God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

First published: 1965

Type of plot: Social satire

Time of work: 1964-1965, with flashbacks to the period 1953-1963

Locale: Rosewater, Indiana, and Pisquontuit, Rhode Island

Principal Characters:

• Eliot Rosewater, the protagonist, a wealthy alcoholic with a conscience who strives to love the undeserving poor
• Sylvia, his wife, who is beautiful, cultured, deeply in love with her husband, but hysterically unable to love the unlovable
• Lister Ames Rosewater, his father, a conservative senator from Indiana
• Fred Rosewater, a lusterless insurance salesman representing the forgotten New England branch of the Rosewaters
• Kilgore Trout, a socialist Christ figure who writes didactic science fiction stories and works as a stock clerk in a trading stamp redemption center
• Norman Mushari, a sneaky lawyer of Lebanese extraction in the firm of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee

The Novel

The focal point of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is Eliot Rosewater’s sustained effort to comfort the unredeemable poor. Son of the famous Senator Lister Rosewater, born to great wealth, and with a Harvard University Ph.D. in international law, Eliot gradually comes to reject the values and traditions of his family and turns heavily to drink as he approaches middle age. One day, he leaves his New York town house and returns dramatically to the one-time family seat, Rosewater, Indiana, where he eventually opens a wretched office in a shotgun attic above a lunchroom and liquor store. As president of the Rosewater Foundation, Eliot controls millions of dollars for disbursement to worthy applicants. He advertises in local telephone booths: “Don’t Kill Yourself. Call the Rosewater Foundation,” and he dispenses minor sums of money (one hundred dollars for the promise to go on living another week), small doses of medicine (two aspirins in a glass of wine), and modest expressions of love (“Call any time you want, dear. That’s what I’m here for”).

The Senator is appalled by his son’s perverse compassion for “the maggots in the slime on the bottom of the human garbage pail,” but Norman Mushari, a sly lawyer with access to the Rosewater money package, is delighted by Eliot’s evident insanity. For if that insanity can be proved legally, then the listless, incompetent Fred Rosewater, the next closest relative in the absence of children by Eliot, will come into the presidency of the foundation, and it is Mushari’s aim to be in attendance when the package changes hands—for that is a lawyer’s golden moment. “If the man who is to receive the treasure is unused to wealth, has an inferiority complex and shapeless feelings of guilt, as most people do, the lawyer can often take as much as half the bundle, and still receive the recipient’s blubbering thanks.”

Mushari is successful right up to the showdown. Eliot indeed proves to be insane (that is, he suffers a nervous breakdown and cannot go on with his charity work). At the last moment, however, Eliot foils the lawyer. It seems that fifty-seven women in Rosewater County, out of tender neurotic love—and bribery by Mushari to make Eliot seem demented—have claimed Eliot Rosewater to be the father of their illegitimate babies, starting with Mary Moody and her twins, Foxcroft and Melody. Eliot, in a masterful stroke of sanity, simply declares all the children to be his, with full rights of inheritance.

This outcome of the action is not only absurd but also amusing, as is the rest of the novel. The reader recognizes that Eliot Rosewater does not really “win” after all. Also, the reader knows that he has scarcely changed the lives of his pathetic clients. It is really Mushari and his ilk who invariably win in these situations, even if they appear now and then to lose. In any case, Vonnegut maintains continuous tension between fragile hope and cruel reality.

The primary thrust of the novel is maliciously amusing satire directed against rapacious American capitalism and the “stupid . . . unnecessary and humorless American class system. . . .” Vonnegut offers a capsule history of the United States in a noteworthy early chapter, and the reader sees from his description of the small county seat in the Midwest that Rosewater, Indiana, symbolizes the entire nation. Vonnegut frequently refers to the early Utopian ideas in the country, and he alludes to the community of New Harmony, Indiana, calling it New Ambrosia. Also, he constantly places in contention the liberal Eliot and his conservative father, showing that he perceives something of value in each point of view. Furthermore, Vonnegut sees that honest and industrious American citizens have ultimately been mistreated by the system, and he concludes implacably that “the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”

The Characters

Eliot Rosewater, the protagonist, is clearly meant to be a positive figure, yet he, like the other characters, is still a target for Vonnegut’s satire. Thus, his love for the wretched of the earth often appears to be perfunctory, and he is presented as being physically ridiculous—all puffy and pasty, mostly bald, an athlete gone to lard who seldom washes, sleeps in his long underwear, and drinks a lot of Southern Comfort and Rosewater Golden Lager Ambrosia Beer. Still, there is perhaps something endearing in this description, and the reader is obliged to love Eliot for his adoration of volunteer firemen. During his bad drinking days, he once traded clothes with a fireman in New Egypt, New Jersey—his four-hundred-dollar suit for a double-breasted chalk-stripe with the creases in the trousers permanently sewed in. “I want to look like you,” said Eliot. “You’re the salt of the earth.” There is something of Vonnegut in Eliot (Vonnegut was once a volunteer fireman, and he was born in Indiana, though in Indianapolis).

