godblessyoumrrosewater
The implied author, or perhaps Vonnegut himself, claims at the start of this novel that a “sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people” (1). While it is true that a sum of money is the thing with which many of the characters are greatly concerned, I think the leading theme is not money, but rather, …
Jonathan Elmer In my last installment, on Cat’s Cradle, I suggested that Vonnegut was playing some interesting games with his literary precursors, especially Melville’s epic whaling tale, Moby-Dick. That mythic beast makes a cameo appearance in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater as well. The scene is “The Jolly Whaler,” the shop run by Bunny Weeks, “the great-grandson of the …
Rick Van Kooten Following the bleak nihilism of Cat’s Cradle, the next novel written by Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, presents a more optimistic side of Vonnegut’s philosophy, even as it is presented as a blistering satire as in Cat’s Cradle. In many ways, Vonnegut’s body of work up to this point could be considered not only a literary project …
Rebekah Sheldon God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a book about economic inequality in America. It is a satirical examination of how class is lived and injustice justified, and so it is certainly timely. But I want to talk about pornography instead. There is a single example of pornography in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It is a dirty …
Eric Sandweiss “A sum of money,” Vonnegut’s narrator alerts us, will be “a leading character” in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the novelist’s 1965 tale of the hazard of old fortunes (1). Like his creator, Eliot Rosewater—the holy fool who fills that lead role in a more conventional sense—is also struck by money’s personal charisma. Mr. Rosewater, a science …
Sarah Phillips Kurt Vonnegut was a prophet, albeit a satiric and stridently earthly one. Vonnegut’s 1965 book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: Or Pearls before Swine diagnosed and warned us about the growing problems that got us where we are today. Those problems were (and are) unfettered free market capitalism, run-away greed, income and wealth inequality, and media-palooza.1 I …
Cooper Harriss I take satisfaction in observing the ways that Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater rehearses with some precision a number of specific themes I’ve discussed in the first four installments of this project. The title’s benediction (“God bless you!”), which we see recur among the townspeople even to the point of betrayal, registers secularism’s religious unconscious, mirroring …
Ed Comentale As self-appointed dean of Salo University, an institution dedicated fully to training in the liberal arts, I have been tracking Vonnegut’s shifts in thinking about the human and his uneasy relationship with humanism as a system of thought and value. As I see it, his first few novels are marked by an increasing pessimism about human nature …
Ted Castronova On page 189 of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the orphan Selena describes the oath she was forced to take every day. Part of it reads: I understand that I have not been placed on Earth to be happy. I am here to be tested. If I am to pass the test, I must be always unselfish, …
