8. Waiting for Nothing

Waiting for nothing by Tom Kromer is, as the title more or less implies, a very depressing little book. Life is incredibly uncomfortable for Kromer and for nearly everyone he comes across on his travels. The scenes in the book are always overcast, rainy, gloomy, and listless, with no end in sight. The theme of the book seems to simply be that we are all ‘suckers,’ standing around waiting for nothing, because in the end there is nothing to wait for but death, and that is the only real escape from the drudgery and discomfort of life anyway.
 
Waiting for nothing is constructed as a first person narrative, in which Kramer depicts, through a series of compelling episodes the struggle of the average working ‘stiff.’ Kramer also raises a wide range of ethical questions through his depiction of everything from robbery to suicide as Mary Obropta points our in her piece, Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing. (source) In the end, the book depicts men in a very animalistic light, struggling to survive however they can and being by their poverty, striped of their humanity. At many points in the book Kromer himself is forced into acts of desperation, perhaps most notably when he prostitutes himself in order to maintain the basic necessities of life.
 
Moreover, Kromer puts a very interesting spin on death in the context of survival. Just about every action taken in the book is done so in order to preserve life, with the one notable exception of the suicide in chapter six.  Life in the book is about animalistic survival. Kromer in essence portrays the constant search for food, shelter, and  warmth, as all being to preserving one’s life and to make it just one more day or one more night. At the same time however, death is presented as the only escape, as Kromer says following the suicide of the man in the shelter “After a guy bumps himself off, he don’t have any more troubles. Everything is all right with him.” (Page 42) Another such example of this is the man who dies in the soup line, his death being presented as relief from the hardship and waiting of life, as if another register opened up at the supper market and he just happened to be the first to get in line. This all works to provoke a sort of existential crisis. Why do the ‘stiffs’ in the book keep scrapping along instead of just ending it? Kromer doesn’t seem to give the typical explanation of  hope and religious obligation. Instead Kromer, presents a Darwinian logic, that it is simply our nature to survive at nearly any cost, regardless of what we our surviving for.

Want to live with a moral obligation every time we pass a bum on the street, a wallet stuffed with cash and credit cards safely in our pocket?
Read Tom Kromer’s Waiting For Nothing.

No, Tom ain’t homeless because he does not want to work. Neither is he because he is an alcoholic or a drug addict. His mind and heart seem in the right place, and believe me, he wouldn’t hurt you either.

He just can’t make ends meet. Yes, in the United States of America.
 
In the United States of America that was built on a promise: The promise of an opportunity to live without limitation, create one’s own destiny. The Indians were ousted, a country premised on freedom was built: “A frontier land where families had their own acres, own gun, own conscience,” in the words of New York Times columnist, Anand Giriharadas. 

Yet, the cold iron benches, the pouring rain, the filth and the constant hunger that accompanies our protagonist, forcing Kromer to literally wait for nothing and take comfort in the emptiness and morbidity of it all, run parallel to what our subconscious has been conditioned to think.
When else, even amidst the media blitz our lives occur, have we experienced such travesty of the human life. For example, when the man in the missionpops himself with a gun, the narrator writes, “After a guy bumps himself off, he doesn’t have any more troubles. Everything is all right with him” (42) Death seems a relief; a pleasant aberration after the wallows of what is life for Kromer and his ilk.

No wonder this book is hard to find. Even Google, a crusader of free information, doesn’t carry it in its online catalogue. I wonder why.  

The aspect I found most eye-catching in Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing was his use of language; not only in the context of the pieces we have been reading thus far, but also in its possible interpretations concerning its authenticity. His usage of the appropriate “lingo” of his subjects, namely the train-riding hoboes and the various human manifestations of the conditions of the Great Depression he encounters throughout the short episodic chapters, was not particularly surprising. As we have seen in The Grapes of Wrath and other selections from this time period, the writer/documenter, assumingly for the sake of poignancy and realism, often incorporates terms and speech styles representative of the way people “really” expressed themselves. However, we have – as an offshoot of this common feature – engaged in a discourse concerning the accuracy and decency of such a representation. There is always a rather stark contrast between the writing style of the documenter and the supposed speaking style of those being documented. Thus an inherent imbalance is created that can either be viewed as a literary craft, juxtaposing romantic jargon with clean prose, or as a somewhat insulting dichotomy between the down-and-out farming or hitchhiking folks and the educated writer trying to make a profit off his delicate retelling of stories he will never truly understand.

