SOURCE: Meyers, Jeffrey. “Brueghel and Augie March.” American Literature 49, no. 1 (March 1977): 113-19.

In the following essay, Meyers explicates the symbolic role that Pieter Brueghel's painting The Misanthrope plays in The Adventures of Augie March.

In chapter ten of The Adventures of Augie March (1953) Augie describes Padilla's technique of stealing books and remembers

an old, singular, beautiful Netherlands picture I once saw in an Italian gallery, of a wise old man walking in empty fields, pensive, while a thief behind cuts the string of his purse. The old man, in black, thinking probably of God's city, nevertheless has a foolish length of nose and is much too satisfied with his dream. But the peculiarity of the thief is that he is enclosed in a glass ball, and on the glass ball there is a surmounting cross, and it looks like the emperor's symbol of rule. Meaning that it is...