Omensetter's Luck: Analysis of Major Characters
"Omensetter's Luck" is a novel that intricately explores the lives and complexities of its major characters set against the backdrop of a small Ohio River town. The Reverend Jethro Furber is a conflicted preacher whose disdain for his parishioners is matched only by his intellectual cynicism and personal insecurities. He grapples with his own misanthropy while simultaneously envying the charismatic Brackett Omensetter, a leatherworker whose extraordinary luck and affable nature draw the ire and suspicion of the townspeople. Omensetter's innate goodness stands in stark contrast to the darker aspects of human nature displayed by characters like Henry Pimber, a local landowner consumed by self-pity and insecurity, ultimately leading to his tragic demise. Lucy Pimber, Henry's wife, embodies a cold, suffocating force, driven by her unfulfilled desires and obsession with control. Israbestis Tott, the town postmaster, serves as a storyteller whose poetic interpretations of events reveal the blurred lines of truth and fiction within the community. Together, these characters illustrate themes of envy, miscommunication, and the ethical dilemmas inherent in personal narratives, providing a rich tapestry of human experience that invites deeper reflection on the nature of luck and human connection.
Omensetter's Luck: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: William H. Gass
First published: 1966
Genre: Novel
Locale: Gilean, Ohio, a river town
Plot: Symbolic realism
Time: The late 1880's and early 1890's, with a flash-forward to the early 1900's
The Reverend Jethro Furber, a fiery preacher from Cleveland who despairs of his assignment to Gilean, an Ohio River town. Short, pale, bone-thin, and intellectual, Furber uses his Sunday sermons to excoriate his parishioners, but he does not believe one word he preaches. A master of the dramatic and rhetorical turn, Furber is a jumble of contradictions: a devil-worshiping minister, a philosophical relativist, a skeptic, and a cynic. Like a small child working a puzzle, he has trouble holding together his complex “modern” parts. Despairing of human love and brotherhood, he is a misanthrope who simultaneously hates and envies his congregational “cows.” Unloved and neglected as a child, Furber developed an inferiority complex that manifests itself in paranoia, delusions, and a negative self-image: He sees himself as a clumsy, comic buffoon who aspires to the lightness and grace of ballet. His paranoia leads to a unilateral attack on Brackett Omensetter, whom he views as a competing religionist. Furber spreads lies about Omensetter's supposed black magical powers to mobilize public opinion against him. Furber is an Old Testament scholar who enjoys reading biblical passages about violence and family bloodletting. When the opportunity arises to deal Omensetter a fatal blow, however, he retreats; he is the theoretician par excellence, not a man of action. He strikes a deal with Omensetter: Omensetter and family can leave town once Henry Pimber's body is recovered and properly buried. While defending Omensetter from Sheriff Curtis Chamlay's search party, Furber suffers a mental breakdown. Later, he disappears from Gilean.
Brackett Omensetter, a leatherworker with extraordinary luck who goes to work for the local blacksmith, Matthew Watson. A large, wide, and happy man, Omensetter habitually spreads out his big arms as if to gather in the entire world; his every word and gesture bespeak his humanity and love of life. Charismatic, he is irresistible to the locals, but his natural saintliness makes them envious and suspicious. They believe that he is protecting a secret. As instinctual, spontaneous, and magical as he appears initially, he is a mere mortal, like Adam, made of clay. The townspeople's hostility wears away at him. He is systematically excluded from everything communal, from horseshoe pitching to fishing, and his primitive side gives way. Meeting Henry Pimber to pay his rent on the fatal day, Omensetter dons conventional clothing; suddenly, Pimber realizes that there is nothing extraordinary about him. Later, after discovering Henry's body hanging from an oak, Omensetter turns to his adversary, Furber, for protection and abetment. Furber's insane defense and the reasoned argument of Truxton Orcutt, the local physician, enable Omensetter to elude a murder charge. Meanwhile, the Omensetter baby, Amos, miraculously survives a bout with diphtheria, and the family moves downriver.
Israbestis Tott, the town postmaster and “historian.” Thin, womanish, and with broken teeth, Tott, a born storyteller, takes town events and personages to make a subjective, poetic history of the local and familiar. Omensetter's story is Tott's creation. Telling stories many times over, Tott supplies new data when the “facts” escape him. The ambiguous saga of the Omensetter cradle and the mystery of how Lucy Pimber obtained it fire his imagination. He wonders if all of his stories are as “wrong” as this one, alluding to the en-twined problematic of ethical behavior and ethical narration: how the narrator-historian chooses to fill gaps in his story. Ethics is really the least of Tott's concerns; like Furber and Henry Pimber, he is a cruel, childish egotist who considers people mere words to populate his narratives. The auctioning of Lucy Pimber's belongings after her death visibly upsets him, for the objects of his local history are being divided up and sold. Out of touch, Tott, the romantic aesthete, takes refuge from life by living imaginatively within the cracks and plaster chips of his bedroom wall. Totally dissatisfied with this life, he understands that his imagination imprisons and paralyzes him intellectually and emotionally. Finally, he acts, taking Dr. Orcutt to tend to the Omensetter baby.
Henry Pimber, a local landowner. He rents to Omensetter the old Perkins place, a dilapidated house on a flood-prone, swampy stretch of the Ohio River. Psychologically cannibalized by his wife, Lucy—like her vegetables, he is canned, stored, and then consumed—Henry is “tea-weak” and has little desire to live. As an ironic reversal of the Prufrock type, however, he is prone to sudden, violent action. His actions, however, are stupid and mistaken; he simply makes the wrong choices—and always has. For example, he shoots to death a fox that has fallen into the well at the Perkins' place. (The shooting prefigures his own suicide, because Henry identifies psychologically with the imprisoned animal.) The force of the shotgun blast drives a stone shard up and into his arm. As a result, he develops lockjaw and almost dies. Omensetter saves his life by placing a beet poultice in his palms. Thereafter, Pimber is never the same. Full of self-pity and remorse for past wrongdoing, he hangs himself seventy feet up in a white oak. His suicide is a cowardly escape from Lucy and a guilty conscience. Like Furber, he is a supreme egotist—he would have made a better Omensetter. A romantic at heart, he envied Omensetter for the wrong reasons, mistakenly equating him with the noble savage.
Lucy Pimber, Henry's wife. Thin, silent, snow-white, cold, and barren, she persecutes her husband, and everyone around her, for her inability to bear children. Her obsession with canning is symptomatic of her latent desire to preserve all living things in the death state. She figuratively suffocates Henry, turning him into a zombie. Her concern for Omensetter's unborn baby is purely selfish—she would carry, bear, and rear the baby herself if she could. Her every gesture is a figure in a tableau of desire. On his final day, she sends Henry off to collect the rent from Omensetter. She is ungrateful to Omensetter for saving Henry's life. When Henry fails to return, she seals herself away in the house as if in a canning jar. Furber finally breaks the lock and extricates the ghastly Lucy, bedraggled and stinking of feces. Physically rejuvenated by book's end, she is paid a final visit by the Reverend Jethro Furber, who offers her the rent money found in Henry's lifeless fist. She refuses the sum but counts it, pleased that Henry had bilked Omensetter of such a large amount.