The interesting thing with Kromer is, however, that he is playing the part both of the documenter and the documented, as he himself is hopping the trains and begging on the streets for a cigarette. He is writing about people in the soup lines, but only as the person standing right behind them, waiting his turn. He writes of men sleeping in the lice-infested mission bunks, but only as the person sleeping in the bunk next to them. The jargon he conveys through his dialogue (“What’s he wanna bump hisself off fer? There ain’t nothin’ to bump yerself off fer…” 41) is carried fluidly throughout his narrative (We are only a couple of hungry stiffs, and we are on the make for a beef stew… 79). Through this narrative style he creates a true sense of authenticity.

But how authentic is it? The piece is full of moments where he hesitates in acting like a “true” bum, where his sense of dignity, perhaps even superiority over the other “stiffs” rings clear. We know that he came into this lifestyle after three years of college (where he did a research project that concluded being a bum essentially implied laziness and a desire for easy money); he seems therefore to be floating in this weird limbo that fuses the lifestyle of a homeless man with the attitude and pride of a middle-class citizen. And regardless of the authentic atmosphere created by his writing, we must for a moment wake from its spell and question whether or not the authenticity in itself is merely a crafted ploy to draw an audience.

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.

Tom Kromer’s Waiting For Nothing provides an interesting contrast to the other narratives we have encountered. We have come across both bleak and uplifting approaches to the travel narratives of Depression-era America, but Kromer offers up a semi-autobiographical account that does not romanticize the hobo’s experience in the way that the other narratives have made a point to do(Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Wild’s Double-Crossing America, Guthrie’s Bound For Glory). Instead, Kromer details the struggle of a stiff to merely survive on a daily basis, from meal to meal, and from flop to flop, with no sort of goal or hope for the future. He describes an almost appocolyptic view of the country and of human nature in the face of crises. As the title suggests, he is “Waiting For Nothing”. He does not seem to have any sort of hopeful view for his future or the future of the country. Kromer’s book is a much grittier, and sobering view of the life of the hobo in the 1930s, than we have previously encountered.
 
The opening Chapter illustrates a man pushed to the margins of his own notions of right and wrong, struggling with his own middle class morals, in the face of the extreme necessity to survive. The stiff contemplates and plans to mug a stranger on the street with a stick to rob him for money to eat. Ultimately, he is unable to abandon his morals to go through with the attack, and is ashamed that he was considering doing so, and that he did not have the courage to do what it takes to survive, until the stranger angrily insults him for asking for money to get something to eat. It is clear that such sacrifices of his morality have taken a toll on his sense of identity when he writes, “I am starved, too, and I ought to starve. A guy without enough guts to get himself a feed ought to starve.”(P. 6) As many Americans were forced out of their homes it seems that they shed a part of their identity when they left their environment, such as when Momma Joad burns her families treasured documents in The Grapes of Wrath. His stark description of himself staring at the well to do nibbling at expensive chickens while he nearly starves to death on the other side of the window is one of the most graphic images illustrating the failure of capitalism, presented in the pieces we have read.
 

I loved Waiting for Nothing, although I couldn’t exactly tell you why. It was powerful, and it changed me as I read it. At one point (the end of chapter 4, I think) I was actually talking to the book. Swearing at it. That is not normal for me.

