I am simply a human being, more or less.

Taken at face value, the line is a deliberately modest self-definition: the speaker refuses grand labels—genius, hero, spokesman, victim—and insists on ordinary human status, while the qualifier “more or less” adds irony and self-skepticism. In Bellow’s fictional world, such phrasing often signals resistance to ideological or social pigeonholing and a preference for the messy, contradictory reality of lived experience. The sentence can be read as a defense of individuality against abstraction: whatever one’s intellect, reputation, or moral aspirations, one remains fallible, embodied, and contingent. Its dry understatement also hints at Bellow’s characteristic comic seriousness—an attempt to tell the truth about the self without self-importance.