God Bless You, Mr Rosewater

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It's like I'm out in a big boat, and I see one fellow in a rowboat who's tired of rowing and wants a free ride, and another fellow who's drowning. Who would you expect me to rescue? Mr. Cedar - who's just tired of rowing and wants a free ride? Or those men out there who are drowning? Any ten year old child will give you the answer to that. As a story, Vonnegut is his usual hilarious self, letting his character as narrator drop several times and revealing personal asides. Beneath the surface, the author conveys an allegory about our spiritually hollow lives, a not so subtle dig at capitalism, having more money than sense. While Vonnegut doesn’t personally appear in his own novels, his alter egos most certainly do. Partially based on a fellow writer, but also undoubtedly Vonnegut himself, one of my favorite characters, Kilgore Trout, makes his first appearance in a Vonnegut novel. Likewise, In 'Pearls Before Swine,' Stephas Pastis provides commentary in his own appearances. Something else worth mentioning, Eliot Rosewater’s sporadic attempts to do good don’t offer much of a plot, but again like the comic strip, his actions are replete with social commentary. Maybe more could be said about the two, but I’ll end the comparison there. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a solid Vonnegut read! And did I mention this was Kilgore Trout’s first appearance in Vonnegut’s work? 4.5 stars Kurt Vonnegut takes on capitalism and socialism in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the fourth book of his I've read. I'm still not sure how I feel about the esteemed Mr. Vonnegut. I think his writing is exceptional but his plots are all over the place. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut tells the story of a man who wants to help the less fortunate and another man who wants to gain control of his employer's fortune.

In time, almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine, too. 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.” Eliot Rosewater is a veteran and the head of the Rosewater foundation, which oversees millions used for charitable donations and helping people. He decides to go out into America and meet people, view small towns, and try to figure out how to help people more. He ends up in Rosewater, Indiana, and decides that he'll help those people. Sadistic Choice: In "All The King's Horses," the captain at one point sees the one way he can save all but one of the remaining Americans... but he has to choose one of his twin sons to die. Due to intervention from one of his adversary's concubines, the child doesn't have to die. Another tome written by Kilgore Trout is ‘The Pan Galactic Three-Day Pass’ , about information, how we get it and about how we process it. The internet and the social media firestorm were still things of the future when the novel was written, but that is why we have science-fiction writers: they see the writing on the wall earlier and clearer that the rest of us, they warn us and even come up with solutions. Driven to Suicide: Celia Hoover, who commits suicide by eating Drano chips, which does so much damage to her body that her coffin has to be kept closed at her funeral. Why she commits suicide is never explained; it may be a result of her descent into madness due to drug abuse.The Baby Trap: Anita got Paul to marry her by claiming to be pregnant. Not only was she not pregnant, she actually can't have children at all. The separation of corporate control and benefit opens the way for what Roman lawyers feared most: fraud. Who can say whether those in control, the corporate managers, are really doing their best for the beneficiaries? In fact what can 'best' mean when it is merely the superlative for an infinite number of quite different possible 'goods'? The opportunity for fraud is immense, and historically irresistible. This is the main theme of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: corporate fraud and how to combat it. Of course I was scandalized by Vonnegut’s crudeness, but thought I had to make a mature dent in such books - ones my parents’ more mature generation even endorsed - so reading Vonnegut ushered me into an oddly skewed adult world. Vonnegut is a writer who came to the genre of science-fiction not because it pays the bills with escapist tales of adventure, but because it is, in his opinion, the only honest way to debate the future of a humanity hell bent on self-destruction. He shares in this opinion with my favourite Ray Bradbury quote: seeing what is wrong in the world, he exclaims, To hell with more of the same, I want better! All those pretensions of the rich… All that petty charity… All that aplomb… All that hypocrisy…Ignorance and vulgarity… God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater…

Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is an outrageous and savagely funny fantasy about people, their pleasures, pains and perversions, a penetrating satire on insanity – a millionaire's private lunacy. Featuring an infectious score by the Oscar- and Tony-winning team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman ( Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Little Shop of Horrors), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a legendary collaboration between one of America's greatest novelists and the songwriting team behind some of the greatest hits of all time. One of the central characters in the novel, according to Vonnegut, is a large sum of money—the Rosewater fortune. The people who have it are driven to be charitable to a certain extent but once Eliot gains control of the Foundation that administers the money, he's not sure how to make the best use of it. He travels around the country making very little impact on people's lives with the money. In the end, he gives it all away to random children that he claims are his heirs. His wife tries to understand him but ultimately has a breakdown because she's incapable of caring about the same problems that Eliot cares about. The money pushes his father to find the roots of Eliot's drive to take care of people that Lister considers useless and not worth helping. How I Wrote This Article" Article: Vonnegut's narration frequently goes off to explain what he was going through when he was writing Breakfast of Champions.

