Much of “Neighbour Rosicky” is about how living a meaningful life is connected to being generous and being surrounded by people who are generous in return. Rosicky is a happy person because his family is kind, loving, and supportive of one another. All of his children are polite and generous, and they genuinely enjoy spending time as a family. In addition, his wife Mary is a warm and pleasant person, and she and Rosicky enjoy a happy marriage. Rosicky partially sought out his present life of working for himself on a rural farm because he never wanted to be forced into stinginess or unkindness; he wants to be able to give to others and never take money from people who are struggling. In this way, a major reason for his happiness is his ability to give to his community and also provide his family with an enjoyable and fulfilling life. As such, the story suggests that true, lasting happiness isn’t found in selfish pursuits—rather, it comes from being kind and generous to other people.
Rosicky has cultivated a value system for his wife and children that’s based on kindness, and his family’s love and warmth make him happy in return. Doctor Burleigh, an outsider to the Rosickys, praises their family and even feels at home when with them, telling Rosicky that he is “one of the few men […] who has a family he can get some comfort out of.” Rosicky has cultivated an environment in which his children and wife are genuinely happy, in a way that is visible to other people. And, in turn, Rosicky is able to “get some comfort out of” his family, something that Burleigh suggests other men aren’t able to do.
Doctor Burleigh also points out that all the Rosicky sons have “good manners” and lack the self-consciousness that he finds typical of adolescent boys. The way the Rosickys have raised their children sticks out (in a positive way) from their neighbors. Burleigh is also very fond of Mrs. Rosicky. He thinks that Mary Rosicky’s warm, caring nature is unique among other wives in town. Her demeanor stands out to Burleigh as indicative of the loving home environment Rosicky has built, and Mary Rosicky credits their happy home to her husband’s personality. She remembers him playing naked in the water tank with his children on a hot summer day. While this is behavior is unconventional for the time, Mary knows that Rosicky’s playfulness and kindness is what has made their home’s atmosphere feel so free and loving.
Indeed, although the Rosickys aren’t the richest or most successful family in town, they do seem to be the happiest. Burleigh compares the Rosickys to other nearby families, including the Marshalls. The Marshalls have an extremely profitable farm and a great deal of expensive, high-tech machinery, but Burleigh is quick to note that they also possess “no comfort whatsoever.” Their financial success and abundance have not made them happier people, and Burleigh dislikes the environment of their home so much that he is quick to leave there as soon as he can. While Doctor Burleigh and Rosicky’s son, Rudolph, can think of many other families who own land and are wealthier or more “ahead,” they cannot say that these families are happier or more pleasant to be around. In fact, it’s quite the opposite—these other families seem to have chosen financial advancement at the cost of interpersonal connections built on love and generosity.
Rosicky’s generosity extends beyond his family—he is kind to his entire community, and it’s clear that this, too, is part of what makes him happy. Rosicky enjoys interacting with the townspeople. He looks forward to going into town to talk to the shop girl he likes or to see Doctor Burleigh, which shows that he values connecting with his community. Rosicky thinks of other people in the town with kindness as well, even people he does not know well. For example, he thinks of Mr. Haycock, the undertaker (a character otherwise not mentioned in the story), as “the kindest man in the world.” This passing thought makes it clear that Rosicky treasures all people, not just those in his immediate family.
Rudolph’s wife Polly is initially distant and cold to the Rosickys, but even she, by the end of the story, calls Rosicky “father” and cares for him when he gets sick. Through her time spent with Rosicky, Polly learns that even if she does not know him well and even if she is only part of his family through marriage, she is still part of his family, and that he will treat her with unconditional love. This love and generosity move her to care for him, and to become a warmer, more empathetic person.
The high value that Rosicky places on family and community is not just one of his character traits—it provides an answer to the story’s question of what makes a person happy. By showing that Rosicky is not only happy but also loved by everyone around him, the story suggests that choosing to be kind, generous, and loving to others can make a person happier overall. Moreover, Rosicky’s pleasant personality and expressions of love influence other people—like Polly, and Doctor Burleigh, and all of Rosicky’s children—to behave similarly. Through Rosicky’s value system, the story demonstrates how being kind and generous can make a person, as well as everyone around them, happier.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family, Community, and Kindness ThemeTracker
Family, Community, and Kindness Quotes in Neighbour Rosicky
Maybe, Doctor Burleigh reflected, people as generous and warm-hearted and affectionate as the Rosickys never got ahead much; maybe you couldn’t enjoy your life and put it in the bank, too.
