Recently Read: "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater, first published in 1965, has many themes as relevant today as they were in the 1960s. Indeed, not much has changed in terms of class warfare. The rich are still hoarding the majority of capital, while demonizing the poor as lazy freeloaders. Instead of calling those who seek to aid the poor communists, they now call them socialists. So it goes.

This is mainly the story of one Eliot Rosewater, who is born into a whole lot of money, but comes back home from war changed. He is considered a drunken lunatic by his capitalist peers, partially because he uses the money at his disposal to help all the working class people he meets. He tries desperately to leave behind his life among the 1% and join their ranks. He periodically runs away from home to join fire departments, and eventually relocates to Rosewater County to live among the people. He loves everyone unconditionally; even his abusive father disregards his son’s love as meaningless because he freely gives it to everyone.

There was more cursing, made harsher by the fact that the Senator was close to tears.
“Why would you swear when I say I love you, Father?”
“You’re the man who stands on a street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, ‘I love you.’ And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own. I don’t want my square of toilet paper.”
“I didn’t realize it was toilet paper.”

Senator Rosewater is the stereotypical capitalist. There is nothing more important to him than money and the control over others that it brings. The way Eliot views the world baffles him.

“Eliot—“
“Sir—“
“We come to a supremely ironic moment in history, for Senator Rosewater of Indiana now asks his own son, ‘Are you or have you ever been a communist?’”
“Oh, I have what a lot of people would probably call communist thoughts,” said Eliot artlessly, “ but, for heaven’s sakes, Father, nobody can work with the poor and not fall over Karl Marx from time to time—or just fall over the Bible, as far as that goes. I think it’s terrible the way people don’t share things in this country. I think it’s a heartless government that will let one baby be born owning a big piece of the country, the way I was born, and let another baby be born without owning anything. The least a government could do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among the babies. Life is hard enough, without people having to worry themselves sick about money, too. There’s plenty for everybody in this country, if we’ll only share more.”
“And just what do you think that would do to incentive?”
“You mean fright about not getting enough to eat, about not being able to pay the doctor, about not being able to give your family nice clothes, a safe, cheerful, comfortable place to live, a decent education, and a few good times?”

The horrors of war, specifically Eliot’s accidental killing of firemen, and a steady diet of booze leaves Eliot emotionally crippled. He struggles to reconcile his charitable impulses with the way others condemn him for it. All the while, something deep down bothers him. What happened during the war haunts him, fills him with guilt, and drives him to drink and devote himself to a life in service of others. Even though he is worshipped by the people he helps, he does not think very much of himself. Eliot feels that he does not deserve to have wealth and privilege. This is illustrated mostly by the shabby way he takes care of himself, neglecting hygiene, living in squalor, and giving away expensive suits and wearing discarded secondhand suits. Eliot simplifies his purpose in life down to one sentence.

“There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:
God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

That is, until he hears “the click” after a conversation with his father. Another character explains.

“You get to know a man, and down deep there’s something bothering him bad, and maybe never find out what it is, but it’s what makes him do like he does, it’s what makes him look like he’s got secrets in his eyes. … Unless he dies young, though, or unless he gets everything all his way and nothing big goes wrong, that thing inside of him is going to run down like a wind-up toy. … You’re working along, and all of a sudden you hear this click from him. You turn to look at him. He’s stopped working. He’s all calmed down. He looks real dumb. He looks real sweet. You look in his eyes, and the secrets are gone. He can’t even tell you his own name right then. He goes back to work, but he’ll never be the same. That thing that bothered him so will never click on again. It’s dead, it’s dead.  And that part of that man’s life where he had to be a certain crazy way, that’s done!”

Eliot devotes himself entirely to the fire department and the care of others. He pays their expenses, listens to their problems, and is simply there … waiting by the phone. He is sort of stuck in limbo between the world of privilege and the world occupied by the real, every day people of Rosewater County, Indiana. These people are weighed down by their troubles, and the thing about that is that a lack of money is not their biggest worry. It does, however, rank pretty high.

The workmen had an uneasy respect for Fred. They tried to be cynical about what he sold, but they knew in their hearts that he was offering the only get-rich-quick scheme that was open to them: to insure themselves and die soon.

Fred Rosewater, in stark contrast to Eliot, is a long lost, distant potential heir to the Rosewater fortune. He sold insurance, making a living off the desperation of his fellow working class neighbors. All were laboring under the illusion that what they really craved was intertwined with money. What they really lacked the most, the thing that troubled them the most, was a lack of self worth. Vonnegut illustrates this in a conversation that Fred has with his wife after discovering a portion of his heritage.

“The point I’m trying to make,” he said, “is—we are somebody. I am sick and I am tired of pretending that we just aren't anybody.”
“I never pretended we weren't anybody.”
“You've pretended I wasn't anybody.” This was daringly true, and said almost accidentally. The truth of it stunned them both. “You know what I mean,” said Fred. He pressed on, did so gropingly, since he was in the unfamiliar condition of having poignant things to say, of being by no means at the end of them. 
“These phony bastards you think are so wonderful, compared to us—compared to me—I’d like to see how many ancestors they could turn up that could compare with mine. I've always thought people were silly who bragged about their family trees—but, by God, if anybody wants do any comparing, I’d be glad to show ‘em mine! Let’s quit apologizing!”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Other people say, ‘Hello’ or ‘Goodbye!’ We always say, ‘Excuse me,’ no matter what we’re doing.” He threw up his hands. “No more apologies! So we’re poor! All right, we’re poor! This is America! And America is one place in this sorry world where people shouldn't have to apologize for being poor. The question in America should be, ‘Is this guy a good citizen? Is he honest? Does he pull his own weight?' “

In true Vonnegut style, however, the doomed working class stiff cannot catch a break. When he takes his wife down to show him the manuscript of the story of his ancestors, the story that gave him pride and purpose, he discovers that it has been eaten by termites.

After Eliot hears the click, he winds up in an insane asylum suffering memory loss. In the end, he regains his faculties to announce that the answer to his legal troubles is to give away his inheritance to children of the poor. This comes after an interesting speech by one Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut’s literary alter ego. Trout, a paperback romance/science fiction writer described earlier in the novel as looking “like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life,” tells Eliot that his time in Rosewater was an experiment in “how to love people who have no use.” Americans, he says, have long been conditioned to hate themselves and anyone else who cannot or does not work. “Poverty is a relatively mild disease for even a very flimsy American soul, but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike, and kill every time. We must find a cure.” With advances in technology, Trout suggests there is a growing epidemic of people being considered worthless because they are not needed for work now done by machines. “So— if we can’t find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well, as has so often been suggested, rub them out.” And of course Senator Rosewater, who turns to Trout come up with an excuse for Eliot’s behavior that a judge would buy, doesn't recognize the truth in his words.

In this novel, Vonnegut did what he does best. He painted a portrait showing the stark ugliness of humanity, with just a touch of beauty peaking through the brush strokes. A bit more crass than some of his other works, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater drips with the bitter cynicism that is characteristic of its writer. Eliot sought to be useful, and to make others feel needed and wanted. What started out as an illustration of the struggle between the classes, of communism versus capitalism, of the stereotypes the rich and poor have of each other, turned out to be a lament of the common man’s loss of usefulness. Like Fred’s customers, many feel like they worth more dead than alive, a situation certainly exasperated by the way they are treated. Trout claimed that Eliot’s experiment proved that such individuals can be loved for simply being themselves, and that love is not meaningless just because they did not do something to earn it. The moral of the story, concisely expressed, is to be kind.


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