The Adventures of Augie March

Thea Fenchel may be the most important romantic partner in Augie’s life, even more so than the woman Augie eventually marries. Thea is important to Augie because she arrives in his life as something of a clean slate. When they first meet, Augie is far more interested in her sister. He hardly notices Thea, even though she tells him that she loves him. After he is rejected by her sister, Augie turns his attention to Thea. She becomes the blank canvas for exploring his ideas of romance.

Since he knows so little about her, Augie is able to create a version of Thea in his mind that explicitly appeals to his romantic side. This is especially true when she invites him to Mexico. With this promise of adventure and excitement, he begins to fill in the blanks with inventions that satisfy what he wants in a woman. To Augie, Thea represents a kind of raw romantic potential. She allows him to imagine a whirlwind romance while ignoring everything practical, ushering him away to Mexico to hunt lizards with an eagle. Augie gets swept up in this adventure because he wants to be. The idea appeals to him romantically, allowing him to become one of the protagonists from his beloved books. Thea is important to Augie because she allows him—for the first time in his life—to play the role of a protagonist while inventing a love interest for himself.

In Mexico, however, their plan quickly falls apart. Thea cannot train the eagle, Caligula, as she hoped, and she becomes frustrated. This frustration does not suit Augie’s romantic version of how this adventure should transpire, so he chooses to ignore it. He spends all his time playing cards with his friends, refusing to learn about Thea’s actual personality out of fear that she might not be everything he ever wanted. As a result, their relationship begins to unravel. When Augie spends the night with Stella, Thea already knows that he has been disloyal to her. She is correct, but Augie resents her for this as it suggests that she knows him better than he knows himself. The woman who allowed him to explore his own romantic identity becomes a reminder of his own struggles for self-discovery. Ultimately, he comes to resent her knowledge of his character more than he loves what she means to him.

Thea has a unique place among Augie’s women as one of the few who actually manages to hurt him. The relationship is so instructive because Thea is like Augie. Though she is from a rich family, she has given up her chance to inherit a fortune because she refuses to modify her behavior. In this way, she accepts poverty in exchange for self-understanding, just as Augie does on a number of occasions. Like Augie, however, she struggles to know herself. She invites Augie to Mexico because she is equally as desperate to believe in the feasibility of a romantic adventure. She wants the escapade to work, and she resents the brutal reality of her own failure. The relationship between Thea and Augie is equally formative and doomed. They are too similar to ever succeed, as they are both desperate to understand themselves and unable to empathize with one another. They are the same person in different bodies, embarking on the same adventures for the same purpose with the same fundamental flaws. Thea may know Augie better than he knows himself, but she still struggles to understand her own identity. In effect, she is the protagonist of her own novel, embarking on her own journey of self-discovery that happens to briefly coincide with Augie’s journey.

Simon March is Augie’s brother. They grow up in the same circumstances, at the same time, and with many of the same influences. Nevertheless, they turn out to be very different people. In this way, Simon represents a diverging path for Augie’s life, as well as his foil. He is emblematic of a very different future that, had a few decisions been made differently, might also have belonged to Augie.

Simon grows up in a low-income home, and as he struggles to find work, he hyperfocuses on one desire: He wants to be rich. However, he is unable to achieve wealth through hard work and determination. Even though The American Dream allegedly offers upward mobility to every citizen, the Great Depression makes Simon’s future look bleak. After dabbling in petty crime and failing, he comes up with a new plan and decides to marry a rich girl. Just as Augie is obsessed with understanding himself to the detriment of everything else in his life, Simon forsakes emotional or psychological well-being in exchange for material wealth. His disposition toward Charlotte never moves beyond vague respect and affection; what he really loves is her potential to make him very, very wealthy. Augie has a similar opportunity but squanders his chance to marry into wealth when he helps Mimi obtain an abortion. To him, friendship is more important than wealth. Simon makes the decision that Augie does not, meaning that their lives take very different paths.

Simon gets everything he ever wanted. After marrying into Charlotte’s wealthy family, he sets up a business of his own and becomes independently wealthy. Though he remains married to Charlotte, he begins an affair with a woman named Renée. Simon insists to Augie that he truly loves Renée, even though their relationship ends in disaster when he does not choose her over his comfortable life with Charlotte. Simon ends the novel in a fairly cold marriage, as Charlotte becomes aware of Renée’s existence and drives her out of her husband’s life. As a result, Simon gets to enjoy his wealthy lifestyle and the products of his labors, but he never gets to be emotionally happy. He chooses to sacrifice happiness for wealth, meaning that he functions as a cautionary tale in Augie’s narrative. Simon represents everything Augie might become if he chooses cynicism over sentimentality. He also demonstrates to Augie that achieving one’s ambitions is not everything in the world. Simon has everything but is unhappy with nowhere else to go. By contrast, Augie has much less. Even though he has still not achieved the happiness or self-realization he once craved, he has come to value the journey as much as his destination. Simon is already at his destination, so his fate reminds Augie to take pleasure in the ongoing search.