The Adventures of Augie March is a picaresque narrative. Augie himself is a "picaro" or "rogue." Typical of the genre, the subject of The Adventures of Augie March becomes the adventures of a freedom-loving rascal who lives by his wits and changes little through the long course of his escapades. Like other picaresque narratives, The Adventures of Augie March is realistic in manner and episodic in structure. After his first two tightly organized novels, Bellow lets himself go.

Bellow also lets himself go in his writing style. The prose is original, exuberant, passionate, unrestrained: "In the cage we rose and dropped, rubbing elbows with bigshots and operators, commissioners, grabbers, heelers, tipsters, hoodlums, wolves, fixers, plaintiffs, flatfeet, men in Western hats and women in lizard shoes and fur coats, hothouse and arctic drafts mixed up, brute things and airs of sex, evidence of heavy feeding and systematic shaving, of...