Maybe it was Tom Kromer’s narration.  It was so strong, so consistent. And his “tough guy” voice contrasted so perfectly, so horribly, with his desperation. Unlike Grapes of Wrath, Kromer didn’t seem to be calling for pity. No, he was demanding humanity. How could anyone just sit and watch a man starve, shrivel, and die? There was something in his portrayals of the rich folks that was at once intensely realistic and cartoonish. It reminded me of how we actually see people who we don’t know intimately: as “others”, just caricatures of who they really are. In this way Kromer used typical flat characters to create a sort of hyper- realism.  The narrator could not know (and probably did not care) what anyone else was thinking or feeling. His moments of sympathy are moving, but still somehow removed. It ties in perfectly with Tom’s lack of basic human necessities. It also explains why a good, honest man might, in hard times, turn immoral. Tom and the novice prostitute Yvonne talk about it in her apartment:
“ ‘You look at things different when you have not eaten for two days,’ I say. ‘I know I have gone that long myself. I have stolen. I have done worse than steal when I have gone that long.’
 ‘Yes, you look at things different,’ she says. ‘What is supposed to be wrong does not look wrong when the only right things looks like something to eat…’ “ (84).

Tom Kromer also used shock to his advantage. The fourth chapter- the chapter that was edited out in its first publication in the U.K- actually left me gaping. To compare it again to The Grapes of Wrath, it reminded me of the last scene when Rose of Sharon nurses the starving migrant worker. Both scenes deal with the theme of personal violation for preservation. However, the meaning is changed entirely by the fact that Rose of Sharon was acting on someone else’s behalf, and Tom was only working to save himself. Altruism makes the scene in Grapes of Wrath is nearly hopeful. The scene in Waiting for Nothing is just desperate. “You can always depend on a stiff having to pay for what he gets. I pull off my clothes and crawl into bed” (53).

In my opinion, the scene in Waiting for Nothing is much stronger. 

Waiting for Nothing could not be a better name for Tom Kromer’s helpless, hopeless depiction of 1930’s Depression America.  Kromer’s journey taking him across the country, spoke volumes about the struggling masses exposing – what Stephen Colbert would say – the ‘truthiness’ of their plight and the adherence to the facts many in our class have been waiting for. I would argue, however, that the reason so few have ever even heard of such a great work, is because of that very ‘truthiness’ fact. The Steinbeck’s and Guthrie’s of the world made their mark because they brought the poor to the masses, something Kromer does not accomplish for most.

In telling his tales of “Stiffs” getting in fights, disrespecting the police, and constantly waiting for their next meal, Kromer is able to artfully show his readers what is at stake in Depression United States. Lives. Many of them.  Families of them. Charity is hard to come by, and hunger is life’s only constant. Sound familiar? If so, that may be because we read depression Grapes of Wrath in middle school, seen glimpses of depression in pictures from Dorothea Lange, heard depression from musicians like Woody Guthrie, and maybe even saw it by enjoying the cinematic hit, Oh Brother Where Art Thou? Though well written and most true to events that took place on the ground, Kromer’s Waiting For Nothing fails to show much more than blanketed depravity, and therefore, has garnered far less exposure than others in his field. After all, depression is depressing and unless someone is giving it to you in visual, harmonic, or literary beauty, you just don’t want to hear about it.

Ostensibly, there is need for more cohesion of thought when producing a travel novel. What succeeds in Kromer’s depiction of Depression-era United States lies in the absoluteness of his cause: to find out what it is truly like to have no money, no work, and no hope. What lacks in his dozen-or-so chapters is a sense of direction or even one of progress. This is the obvious point of Kromer’s written word as no self-respecting book would name itself, Waiting for Nothing, and end up waiting for something. Unfortunately, this does not do authors like Tom Kromer very well, as the proliferation of their very important thoughts and experiences never make it as far as the Hollywooded-up bombshells like Grapes.

What is more important to stenographers of the Depression –Fidelity to the facts (something even Kromer admits failing to wholly do), or creating a narrative for storytelling attractiveness? I would argue, men and women like Steinbeck and Lange, though less truthful, are able to get more of their message across to more people and over more generations than the likes of Kromer for their storytelling abilities. The mind of a Stiff is vital to our conception of unemployed men of the time, but how does this depiction help if a 21 year old NYU student has never even heard of your name? Works like Waiting for Nothing hold exceptional places in our travel discourse, but couldn’t they affect so many more if they held exceptional places in our conventional literary discourse as well?