Short stories include:

Strawman Political: Senator Rosewater, although he is far more Truth in Television than most people will admit (even to themselves). All-Loving Hero: Eliot's defining trait - he loves everyone, no matter how unlovable they are, simply because they are human and need someone to love them. Possibly deconstructed, note though it could also be seen as a case of Evil Cannot Comprehend Good as Senator Rosewater bitterly notes that that makes for a raw deal for anyone who (like himself) wants to have a personal relationship to Eliot, since Eliot loves them exactly as much as he does a random person on the street. Eliot's wife also tries to be this, but it eventually causes her to have a nervous breakdown and turn into a complete sociopath for a while - essentially, she wore out her sense of empathy by trying to apply it as widely as Eliot. Eliot himself also suffers a mental collapse towards the end of the novel. Rape as Drama: Quite gruesomely used in "Welcome To The Monkey House". Sex is repressed and discouraged to the point where a vigilante thinks the only way to convince women to try it is to rape them. The women he violates end up being his loyal followers, and eventually help him do it to other women. It may sound unreal, but this happens in a lot of societies and cultural subgroups. Like so many great American fortunes, the Rosewater pile was accumulated in the beginning by a humorless, constipated Christian farm boy turned speculator and briber during and after the Civil War. The farm boy was Noah Rosewater, my great-grandfather, who was born in Rosewater County, Indiana.

The Rosewater Foundation has more money than God. When Eliot Rosewater, the current head, starts making people nervous with all his talk of redistributing wealth, Norman Mushari decides to put Eliot's sanity to test in court and reaches out to the Rhode Island branch of the Rosewater family. An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. Noah hired a village idiot to fight in his place, converted the saw factory to the manufacture of swords and bayonets, converted the farm to the raising of hogs. Abraham Lincoln declared that no amount of money was too much to pay for the restoration of the Union, so Noah priced his merchandise in scale with the national tragedy. And he made this discovery: Government objections to the price or quality of his wares could be vaporized with bribes that were pitifully small. The New York Times called it "[Vonnegut] at his wildest best" and Conrad Aiken said that it's "a brilliantly funny satire on almost everything". [3] Slaughterhouse-Five [ edit ]

Tropes common in his work:

Winds of Destiny, Change!: The titular effect from "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" - anyone who thinks in just the right way can manipulate chance all around them. First manifesting as the ability to roll snake-eyes at will on two dice, it can allow its user to cause machines to fail at will around them. Horrified by the potential destructive power of the effect, Prof. Barnhouse goes into hiding and dedicates his life to rendering all weapons inert via his power. He was the youngest, the shortest, and by all odds the least Anglo-Saxon male employee in the firm. He was put to work under the most senile partner, Thurmond McAllister, a sweet old poop who was seventy-six. He would never have been hired if the other partners hadn't felt that McAllister's operations could do with just a touch more viciousness.

The Rosewater does not have a dedicated parking lot. There is street parking on Woodlawn with no dedicated disabled parking spaces on the street.To get into the bookstore, there are 3 steps with a railing on a grassy slope leading from the sidewalk to the lawn and 6 steps with a railing from the lawn to the main level of the store. Inside, there are 6 steps with no railing from the first level to the second level, which houses the children's room, restroom, romance and mystery sections. So, when Brian resurrected Eliot from the depths of my depressive reaction to this novel, and showed the outright godliness in Mr Rosewater’s altruistic demeanour, I was overjoyed. Maybe I flatter myself when I think that I have things in common with Hamlet, that I have an important mission, that I’m temporarily mixed up about how it should be done. Hamlet had one big edge on me. His father’s ghost told him exactly what he had to do, while I am operating without instructions. I’m going to love these discarded Americans, even though they’re useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.” Viagas, Robert (November 16, 2016). "Encores! Off-Center Production of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Is Getting a Cast Album". Playbill . Retrieved May 22, 2018.I hate these men in real life--whether of the orange or Martian doughboy variety--and yet somehow Kurt Vonnegut has managed to make Eliot Rosewater endearing. Unlike with many of his books this isn't the here's-the-protagonist's-life-story kind, and half of it is actually concerned with Eliot's have-not relation, Fred Rosewater. Food Porn: Many delicious-sounding recipes are used as a framing device (although Vonnegut explains in the preface that he has tinkered around with the recipes, which are based on recipes from various real life cookbooks, and that they will not work if tried at home). They are also a reference to Rudy's abilities as a cook, and how he feeds and cares for his family as a means of atoning for the damage he has done.