Homeless and Hopeful

Reading through Boxcar Bertha was a strenuous task for me. A fictional piece of writing masked as an autobiography about the romanticized life of a homeless women wasn’t extremely appealing. I also don’t see the appeal in making homeless life seem like a blessing. Bertha speaks of her childhood filled with pimps, poverty, prostitutes, adultery, and jail as normality. She describes that because it was all she knew, it was normal for her to witness it. Even so, and correct me if I’m wrong, seeing people sent to jail and scraping for any type of food is a scary time for a child. I found Bertha’s mostly happy life hard to believe. Yes, homeless people might have hope, but in the end their day to day struggles are more monotonous and hard to deal with than the “fun” homeless life Bertha depicts.

I found this piece even more difficult to comprehend when I got to the Afterword. It states, “This takes nothing away from the book as far as we’re concerned; it just makes it more worthwhile to know something more about the true author, who was a highly unusual and fascinating fellow”. Contrary to this statement, reading the afterword increased my distaste for the novel. Not only did I read a romanticized story of a female homeless person, but in the end I realize that it is written by a man. Although he had been homeless at different points of his life, he was never a female. I can imagine multitudes of difficulty in genuinely writing about the life of a female hobo if you are a male. Granted, he fictionalized some real life encounters and stories he had been told. Maybe the gap between reality and Reitman’s idea of reality is why being a female homeless person seems so exciting in this novel?

The second part of the quote above speaks of how Reitman was an unusual and fascinating man. If so, I wonder why he didn’t write an autobiography of himself? This also makes me question why he chose to write a novel about a female hobo instead of a male because he did choose to incorporate certain people and events in his life. Overall, I am confused as to what the point of this novel was. I personally am curious as to what he wanted the response to be from this novel. The end of the afterword suggests he wanted some sort of delusional enlightened hope for humanity. Maybe it’s in the way the story is presented, but my response was nowhere near a feeling of hope.