The Motif of Death in "Waiting for Nothing"

Tom Kromer’s book, Waiting for Nothing, is a thoroughly depressing read – from start to finish the reader is confronted with dismal scenes of sitting on park benches in the dead of winter, walking in the street in pouring rain, everything gray and gloomy and hopeless, with nothing in sight – waiting for nothing. One of the darkest elements of this book is the near-constant presence of death: this motif is one that runs throughout the story, in various forms but each time as dark as the last – perhaps especially due to the narrator’s nonchalance, an attitude that reveals a sort of weary expectation of death at any time. The narrator is not only waiting for nothing better in life, but he seems also to be waiting for the greatest “nothing” of all – the nothingness of death.

The narrator’s recurring encounters with death begins very early in the book, where in the very first chapter he finds a drunk who is sleeping with his eyes open – as if dead. These “stiff stiffs,” as Mary Obropta calls them in her article “Kromer’s ‘Waiting for Nothing,’” keep popping up every few pages. Obropta lists a handful of them: a suicide victim in the bathroom in chapter three; Mrs. Carter’s black-satin-draped, coffin-like apartment in chapter four; the narrator’s coat, bummed from an undertaker, in chapter seven; a stiff who dies waiting in the soup line in chapter eight; a stiff who nearly dies in a botched attempt to jump onto a moving train in chapter ten; a boy stiff in chapter eleven who tries the same feat and is crushed under the train’s wheels; a description of a “graveyard-like” hobo camp in the same chapter; and finally, in chapter twelve, an echo of the first chapter where a stiff dies in spasms in the mission bed next to the narrator. Even when there isn’t someone dying right in front of him, the narrator is always talking about needing to find a place to sleep, a bite to eat, a way to get warm; death is always near, and the narrator is always just managing to avoid it – only to have to face the prospect the next day, and try to avoid it again.

The last chapter leaves the narrator back in the same place as he was in chapter one: in a lice-infested mission flop, trying to get to sleep. We follow him through twelve chapters as he barely scrapes by every day, only to end with him in the exact same position as he was at the beginning of the book. It is a lesson in futility: as Obropta says, the narrator is “waiting and waiting,” over and over, with no end in sight and nothing to wait for.