a dead man's account of his life

risking a lot for a ride

Kromer writes in the autobiography section of Waiting for Nothing that he began his days as a "stiff" catching rides on trains because it "got me where I wanted to go, which was never more definite than 'east' or 'west.'" Without any money, shelter or hope for a better future, Tom Kromer writes about the everydays in that era that were filled with people who are caught in dire circumstances with no way out. He writes, "Where are they going? I do not know. They do not know. He hunts for work, and he is a damn fool. There is no work. He cannot leave his wife and kids to starve to death alone, so he brings them with him. Now he can watch them starve to death. What can he do? Nothing but what he is doing." Kromer's clear, straight-to-the-point writing style was intriguing to read. It is incredibly personal and revealing but his words are neutral in terms of evoking emotion, the events are described as I imagine they actually happened. I can't say that 'detached' is the right word for describing Tom Kromer's semi-autographical novel although I do think it is one aspect of his writing that struck me the most. The novel is written from a perspective of a man who has passed this life and can reflect back and recount his experiences without getting caught up in the emotional aspect. He can write about the shameful, humiliating things that he has endured to survive without hesitation it seems because this is a man with nothing to lose.

The possibility of death no longer seems to be a mystery to the narrator, Kromer writes of it repeatedly and so nonchalantly its almost as if the experiences that he has gone through have been so terrible that death no longer seems to be a frightening thought but rather expected. Kromer describes the stiffs as though they are already dead, "the tombstones are men. The epitaphs are chiseled in sunken shadows on their cheeks" (Waiting For Nothing, ch. 10). Perhaps due to this, many of the stiffs are not given names. It does not matter because they are all fated to die soon, the narrator does not identify individuals much by their names but their identity is created more in terms of physical descriptions. Death is something too common to ignore, and on the other hand, too common to get caught up by the death of others. In Mary Obropta's analysis of Kromer's Waiting For Nothing, she writes that "chooses to reinforce the horror of death" through his illustrations of the death he encounters. However, I think that through the repetition, he is not emphasizing the horror of death but how unavoidable it was, and ultimately making death seem as the common, ordinary thing that it was in the time of the depression for a wanderer. His novel is stripped of any elaboration, romanticism of the hobo's life, and tells the good and the bad as simply as it happened. He wrote in the autobiography that he had no hope of getting Waiting for Nothing published, he "wrote it as he felt it" and I think that sentiment permeates throughout. By the end of the novel, nothing has changed really. There is no more hope than there was in the beginning, and without hope for a better future, what do you wait for?