Over there across the cornstalks his own roof and windmill looked so good to him that he promised himself to mind the Doctor and take care of himself. He was awful fond of his place, he admitted. He wasn’t anxious to leave it. And it was a comfort to think that he would never have to go farther than the edge of his own hayfield. The snow, falling over his barnyard and the graveyard, seemed to draw things together like. And they were all old neighbours in the graveyard, most of them friends; there was nothing to feel awkward or embarrassed about.
They had been at one accord not to hurry through life, not to be always skimping and saving. They saw their neighbours buy more land and feed more stock than they did, without discontent. Once when the creamery agent came to the Rosickys to persuade them to sell him their cream, he told them how much money the Fasslers, their nearest neighbours, had made on their cream last year.
“Yes,” said Mary, “and look at them Fassler children! Pale, pinched little things, they look like skimmed milk. I’d rather put some colour into my children’s faces than put money into the bank.”
The agent shrugged and turned to Anton.
“I guess we’ll do like she says,” said Rosicky.
Rosicky was a little anxious about this pair. He was afraid Polly would grow so discontented that Rudy would quit the farm and take a factory job in Omaha. He had worked for a winter up there, two years ago, to get money to marry on. He had done very well, and they would always take him back at the stockyards. But to Rosicky that meant the end of everything for his son. To be a landless man was to be a wage-earner, a slave, all your life; to have nothing, to be nothing.
“‘We ain’t got an ear,’ he says, ‘nor nobody else ain’t got none. All the corn in the country was cooked by three o’clock today, like you’d roasted it in an oven.’
“‘You mean you won’t get no crop at all?’ I asked him. I couldn’t believe it, after he’d worked so hard.
“‘No crop this year,’ he says. ‘That’s why we’re havin’ a picnic. We might as well enjoy what we got.’
“An’ that’s how your father behaved, when all the neighbours was so discouraged they couldn’t look you in the face. An’ we enjoyed ourselves that year, poor as we was, an’ our neighbours wasn’t a bit better off for bein’ miserable. Some of ’em grieved till they got poor digestions and couldn’t relish what they did have.’”
Well, when I come to realize what I done, of course, I felt terrible. I felt better in de stomach, but very bad in de heart. I set on my bed wid dat platter on my knees, an’ it all come to me; how hard dat poor woman save to buy dat goose, and how she get some neighbour to cook it dat got more fire, an’ how she put it in my corner to keep it away from dem hungry children. Dey was a old carpet hung up to shut my corner off, an’ de children wasn’t allowed to go in dere. An’ I know she put it in my corner because she trust me more’n she did de violin boy. I can’t stand it to face her after I spoil de Christmas. So I put on my shoes and go out into de city. I tell myself I better throw myself in de river; but I guess I ain’t dat kind of a boy.
It wasn’t nervous, it wasn’t a stupid lump; it was a warm brown human hand, with some cleverness in it, a great deal of generosity, and something else which Polly could only call “gypsy-like,”—something nimble and lively and sure, in the way that animals are.
Polly remembered that hour long afterwards; it had been like an awakening to her. It seemed to her that she had never learned so much about life from anything as from old Rosicky’s hand. It brought her to herself; it communicated some direct and untranslatable message.
He was thinking, indeed, about Polly, and how he might never have known what a tender heart she had if he hadn’t got sick over there.
He thought of city cemeteries; acres of shrubbery and heavy stone, so arranged and lonely and unlike anything in the living world. Cities of the dead, indeed; cities of the forgotten, of the “put away.” But this was open and free, this little square of long grass which the wind for ever stirred. Nothing but the sky overhead, and the many-coloured fields running on until they met that sky. The horses worked here in the summer; the neighbours passed on their way to town; and over yonder, in the cornfield, Rosicky’s own cattle would be eating fodder as winter came on. Nothing could be more undeathlike than this place; nothing could be more right for 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. Rosicky’s life seemed to him complete and beautiful.
