Financial instability affects everyone in “Neighbour Rosicky,” and while Rosicky himself is not wealthy, he seems to be the happiest character in the story. Notably, Rosicky chooses to spend his money as he pleases and as he feels best serves his family, instead of saving it or trying to push himself to advance economically. While his health suffers from the physical labor of his work as a farmer, he still remains grateful and prefers to not prioritize earning and saving money over using his time as he likes. His contentment with this choice contrasts with his other families in the town, like the Marshalls, who are eager to make as much money as possible. Ultimately, it seems that Rosicky’s laidback attitude toward his work and his money is part of what makes him the happiest character in the story.
The Rosickys’ financial choices differ dramatically from their neighbors, but the Rosickys are the happiest family in the town. Doctor Burleigh explicitly prefers being in the Rosicky household, which he finds comforting and loving, in contrast to other households that seem cold and overly concerned with financial gain. Bureligh’s reverence for the Rosicky household reveals how financial success does not determine the overall quality of life within a family—in fact, the Rosickys’ willingness to be hospitable, to take their time with things, to spend time together rather than overworking themselves, is part of what makes them a happier family.
While other neighbors are devastated by crop failure, Rosicky always responds with gratitude and chooses not to let what is out of his control (nature) prevent him from being happy and making his family happy. Rosicky’s willingness to relax and not be pushed by an unrelenting desire to earn money is what gives him the time to attend to the feelings and needs of his loved ones—and what makes his life a happier one than his neighbors, who view the uncontrollable parts of being a farmer, like crop failure, as tragedies. Indeed, Rosicky spends his money freely rather than hoarding it, and it seems that he and his family are happier for it.
Although Rosicky is ultimately unhappy living in New York, for the brief time he is happy, he chooses to spend all of his money rather than save it. He goes out at night with his friends—to bars or to the opera—and is more content because he gets to do this. While he could have been saving money for a hypothetical future life, Rosicky would rather enjoy his life as it is in the present. As a farmer in Nebraska, Rosicky knows that he could find ways to make more money—he could sell their cream, for example, for extra cash—but Rosicky chooses not to do this. Instead, the Rosickys use their cream to feed their own children, which Mary Rosicky justifies by arguing that she would rather “put some colour into [her] children’s faces than put money into the bank.” For the Rosickys, it’s more important to have a well-fed, comfortable family than to make as much money as possible.
But even though Rosicky is happy to spend money on things for himself and his family, he also is very content living simply, without a lot of wealth or material possessions. Rosicky always chooses to eat lunch at home rather than in town. He finds the food in town too “extravagant” and prefers his simple and loving home environment to any of the more ostentatious pleasures of spending money in town. At one point in the story, Mary Rosicky shares a memory with her children about when Rosicky learned that there had been corn crop failure. While their other neighbors were devastated by the loss of income and the waste of hard work, Rosicky chose to throw a picnic, preferring to be grateful for what they had instead of disappointed in what they lost. This shows that Rosicky’s relaxed attitude toward money makes him happy and stable, regardless of the instability going on around him.
Rosicky’s decision to prioritize his everyday happiness and his family’s wellbeing over money becomes one of his central virtues as a character, and it provides insight into the wider significance of the story. Rosicky does, at times in his life, suffer from poverty, but this is always when he is living in a city, without other comforts to make him happy. Living in the Nebraska countryside, on his own land, he is nearly always happy, even when crop failure leads to hard times. For Rosicky, money does not buy happiness—there is a certain necessity to possessing money, but Rosicky is not interested in having more money than he requires to provide for his family. By the end of the story, he has achieved a happier life by choosing to enjoy life’s pleasures (and the pleasure of nature) without trying to “get ahead.”
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Money vs. Happiness 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.
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.
He often did over-time work and was well paid for it, but somehow he never saved anything. He couldn’t refuse a loan to a friend, and he was self-indulgent. He liked a good dinner, and a little went for beer, a little for tobacco, a good deal went to the girls. He often stood through an opera on Saturday nights; he could get standing-room for a dollar.
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 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.
