The Adventures of Augie March, although it suffers a complete breakdown in structure and in quality of writing two-thirds of the way through, nevertheless is the most brilliant attempt to write the great American novel. That is, it belongs to a group of novels which either, like dos Passo's U.S.A. try to convey the experience of America, or, like Look Homeward, Angel, the experience of being an American. Augie March, in the Chicago scenes — the first two-thirds of the novel —does both, and this is why it is so richly-textured and inclusive in its sense of life. Bellow's grasp of character, in this context, of being an American, is concentrated in the central figure of Augie March himself, growing from childhood to maturity through a specific historical and social situation. The continuity of natural growth, and Bellow's strong sense of the progression of time — not merely the private chronology of Augie's life, but time as history — give the tale a compulsive drive forward (the impetus of the bildungsroman rather than that of the picaresque novel).