Charles McColl Portis was born in 1933 in El Dorado, Arkansas, and grew up in various small towns in southern Arkansas. After graduating from high school, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps and served in the Korean War, eventually reaching the rank of sergeant.
After his discharge from the army in 1955, Portis enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and obtained a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1958. He worked for several newspapers, including the Arkansas Gazette, and later became a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, rising to the position of London bureau chief.
Despite a promising journalistic career, Portis made a bold decision in 1964 to return to his home state of Arkansas and fully dedicate himself to writing fiction. Throughout his career, he wrote five novels, several short stories, and essays. He died in 2020 in Little Rock, Arkansas, from complications related to Alzheimer’s disease.
Published in 1979, The Dog Of is Portis’s third novel. The title refers to a dilapidated bus, briefly mentioned in the story, owned by a retired and eccentric quack physician from Texas, Dr. Reo Symes, who is chasing a dubious land development scheme in Belize. He is convinced that opportunity lies in idle territory: “There is a lot of land down there, Speed. It is just sitting there, waiting for somebody with a little get-up-and-go.”
Dr. Reo Symes joins twenty-six-year-old Ray Midge, who is on a bizarre road trip from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Mexico in search of his runaway wife, Norma, and her ex-husband, Dupree. The couple took off with Ray’s Ford Torino, credit cards, and shotgun. Ray obsessively tracks the duo’s movements by analysing the purchases on his credit card statements, particularly Texaco gasoline receipts, and scouring vehicle registration records.
Narrated in the first person by Ray Midge, the novel offers readers a direct window into his compulsive, dryly comic mindset as he embarks on this futile odyssey. The perspective deepens the absurdity and emotional texture of the journey, immersing us in Ray’s skewed logic and quiet desperation.
The odd pair, Ray Midge and Dr. Reo Symes, embark on a wild and futile quest through Mexico and into Belize, marked by delusion, eccentricity, and a parade of peculiar encounters. The journey is less about finding Norma and more about navigating a surreal and senseless world. This struggle to make sense of the world becomes a poignant reflection of life’s absurdity and the characters’ attempts to find meaning within it.
The Dog Of The South is a modern picaresque, echoing the spirit of Cervantes’s characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who, like Ray and Reo, are a mismatched duo chasing different dreams. Their escapades are filled with absurdity and comic misadventure. Their image mirrors a deeper existential aimlessness that is a sharp satire of American idealism and the belief in reinvention.
The Dog Of The South is stylistically and thematically reminiscent of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces, as both novels feature a cast of eccentric, deluded characters navigating perplexing worlds. Portis and Toole each use absurd humour and satirical narrative to explore themes of disillusionment and misguided ambition.
Their protagonists, Ray Midge and Ignatius J. Reilly, are obsessive, socially estranged, and comically out of step with reality. Their strange worldviews and compulsions drive the narrative, often to absurd and poignant ends. Portis surrounds Ray with an equally peculiar supporting cast, including the unstable and self-important Dr. Reo Symes, his domineering mother, and her odd companion, Melba, figures who mirror the chaos and dysfunction of Ignatius’s world, populated by the likes of his overbearing mother, Irene Reilly, and the exuberant Santa Battaglia.
While both authors employ satire to critique human folly, Portis tempers the absurdity with a gentler, more melancholic tone, in contrast to Toole’s more extravagant and farcical approach.
Like Toole, Portis employs sharp-witted satire, caustic humour, and richly textured dialogue to bring his characters to life. His writing is entertaining and unconventional, marked by a keen sense of observation and dialogue that often borders on the ridiculous.
These stylistic choices not only enhance the comic tone of the novel but also reveal the absurdity and quiet desperation that underlie his characters’ behaviour. Through this balance of humour and insight, Portis crafts a narrative that is both amusing and unexpectedly affecting.
He masterfully captures the voice and rhythm of the rural South while offering a subtle critique of its culture and values. The Dog Of The South is not only richly comical but also a poignant meditation on delusion, failure, disappointment, and the peculiar ways people search for meaning in their lives.
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