. Augie is constantly reminding the reader that he is not Timur, Tallyrand, Christ, Cecil Rhodes, or any other hero. Yet he dreams of greatness, commanding personalities, secret sources of power, and women with style. His adventures are faltering steps toward these ideals. Augie finally discovers that his dreams of glory have outrun his achievements. This novel is at its strongest when it is representing Augie's distinctive amalgam of aspiration, disaster, and optimism.

Argues that while both novels share genetic heritage in the evolution of the picaresque novel, it seems evident that Bellow sought to develop his own distinctly modernist voice in contradistinction to the nineteenth century heritage that his text invokes. Traces the influence of Twain on AAM. Mentions specifically voice, story, modifications, and uses of satire. Argues that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and AAM are not pure picaresque novels, but hybrids: picaresque novels of formation or anti-formation in which both writers address the question what it means to be an American. Seventy years after Twain's response to the question Bellow's AAM deals with the cultural context of Chicago between the wars. However, AAM is ultimately closer to the modernists of his own time because he and Twain convey a set of common values that, generally speaking, have romantic or realistic roots. Concludes that Augie March, Holden Caulfield, and Jack Kerouac are the last true heirs of Huck Finn.

Sees AAM directly in the picaresque tradition, unlike most modern works with their "consciously reflective and existential" concerns.

Rodrigues claims that the strange world of Thea and Mexico owes its existence to the real-life adventures of Daniel and Jule Mannix, two famous hunters in Taxco, Mexico. Bellow visited this couple in Mexico in 1940 while they were on their honeymoon. They had trained a bald eagle called Aguila which they used to capture dragon iguanas. When this episode was published by Harper's Bazaar, Mannix wanted to sue Bellow and was persuaded not to. Rodrigues goes on to detail Bellow's debt for landscape and other detail to this trip and this geographic area. He also details what Bellow borrowed from the Mannix's articles on training the eagle and concludes that Bellow's imaginative use of the material more than adequately transforms it for the purposes of fiction.

Describes how Bellow has adapted the method of the picaresque novel of previous centuries because it provides him with the autobiographical mode he wants, along with the appearance of simplicity, candor and ingenuousness necessary for depicting an alternate kind of hero from the typically distorted intellectual characteristic of the twentieth-century novel.

Provides a general discussion of AAM as an example of the bildungsroman done in the tradition of the Jewish–American novel. Touches on several novels and miscellaneous topics.

Describes the rebirth of the picaresque tradition after WWII with J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, and Saul Bellow. Building on Judie Newman's treatment of Bellow and theories of history, Shaw argues that "verbose, indecisive, and visionary, Augie personifies American history between World War 1 and 1950" (204) and that the picaresque was the perfect form for the kind of historiography embodied within the novel.

Discusses AAM as a debate on liberty; describes the duality which organizes the book; finally sees it as a "serious interrogation—a quest."

AAM is a parody of the American rags-to-riches story based on the myth that hard work, purity and virtue will bring success to even the most downtrodden. Bellow destroys that Horatio Alger myth in the episode on Einhorn and Nails Nagel.

Sees AAM as Bellow's most important novel to date. Identifies Augie as a "latter-day example of the Emersonian ideal Yankee who could do a little of this and a little of that." Criticizes Augie for having no commitments and for being a static character.

Describes AAM as a young man's psychic pilgrimage containing Bellow's inexhaustible experiences with his Chicago childhood before the Great Depression and a journey ending with his sojourn in Paris after World War II. Discusses in detail this bildungsroman. A major summary of the commentary on this novel.