The world is full of suffering people. Some of us feel it more deeply than others. Empathetic souls recognize the suffering of other people—pain, hunger, poverty, displacement, fear, loss, anger, war—and it can elicit despair. Life is not fair, and if the economy of suffering carried weight, it would tilt the earth and cause it to wobble on its axis.

Eliot Rosewater, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, feels the suffering deeply and wobbles wildly in response. Eliot is a member of the 1% Club, heir to the imaginary “fourteenth largest family fortune in America” and the “property, privileges, and pleasures” that come with it. He’s the only son of a career politician, Senator Lister Ames Rosewater of Indiana, and also the President of the Rosewater Foundation, a fortress of “legal folderol” that allows Eliot absolute control of the income from the family fortune while preserving its capital eternally untouched. Vonnegut’s novel was published in 1965, and he names the sum of the Rosewater fortune as $87,472,033.61, extravagant wealth even today.

Eliot, a deeply empathetic soul, is granted very deep pockets to alleviate people’s suffering, and he tries to take the Foundation seriously. He runs a sleek, by-the-books organization, opening a suite of offices in the Empire State Building and giving away fourteen million dollars over six years to worthy causes like birth control clinics, cancer research, mental health services, and organizations that expose race prejudice [sic] and police brutality. Sixty years post-novel, Vonnegut’s list of causes is still relevant.

Under Eliot’s direction, the Foundation also supports the humanities and donates to museums and universities. Social convention demands that he find a wife, and he meets and marries Sylvia DuVrais Zetterling, a French heiress whose grandparents were a Rothschild and a Dupont, following another convention that wealth marries wealth. Eliot drinks too much, but no one worries because he seems able to handle his liquor.

Until suffering wobbles the world too hard, and Eliot has a breakdown. He goes AWOL on a cross country weeklong binge. He returns to Sylvia, only to take off again, and again, traveling as far off the beaten path as Clover Lick, West Virginia. The roots of his alcohol-fueled wandering are twofold: hateful awareness of the unscrupulous means by which the Rosewater wealth was acquired—what Eliot calls history—and the death of his mother when he was nineteen and handling the jib that swung and knocked her fatally into the sea.

Eliot just can’t pretend everything’s hunky dory when suffering flows in and out of him like air. He sees suffering. He feels it. He can’t escape it by running away. In his despair, he makes an executive decision: he will move the Foundation to his hometown of Rosewater, in Rosewater County, Indiana, and commit to a grass roots mission. As he says to his wife, Sylvia, who loathes provincial life, “I’m going to care about these people…. I’m going to love these discarded Americans, even though they’re useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.”

The idea is as old as Voltaire, as Thoreau. One must cultivate one’s own garden. The world is our own backyard. Eliot moves the Foundation to Rosewater and sets up office on Main Street in a “shotgun attic” above “a lunchroom and a liquor store,” a cluttered space where he runs a twenty-four-hotline to take calls from people in distress, including characters like Diana Moon Glampers, afraid of thunder storms, and Sherman Wesley Little, who Eliot talks off a suicide ledge, and Stella Wakely, an angry, unsheltered woman. Eliot responds to each individual’s suffering by listening, asking questions, and sometimes with a little cash. He keeps a ledger of the people who call, including their name, nature of their pain, and what the Foundation had done about it. Suffering is abundant in small town America. The ledger is almost full.

In making himself absolutely available to the suffering public, Eliot reveals the limited nature of time as love. His father, the Senator, complains that Eliot has ruined the meaning of the word “love” for anyone who loves a particular person for a particular reason, like the unique love a husband is supposed to have for his wife. Consider poor Sylvia. What does Eliot have left to give her when he belongs to the suffering world? Other characters think he’s crazy and call him “The Nut,” “The Saint,” “The Holy Roller,” and “John the Baptist.” Eliot is ordered to appear in an Indianapolis court room because a conniving lawyer seeks evidence to have him declared insane in order to remove him as the Foundation’s president.   

There’s no way Eliot can solve the problem of time. There’s only so much of him to go around. But, as Vonnegut writes, money is to humans as honey is to bees. Some resources are renewable, like life itself. While he is away in Indianapolis, fifty-seven women back in Rosewater name him as the father of their children, much to his surprise. This turn of events gives Eliot an idea for “settling everything instantly, beautifully, and fairly.” He instructs his lawyer to “draw up at once papers that will legally acknowledge that every child in Rosewater County said to be mine is mine…. Let their names be Rosewater from this moment on. And tell them their father loves them, no matter what they may turn out to be.” The immense wealth built on the backs of the suffering masses will be returned to their heirs. If children are the future, Eliot has influenced time.

His compassion, his angst, his integrity, his art, and creative thinking make Eliot a heroic character for me. He embodies a humanitarian ethos in an absurdly out-of-whack world where profit and greed cause suffering, not only in small town America, but on a global scale. Eliot turns his deep pockets inside out, and he gives time and attention to people in need. While the garden he tends is a small one, his great longing is a paradise for all.   

Work Cited: Vonnegut, Kurt. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. New York, Dell Publishing, 1965.