英文文學與文化教學資料庫

Neighbour Rosicky

Text: Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. Vol. D. New York: Norton, 2003. 1122-42.
Introduction Rosicky Polly Doctor Ed

Introduction
	“Neighbour Rosicky” and “Double Birthday,” written in 1928 and 1929, respectively, are from Cather’s mature phase, after she had published such major novels as My Antonia (1916), The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Although they have different settings—“Rosicky” on the Nebraska prairie and “Double Birthday” (like “Paul’s Case”) in the city of Pittsburgh—both stories focus on the survival of family and memory in the face of modern forces (capitalism, industrialism) that would undermine them. Cather would later write that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” and her allegiance was to the earlier part. Like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, she recognized that the Great War and its aftermath represented a fundamental break in the Western tradition. Her answer to modern disillusionment was to portray characters trying to unify the pieces of their lives in various quiet ways: through love, storytelling, and openness to their enduring physical surroundings. In the process, Cather develops formally complex narratives that bridge different times, settings, and centers of consciousness. “Neighbour Rosicky” is the study of “a very simple man” who has lived a rather complex life (1131). The story’s concern is the meaning of this man’s life—for himself, for his wife and family, and, with special power, for his daughter-in-law Polly and for his doctor Ed Burleigh. Fundamentally, the story explores the different ways in which a life can have meaning, and the different ways in which that meaning can be communicated to others: verbally, through storytelling; and physically, through the body and the landscape. TOP

Rosicky
	As he faces the fact of his weak heart and the closeness of death, Rosicky, at age 65, reviews his life and thinks about his family’s future. Rosicky’s life has spanned four settings: his boyhood in rural Bohemia (through age 12), where he first grew attached to the land; his teenage years in London’s Cheapside, where he was wretchedly poor as a tailor’s apprentice (age 12-20); his young adulthood in New York, where he prospered (age 20-35); and his later life on the Nebraska prairie, where he finally got back to the land (age 35-65). In the story, these parts of his life appear in sections, in rather jumbled order: Section 3. Rosicky remembers New York, especially the Fourth of July when he decided to leave the city, at age 35; and he recalls his boyhood in Bohemia, through age 12. Section 5. On a Christmas Eve, his wife Mary tells a story about a crop failure on the Fourth of July in Nebraska, 15 years earlier, when Rosicky was 50; then Rosicky follows with a story about his last Christmas in London, when he was 20. Notice how significant moments over the years are connected by the holidays of Christmas and the Fourth of July. What significance do these holidays have for the meaning of Rosicky’s life? What are Rosicky’s attitudes toward money, freedom, and success? Another unifying theme in Rosicky’s experience, as he reviews it, is the advantages of rural life over city life: “In the country, if you had a mean neighbour, you could keep off his land and make him keep off yours. But in the city, all the foulness and misery and brutality of your neighbours was part of your life” (1139). A major feature of the American Dream, as commonly understood, is to own your own house and land. What is Cather suggesting here about the importance of land to happiness in American life? Is Rosicky a good neighbor? How is he different from his neighbors in Nebraska? TOP

Polly
	Rosicky has a special desire to communicate with his daughter-in-law Polly, the wife of his oldest son Rudolph. Polly feels rather out of place in the Rosicky family. She is an “American” rather than a Bohemian—that is, she is a member of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture in the U.S., not an immigrant like the Rosickys. Moreover, she comes from the town, not the country. Rosicky tries to express to Polly his feelings for the land, in hopes that she and Rudolph won’t quit the prairie for the city. It is for Polly’s benefit that he tells, in English, the story of his unhappy years in London—and the launching of his American life. The immigrant Rosicky is telling the “American” Polly the story of his personal American success. The climax of “Neighbour Rosicky” is the scene where, after Rosicky has suffered a heart attack, Polly rescues him and nurses him, calling him “Father” for the first time. Holding his hand, she suddenly feels “that nobody in the world, not her mother, not Rudolph, or anyone really loved her as much as old Rosicky did.” The experience is for her an “awakening”: “It seemed to her that she had never learned so much about life as from old Rosicky’s hand. It brought her to herself; it communicated some direct and untranslatable message” (1141). In contrast to the London story, which is “translated” from his native language, this communication between Rosicky and Polly is physical and immediate, suggesting another level at which meaning can flow between people. His “warm, broad, flexible brown hand” contains the story of his life as a tailor, farmer, husband, and father. One approach to “Neighbour Rosicky” is to examine references to Rosicky’s hand. How do the actions of Rosicky’s hand, throughout his life, represent his personality and his values? TOP

Doctor Ed
	“Neighbour Rosicky” is framed by the consciousness of Ed Burleigh, the young doctor who diagnoses Rosicky’s heart problem at the beginning and visits his grave at the end. Obviously, the doctor has not succeeded in preserving Rosicky’s life, but it is from the doctor’s perspective that Rosicky’s life achieves its final synthesis in the line: “Rosicky’s life seemed to him complete and beautiful” (1142). Who is Doctor Ed? On one level, he is a stand-in for Cather herself, the educated outside observer who oversees the lives of these characters. (As a child, Cather liked to play at being a doctor.) He also strikes a chord with any reader who might not possess the completeness of Rosicky’s life but can somehow share in it. How does Doctor Ed connect with Rosicky’s experience? In the end he does it not through stories or through physical touch, as his family does, but through the landscape. When he drives to the graveyard where Rosicky is buried, next to the Rosicky farm, Doctor Ed feels the power of the man’s life: “A sudden hush had fallen on his soul. Everything here seemed strangely moving and significant, through signifying what, he did not know” (1142). Here Doctor Ed feels something like the “untranslatable message” that Polly felt in Rosicky’s hand. He feels the fulfillment of a life of a man “who had helped to do the work of great cities and had always longed for the open country and had got to it at last” (1142). This scene reflects the earlier scene, in section 2, where Rosicky himself observes the graveyard from the same spot, in a snowstorm, and feels the attraction of a place where “[a] man could lie down in the long grass an see the complete arch of the sky above him” (1127). (Readers familiar with Robert Frost’s famous poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” [1923] might recognize the similarity between Rosicky’s situation in section 2 and that of Frost’s persona, who also contemplates death but presses back into life; Cather very probably has the poem in mind.) Mysteriously, by sharing the same viewpoint as Rosicky, Doctor Ed is able to internalize Rosicky’s experience. In the end, the land is not only a space for dividing neighbors but also uniting neighbors, even the living and the dead.
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Polly

Polly

Doctor Ed