American Augie

I cannot imagine a more electric opening for a novel than the one I've just read.  It is from The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow, and it goes like this:

     "I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.  But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
     Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."

My God.  I mean, my God.  Such juice, such recklessness.  Who does this anymore, who has the courage to be so brusque and essential?  I'm only fifty pages into the book, I don't know yet what Augie's going to grow up to do or be (if you know, please don't spoil it for me), but he seems to announce himself here as a kind of butcher.  The frankness, the almost rude clarity of his formulations--whoever else he is, or will be, Bellow seems to indicate to us, Augie will cleave.

Of particular interest are the first four words: I am an American.  I can't get over it.  It feels like just about the most audacious thing anybody could ever say, it feels just berserk with irony, guts, muscle, regret, paranoia, almost disbelief.  But here's the question: did it feel that way to readers in 1953 when Adventures was published?  Did it feel like that to Bellow?  Or were we all a little more matter-of-fact back then?  How much, if anything, can we understand about ourselves by trying to understand the difference between what Augie's proclamation meant at mid-century, and what it might mean now?

Maybe I'm making too much of this.  As I'm working through it, it's beginning to sound a little like, I don't know, rehash Tom Brokaw or some such.  And I have to admit the chapters that follow Augie's opening salvo seem to me already to have taken a detour or two down the side alleys of their own rambunctiousness and rather herky-jerky enlightenment.  (All of which is, of course, entirely forgivable--the fifty pages of Adventures are the only fifty pages of Bellow I've ever read, but his restless mastery thus far earns him precisely what every author must earn: the right to follow his or her own inner dictates.)

Well, enough with the snooty parsing already.  I suppose the distillation of all this, the point, is to note, for the benefit of...whoever might benefit from it, that Augie's opening is no less than the reason any of us are in this literature business to begin with: the peril, the responsibility, the thrill of self-definition.  I am an American.  Beat that.