For the duration of Waiting For Nothing, Tom Kromer is a desperate man. Well, not the entire duration, I guess. As soon as he gets his hand on enough money for a hot meal, everything is just peaches for him. The idea of one's entire thought process for the day depending on something as trivial as a handful of change is foreign to most, but so common among the chronically unemployed characters we've seen. It makes sense of course: if someone's aspirations in life include a steady job, a healthy family, a comfortable house in the suburbs, and quality public schools, their dreams won't be dashed and reassured several times daily. But for Kromer, who gets so hungry that he can think about nothing but food all day, his dreams are narrowed to a mere meal just to keep him alive, a meal which may or may not arrive with each new day.
 
As a result, everything is measured in whether it helps or hinders his progress toward some food or, in other cases, decent rest. Outside is cold and wet. Inside is warm and dry. Hunger is wrong. Generous bakers are good. A stingy butcher is bad. Mission stiffs are bastards. Everyone who walks by a beggar is an enemy. Everyone who gives a bit of change is a saint. Kromer paints each person he encounters as a one-dimensional character because that’s the only way he can see them. That’s the only way his desperation will allow. His travels bring him into contact with a wide variety of people, all quickly organized into two opposing groups. Of course, going with the anti-authority theme we’ve seen all semester, every cop is a bastard in Kromer’s mind.
 
Though it is a very simple way of seeing things, Kromer is no different than anyone else focused on a task, whether it be choosing a taxi over a bus to get somewhere faster, picking the shorter line over the longer line at the grocery store, or picking the freshest piece of fruit. But while many people have the luxury of focusing on unessential pleasures and diversions, Kromer’s mind must stay focused on utilitarian endeavors throughout his life as a penniless traveler.

“The “Stiff” idiom is, of course, authentic,” says at the end of his book and autobiography Waiting for Nothing (Kromer, 259). I really appreciated his honestly in the last part of the novel, in the chapter entitled “Autobiography.”  In light of last week’s investigation into the autobiographical nature (or not-so-autobiographical nature) of the texts and picture/text books, it is refreshing to read an author who is very honest about how truthful and reflective his writings are. He doesn’t lie about the writing: “save for four or five incidents, it is strictly autobiographical. Some of the events portrayed did not occur in the same sequence as I gave them, for I have juggled them in order to better develop the story” (Kromer, 259).
 
Considering the author and photographers last week had a blatant disregard for telling their audiences that their information was semi-fictional, and not totally biographical or observational of what they had seen out on the road while they were “on the bum” or pretending to be on the bum in order to capture the lives of those who really were “Stiffs.”
 
The term “Stiff,” and Kromer’s mention of it at the end of the “Autobiography” chapter intrigued me. I was wondering if he had somehow redefined the word, or just helped bring the term into popular speech and language.  Did he create the idiom in literature from what he heard as the popular vernacular, and make this statement as a way of showing his authenticity and that he really, and truly wrote this while on the bum, even though he is honest about his humble beginnings and how he worked hard to educate himself: “parts of the book were scrawled on…papers in box cars, margins of religious tracts in a hundred missions, jail, one prison, railroad sand-houses, flop-houses, and on a index fingers on a honest-to-God typewriter” (259).
 
I looked up the word stiff. As a noun it means firstly, “corpse.” The next definition is “a tramp, bum [or] a member of the working class; especially: a blue-collar worker.” Thirdly it could also mean “a stodgy or excessively decorous person: flop, failure.” (source). From all the various times that the twenty-eight year old Kromer wrote about various “Stiffs” in his recollections of his travels, you can see that he understands the various uses of the word “Stiff” and really wanted to bring the colloquial language into a novel that was not fully academic but not fully without academic information.
 
The truthfulness of Kromer’s stories, language, and writing and even statements about his writing makes me really respect him. He was from “working people” in coal mining towns. He worked hard “in glass factories and proofread on newspapers at nights while going through three years of college” (257). He did not go on the bum just to document the plight of those struggling like the authors of last week, he went on the bum because he needed to head “out for Kansas to make the wheat harvest” (258). I thoroughly enjoyed the down to earth, yet intelligent comments of life on the road that Kromer discusses in Waiting for Nothing.

Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer is an account by the author of time he spent among the indigent, riding the rails and learning of life among the road. It is told in a brusque, repetitive, simple style which attempts, at its best, to conjure up an understanding of the harsh reality of the road. He seems to be attempting to paint a somewhat sympathetic portrait of the “Poverty Gypsies” of the depression. He makes some attempt to draw on the tribal notions we’ve discussed concerning the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath. He attempts to instill in the reader the notion that these are a “people” a group bound together, with rules if not laws and traditions if not rituals.

 

But what was inescapable to me in his attempt to paint it this way was how constricted and contorted that interpretation seemed to be. The hobo world he depicts is, first of all, overwhelmingly male. The “stiffs,” as he refers to those who live the lifestyle he has adopted, are all men. If women or children show up they are some “stiff”’s wife or child. And then they are often seen as baggage, a liability that it is nonetheless the duty of the stiffs to protect.

 

This combined with the language, which at its best captures the brutal spirit of the road but at its worst sounds like a childish tough-guy put-on, put me more in the mind of an American male power-fantasy.

 

American men are supposed to be strong and self-sufficient. We are the inheritors of the wild west, and of the Revolutionary War. Our ancestors were man enough to know when they were being controlled and strike out in their own way. Now, as any society gets on in years and builds big enough social systems, there are going to be those men who are, in fact, wholly dependent on those systems. While a cushy middle-class life may seem like paradise to someone who has slaved for their daily bread, men raised that way but told they need to be tough and self-sufficient like cowboys often have a certain amount of insecurity about their manliness.

 

And then Poverty can take on new dimensions to them. Rather than simply being a way to live, poverty becomes symbolic. It becomes a symbol of manly self-sufficiency, if a man can live on only scraps and beans, he is truly a man. Throughout the twentieth century we’ve seen examples of middle-class men attempting to put on poverty as an attempt to authenticate themselves and their masculinity. From the proletarian posturing of the sixties and seventies to adopting the flannel shirts and ripped jeans of the white working class during the grunge era of the early nineties to the gangster-rap aesthetic of the early 2000s, American men seek to associate themselves with the downtrodden as a way of asserting their own masculinity.

 

This, I would assert, is largely what Kromer is displaying in Waiting for Nothing. Obviously there’s some honest assessment of a way of life, but it’s wrapped up in a macho posture that honestly gets in the way of his story. The grunting caveman-language of the narration is often superfluously simplistic and repetitive, attempting to use the repetition to reinforce the brutality of the world, but largely succeeding only in establishing Kromer as a chest-beating alpha male.

Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing was a stark contrast to the travel literature we have been reading so far. While there has certainly been struggle (Grapes of Wrath) there has always been a sense of hopefulness, of light at the end of the tunnel, or at least some kind of eventual goal. Kromer’s novel/autobiography (because, which is it really?) has no end point, in fact, the story barely even follows a linear narrative, unconstrained by time, or any other typical story telling technique. This idea of hopelessness without any brightness at all taps into our human emotions but breaks the norms that storytellers – like Hollywood – use to keep us coming back for more. Kromer’s book is not something you want to read over and over again.
 
What was particularly interesting to me was the description of CH 4 in the Afterword and what it meant, socially, for them to remove the chapter due to its sexual tones. The almost shamelessness with which Kromer describes his actions to the reader could be shocking to the audiences of this book and therefore, they emitted it, because it undermined the rest of the story. This chapter, however I think is the most telling. As we explore ideas of travel and the entire uprooting of a person, their identity comes into question.
 
To me, Kromer’s book boiled down to what a human truly is. When all categories of identity are sloshed away (homosexual, heterosexual, rich poor, etc) there is jut basic humanity left, and the way that aligns you with others. He has to deal with fight or flight in the chapter about the fight in the box car, and the very first chapter when he almost hurts a man, and the chapter when he almost robs a bank – he never fought unless he had to, otherwise he ran. As the Afterword mentions as well, Kromer embodies Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This principle outlines that all of the physiological needs (breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, etc) need to be fulfilled before the other needs can be met, and as we climb the pyramid, we become more fulfilled human beings. Kromer fluctuates throughout his tale, particularly with the Yvonne, the young prostitute. It is the most hopeful moment that readers see, because it is his connection to another human being, at least, for now, until his physiological needs are no longer met.
 

