God Bless You, Mr Rosewater

Product Information

Eliot gives money, time, compassion and energy to the people of Rosewater county, and it doesn’t seem to solve the problem. People need to feel loved, but they also need to feel valued, and that’s not always easy in the stratified society they live in. I was touched by Eliot’s efforts to right what he believes is wrong and to atone for that horrible mistake he can’t seem to get passed. The plot is quite basic really and gives plenty of room to the central question that is- If you don't have to work and spend your life preoccupied with making money, what do you do with your time and what is your purpose? That is the central problem for Eliot and is the thing that drives him to drink, as he struggles with a search for some substance and meaning in his life. There is a balance between gentle humour and soul searching in the novel which I thought worked well and the book had a poignancy about it and an undercurrent of sadness and quiet despair that gets under your skin as you reach the end... By the time I read Eliot Rosewater’s story, I could still laugh, thanks to my then mid-teen sister’s youthful giggling presence in my life, but it was after my ‘accident’, so Mr. Rosewater was for me a bitterly sardonic type of laugh.

Vonnegut is also notable because he was one of the first modern science fiction authors to get serious attention in the literary world. Although your literature professors (and Vonnegut himself) may try to tell you he's not actually a science fiction writer, the aliens and time-travel seem to disagree.

I played piano differently (but I thundered downward on the keys, instead of flexibly moving my fingers Into them). 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. But from somewhere something is trying to tell me where to go, what to do there, and why to do it. Don’t worry, I don’t hear voices. Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue": Mercilessly deconstructed in "Shout it out from the Rooftops." The author is shunned by everyone in her town, loses her living and is on the verge of breaking up her marriage after "Hypocrites' Junction", a book about a thinly disguised version of her town, becomes a smash hit. The more Mushari rifled the firm's confidential files relative to the Rosewater Foundation, the more excited he became. Especially thrilling to him was that part of the charter which called for the immediate expulsion of any officer adjudged insane. It was common gossip in the office that the very first president of the Foundation, Eliot Rosewater, the Senator's son, was a lunatic. This characterization was a somewhat playful one, but as Mushari knew, playfulness was impossible to explain in a court of law. Eliot was spoken of by Mushari's co-workers variously as "The Nut,""The Saint,""The Holy Roller,""John the Baptist," and so on. One of the more outright funny novels by Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a scathing social satire about greed, hypocrisy and good, though misshapen intentions. One of the most starkly telling scenes for me is near the end when Elliot has taken up tennis and lost all the weight, and it is as though he has awakened from a long sleep.

Hypocrite: Fred Rosewater's wife is said to despise him for being so poor and dull, while having failed to notice that she's every bit as poor and every bit as dull as he is. note In fairness, since he's the breadwinner of their household, her being as poor as him is pretty much inevitable.

But medieval lawyers (mostly priests) found a way round the Roman legal tradition. So in Vonnegut's novel the shares (but not the assets) of the Rosewater Company are owned by the Rosewater Trust. The only thing the later can expect from the former is an 'equitable' flow of dividends, which is exactly what it gets. Otherwise the Trust has no say in what the Corporation does or how it does it. The Rosewater Corporation is, in itself, useless. An Encores! Off-Center staged concert ran at New York City Center from July 27–30, 2016. The production starred Skylar Astin (Norman Mushari), Santino Fontana (Eliot Rosewater), Brynn O'Malley (Sylvia), and James Earl Jones (Kilgore Trout). The production also featured Rebecca Naomi Jones and was directed by Michael Mayer. [5] [6] [7] [8] This cast recorded the first studio recording of this musical in 2017. When the United States of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for those who loved expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone.

The 'Verse: Vonnegut's stories and characters have a tendency to overlap with one another. If it's one of his fictional works, expect at least a cameo from Kilgore Trout and/or the Tralfamadorians. Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade, first published in 1969, features Eliot Rosewater in Chapter Five. Billy Pilgrim, the main character of the novel, has committed himself to a psychiatric hospital during his last year of optometry school, and finds himself sharing a room with Eliot Rosewater. Eliot introduces Billy Pilgrim to the works of Kilgore Trout, which set the foundation for Billy's adventures through time and with the Tralfamadorians, aliens that Billy claims abducted him. [5] Film appearances [ edit ]

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. Cosmic Horror Story: While most of his works, with a few exceptions, don't often include hostile extraterrestrial or quasi-supernatural beings (preferring anthropogenic agents of the apocalypse, e.g. Ice-9 in Cat's Cradle), Vonnegut shares with writers of the cosmic horror genre a belief in a universe that is completely indifferent to human welfare and morality and therefore seems hostile. 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. 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. Eliot Rosewater, drunk, volunteer fireman and president of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation, is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature, with a little help from writer, Kilgore Trout. The result is Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy and follies of the flesh to which we are all heir.