What is a man to do?

Submitted by Charlie on Tue, 10/05/2010 - 08:43
Vagrant and bourgeois society in Kromer's Waiting for Nothing.
Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothingis comprised of episodic accounts of the life of a vagrant in Depression-era America.  While Kromer’s novel does give us details about the day-to-day hardships of hobo life, it tells us something more.  Kromer’s depiction of life “on the bum” not only expresses the vagrants’ difficulty in finding food and “a flop” for the night, but also describes their lifestyle as the moral antithesis of bourgeois existence.  The same rules do not apply, and the bums have created their own social codes in reaction to their exclusion from those of acceptable society.
 
Vagabond existence in the Depression, according to Kromer, begins to reject the moral virtues of working we were discussing in class last week.  Kromer’s protagonist continually mentions that he used to look for work but eventually stopped; he gave up because he felt the inevitable continuation of his workless cycle.  He tries to get a job; there is no work; and they don’t want him anyway because he’s down-and-out.  Tom, the character, sees it as easier to give up and live on begging as opposed to willfully participating in a system that does not benefit him and the other unemployed men.
 
Tom has also given up on religion; prayer becomes a means of satiating the mission so that he can eat at night.  In his socio-economic position, he does not have the inclination to believe in the God of the bourgeois.  The concept does not seem to apply to his life.  “These stiffs are in this joint because they have no place to get in out of the cold, and this bastard asks them to stand up and tell what God has done for them.  I can tell him what God has done for them.  He hasn’t done a damn thing for them.  I don’t though.  It is warm in here.  It is cold outside (p. 39).”  Predestination and salvation are impossible to believe when your life is seen as living proof that you are not destined for success.
 
Perhaps at its core, the vagrant lifestyle, as portrayed by Kromer, undermines the individualism of American capitalist culture.  Things are shared (and hoarding for yourself only hurts the community), and no one stays in one place.  They cannot (and, secondly, refuse to) settle down, work hard, and remain content.  Their life is constant work and cannot be experienced in the same way as the bourgeois American dream.
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Individualism

Submitted by braininavat on Mon, 10/11/2010 - 15:42.
There's certainly something to be said about the communal mode of the vagrant lifestyle. I'd imagine it's tremendously difficult to be an individualist with so little to call one's own. Capitalism is theoretically an economic model meant to support social meritocracy, wherein those who work hard are rewarded greatly. Due to some of the basic facts of industrial and post-industrial society, however, this reward is exponential, not linear. Having more means being able to invest more, and consequently get more, and so on in a (theoretically) ever-upward spiral. However, if there are no bootstraps with which one might pull oneself up, it's obscenely difficult (if not impossible) to kick-start this upward motion. As such, the very poor must rely upon the resources of the community rather than their own private resources, which likely forces a shift in thinking for them. If the barriers for entry into the current society are too great, then they must create their own vagrant society. In my opinion, much of the problem would be eliminated if the poor were simply given longer bootstraps.