In terms of travel, this idea of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is so crucial because it brings in to question, what can humans truly survive on? Do the travelers and hobos of the 1930s live at the base of the pyramid? Can they find happiness there? How does this compare to Boxcar Bertha who felt her self-actualization (or claimed to) by her lack of responsibility and tired down-ness?
 
I think this question persists in travel today as well, as our generation strives to leave college and go backpacking for a year, what satisfaction are we looking for? Is it the mentality of the 1930s that we strive for, where we only need the very base level of the pyramid, or is it a façade where we are actually searching for the hardest level to achieve – self actualization? 

Tom Kromer’s “Waiting for Nothing” is reminiscent of Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath”, told in vignettes, but instead of chronicling one families trial and tribulations, focuses on one man’s struggles.  Most chapters begin with Tom’s hunger and then later focus on how he will go about finding some sort of sustenance and shelter.  He is quite descriptive in the things that he eats, unlike in “Grapes of Wrath”.  He describes how he makes his stew and how he goes about purchasing the ingredients.  He describes what it feels like to sleep on a bench during a cold night – sheltered by an old newspaper except for the air coming from below through the cracks in the bench.  He does whatever he must in order to find food and a place to sleep, and even one time goes home with a wealthy transsexual man.  The reader can understand Tom’s plight through the details provided, but aren’t necessarily compelled to pity Tom, as he doesn’t seem to dramatize in his narration as Steinbeck often does.  Tom struggles day after day, but his story is of him getting by.  He comments on the difficulties that families face, such as the families waiting in the soup lines or living in the garbage jungle, but he moves about on his own, uninhibited, simply getting by. 

There are many intriguing stories in his journey, however.  I was most intrigued by the ways in which Tom and his fellow ‘stiffs’ tug on the heart strings of others.  In the first chapter a man gives Tom a full steak dinner just to make himself look good to the other customers.  As Tom is finishing his dinner, another man comes up to him and gives him enough money for a ‘flop’ that night.  Tom comments on the ways in which these men deal out their charity, the first quite publicly and the second without need for recognition.  Kromer doesn’t seem to necessarily look down upon the first man, but certainly respects the second more. This sort of distinction between the ways in which people gave charity is interesting. Another chapter describes the way in which ‘stiffs’ would act out a scene to tug at the heart strings of women waiting for a bus.  They would purchase a donut only to leave it on the curb in sight of these women, and later act pathetic when they pick it up and eat it, earning over $2 with this scam.  Scam or not though, these men (and they seem to be mostly men in Tom’s story) are truly hungry.  The story turns from charity in a well-lit town, to death from starvation in a ‘flop’ at the end (not to mention the horrifying image of a bed swarming with lice).  But no matter what, Tom tells an intriguing and seemingly honest tale of living day-to-day in search of “three hots and a flop”.

After reading the novel and the accompanying article my Mary Obropta, I thought I would do a blog about what the title “Waiting for Nothing” means.   Obropta develops the idea in her article that this novel is a religious testimony of sorts.  It details his trials and temptations, and as the author points out the lord’s name is mentioned quite a bit even it is a swear every time.  Perhaps more interesting is the author’s interpretation of the repetitive death symbols in Waiting for Nothing.  She interprets it as the starkness of reality, an indication that death is death and there is no heaven.  The essay concludes with her final point: the book goes nowhere, “there is no progression, there is no salvation”.  Overall, I think Obropta develops and proves her argument that Waiting for Nothing has a number of similarities to religious texts.

I therefore accept her argument as a premise for discussion of the title.  Waiting for Nothing has a number of religious connotations.  First, there is the theme of deliverance.  At the second coming, when the world is self-destructing, Christ will come again to save the world.  Another example is the deliverance of the Jews from Egypt, led by Moses.   The word “nothing” suggests there is no more belief in this concept of deliverance, and the word “waiting” means he must have once believed in this concept or he wouldn’t have tried waiting.