If Eliot finally seems to have failed in his effort to give dignity to the poor people of Rosewater County, one must consider Kilgore Trout’s observation on the matter. He says first that the main lesson Eliot learned “is that people can use all the uncritical love they can get.” Eliot was able to give such love over a long period of time, and “if one man can do it, perhaps others can do it, too.” Thus, a genuinely positive idea (though some might call it sentimental) is at work in the novel to balance the negatively directed satire.

Trout is first described as “an old man with a full black beard.” He looks like a “frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life.” He enjoys the distinction of being admired by both Eliot and the Senator. Although wise, he writes abominably; he has no sense of style at all, but his provocative science fiction stories offer fascinating ideas under such titles as Venus on the Half-Shell, Oh Say Can You Smell?, Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass, and 2BR02B (shorthand for Hamlet’s famous question). The latter hypothesizes an overpopulated America in which all the work is done by machines; people, now useless, are encouraged to volunteer for death at Ethical Suicide Parlors. One such volunteer asks a question fundamental to all of Vonnegut’s writings: “What in hell are people for?”

Eliot’s wife, Sylvia, tries to follow her husband in caring for such useless people, but after five years she has a nervous breakdown and asks for a divorce. Her doctor coins a word in naming her disease: “Samaritrophia . . . hysterical indifference to the troubles of those less fortunate than oneself.” It is only a disease, adds the author, “when it attacks those exceedingly rare individuals who reach biological maturity still loving and wanting to help their fellow men.” The last news one has of Sylvia is that she has entered a Belgian nunnery where the rule of silence is observed.

One might suppose that Vonnegut’s common people would be presented sympathetically, but the author’s satire extends to them also. For example, there is Bella, who has a little business called Bella’s Beauty Nook and who weighs 314 pounds; Diana Moon Glampers, “a sixty-eight-year-old virgin who, by almost anybody’s standards, was too dumb to live”; Coach Letzinger, a free-lance garbage man and a pitiful exhibitionist; Delbert Peach, the town drunk, “all bristles and stink”; Lincoln Ewald, a Nazi sympathizer during the war who still greets people with “Heil Hitler!”; Roland Barry, who had a complete nervous breakdown ten minutes after he joined the army when he was ordered to take a shower with one hundred other men; and Tawny Wainwright, “a fourteen-year-old nymphet, pregnant by her stepfather.” Vonnegut takes the position that anyone who thinks loving the unlovable is easy and fun is a sentimental fool.

Critical Context

When God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was published in 1965, Vonnegut had not yet attained his full and enormous popularity, which would come only with Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). He was, however, already well established as a cult figure, with a following that regarded him primarily as a science fiction writer. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was widely reviewed, receiving notice in some two dozen periodicals, including The New York Times Book Review, while Vonnegut’s previous novel, Cat’s Cradle (1963), was reviewed in only four places (though one of these, significantly, was The New York Times).

Most of Vonnegut’s important themes are to be found in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which ranks among his top three or four novels. (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is also significant because it marks the first appearance of Kilgore Trout, the recurring character who is one of Vonnegut’s most popular creations.) God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, like Slaughterhouse-Five, despite its pervasive, often flippant, humor, attains to an almost Dostoevskian understanding of the suffering of humanity and the necessity of realizing that “all are responsible for all. . . .”

Bibliography

Boon, Kevin A. Chaos Theory and the Interpretation of Literary Texts: The Case of Kurt Vonnegut. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Extending the scientific theory of chaos to literary criticism, Boon uses words and phrases such as “strange attractors,” “fractals,” and the “micro/macro connection” to describe certain aspects of Vonnegut’s prose. A somewhat offbeat but nevertheless astute analysis of Vonnegut’s work.

Broer, Lawrence. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989. Broer offers an in-depth analysis of individual novels by Vonnegut, including God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. His study gives the reader a unique perspective on the common themes that run throughout Vonnegut’s work.

Mustazza, Leonard, ed. The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Critical essays present a detailed study of Vonnegut’s various works, including God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. A biographical introduction as well as a selected bibliography make this a valuable resource.

Reed, Peter J., and Mark Leeds, eds. The Vonnegut Chronicles. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Presenting a series of interviews and critical essays on Vonnegut’s writing, this volume offers a broad variety of opinions and observations from scholars and journalists. A good source of information that helps the reader see more clearly the unique characteristics of individual novels against the wider context of Vonnegut’s work.

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991. This collection of Vonnegut’s essays examines both the personal issues and social events that shaped his distinctive writing style as well as his view of modern culture. Vonnegut offers a rare glimpse of his heart in this intimate self-portrait.