Tags Archives

mr. rosewater

The Grand Social Experiment | Van Kooten on God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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 …

Addendum to The Grand Social Experiment

Rick Van Kooten   What is the best estimate of the location of the fictional Rosewater, Indiana? Being a Hoosier and someone who loves maps, and who has an obsession akin to trying to explain the periodicity of Rumfoord’s appearances in Sirens of Titan, I could not resist trying to estimate from clues in the novel the location of the …

Follow the Money | Sandweiss on God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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 …

Eliot Rosewater for President, or, Nimium capto aut ut omnino nihil | Phillips on God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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 …

Rave on, Eliot Rosewater | Harriss on God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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 …

Utopian Lanes: The Project Logic of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater | Comentale on God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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 …