Caught in between very different worlds

     In On the Fritz: Tom Kromer's “Imaging of the Machine” Hugh Crawford sites the reasons behind the style of Kromer’s writing in Waiting for Nothing.  He compares the technological advancement with the shift to a more efficient, stripped down writing style characteristic of authors like Hemingway.  The contrast between Kromer’s early article the novel he later wrote brings places the author in a distinctive social position.  Though he is rejected by larger society he adopts the writing style of the machine.       The narrator of Waiting for Nothing seems to be caught in between worlds.  He is a product of the clash of his two lives once being college student with possessions and then as bum after he loses everything.  He has no political motivation and his goal is only surviving the situation he has found himself in.  As an intellectual he is not like the other bums and brings a distinctive prospective, a result of his former life to the one he has found himself in.