The concept of parenting haunts both Augie and Sully. Augie acknowledges his failures as a parent early in the narrative, recalling the child he never bothered to meet and admitting that he has no idea how to care for Iris beyond feeding her and allowing her to follow him on his walks. Deep relationships and responsibility are something Augie has avoided broadly, but the particular vulnerability and dependency of children initially leads Augie to resent Iris’s presence at the observatory. Augie has spent a lifetime avoiding the role of a father. He knows he impregnated Jean in New Mexico, and he fled when she refused an abortion. He seems to have long suppressed any feelings of guilt; his only gesture toward parenting was to send birthday gifts to his daughter for a few years.

However, Augie’s very resentment of Iris holds the seeds of parental concern: He is “[a]ngry that this responsibility had fallen to him, that he couldn’t leave it behind or pass it off to someone else. Angry because he did care, despite his best efforts not to” (21). For most of the novel, Augie believes that Iris is someone else’s child, forgotten in the rush to evacuate.