Kromer’s anger at the Church (and God?) is pointed out by Obropta who notes that “many of the most dismal and harrowing scenes took place in missions”.  There seems to be a constant theme throughout the literature we have read where travelers turn to the church and are faced with a closed door.   The Joads always turn to the preacher but he always says he can’t help them, although he usually gives it a shot.  Woody knocks at the Catholic Church looking for a meal and is turned away by the priest.

Waiting for Nothing follows a starving man through a series of first person vignettes, depicting the brutal conditions of the Great Depression. The character goes through a great many ups and downs, from having a stranger buy him a steak to being beaten by police, from a failed bank robbery to sharing coconut pie with a friend. He even gives himself to a wealthy transsexual in return for some temporary relief from the harshness of living on the street.  Throughout everything, he is constantly hungry—searching for his next meal. It is because of this drive that he turns to the church.
 
There are certain parallels to be drawn between the “mission stiffs” and the man in the grey suit who first buys a steak dinner for the main character. The man in the grey suit buys the steak but announces it loudly enough for the rest of the restaurant to overhear his magnanimity. The mission seems to serve a similar purpose—that of stroking the egos of those who are giving the aide. The food serves as a trap, and they make the starving men sit through extensive sermons and conversion attempts, though only the newly poor apparently fall for the tricks. As soon as one man makes a snide remark, the pastor brands him as an agent of the devil and casts him out into the cold—hardly turning the other cheek.
 
In the climax of the story, the mission workers try to turn a blind eye to a dying man, and when the main character tries to rouse them, he is similarly greeted with threats of expulsion. Not to be deterred, he does the right thing and insists on summoning medical care, but the victory is ultimately hollow as the doctors pronounce the dying man’s case hopeless, and they do nothing more than load him onto a stretcher. This scene plays out just after the main character proclaims his disbelief in a higher power, reasoning, “If there is a God, why is such as this? What have these men done that they live like rats in a garbage heap? Why does He make them live like rats in a garbage heap?”
 
The world in which this man exists is hungry, bleak, and hollow, but he remains steadfast and fatalistic. As he put it, “all [a man] can do is try to keep his belly full of enough slop so that he won’t rattle when he breathes.” So much for salvation.

Published in 1935, Waiting for Nothing was Tom Kromer’s only novel. The book is a semi-autobiographical tale that depicts a homeless man as he travels throughout America during the Great Depression. What is remarkable about Kromer’s work is the rawness of life that it is able to capture. The story is blunt and devastating. In order to create a more demoralizing sentiment, Tom Kromer uses antireligious dialect and themes that reinforces a potent message of no salvation for society.
 
Throughout Waiting for Nothing, Kromer expresses antireligious sentiments by taking the lord’s name in vain. Kromer quickly establishes this theme by using “God” and “Jesus” repeatedly in different variations throughout the novel. In the opening paragraphs Kromer writes, “Christ, I have lost my nerve” (Kromer 6). This language was seldom used in publications prior to this but often used by individuals in real life. Thus, authenticity was added to the novel.
 
Similar to most biblical stories, Kromer faces strong temptations during his journey across America. However, unlike other religious scriptures, the hero in Waiting for Nothing does not always appear as a morally righteous person. Throughout his journey, Kromer is tempted to strike people on the head, rob a bank, sleep with a prostitute, become a prostitute, steal train rides and commit suicide. Ultimately, temptation is not always something that he cannot always resist.
 
Kromer also establishes his anti-religious sentiments by incorporating Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution. Waiting for Nothing is written less than ten years after the Scopes Trial. According to Mary Obrota,“The animal imagery Kromer uses throughout his novel emphasizes a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest.”’ Thus, Kromer describes the homeless as rats. This is an apt analogy because like rats, the homeless are considered to be grotesque. They are scavengers that exist at the bottom of society, and they live off the remains of others.
 
By incorporating a traumatic ending, Kromer is able to fulfill his theme of a society without hope and a world without God. From the beginning to the end of the story, Waiting for Nothing features several dead bodies that are symbolic of a lack of survival in his vicious world. The only jobs for the homeless is are to persevere in a dehumanizing society. The novel features little to no progression, as the main character does not evolve during the story. Furthermore, the title strongly evokes the idea of no afterlife. As even in the end, there is nothing.