50 pages • 1 hour read
Jenny ErpenbeckGo, Went, Gone
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Homeland and Refuge
The refugees are driven from the lands of their births by violence. The Gaddafi regime is mentioned several times as a source of the unrest, but the terrorist group Boko Haram is also active in the regions where they lived. Through no fault of their own, the refugees are forced to leave their homelands, then arriving in countries that do not want them. They no longer have a sense of home, and the refuge that the government purports to offer is not ideal. Rather, it results in an enforced idleness that wastes the men’s time and prevents them from taking actions such as working that would allow them to solidify their futures.
To offer refuge is to offer sanctuary. But the media in Berlin treats the refugee story as one of inconvenient loafers who want only to take from the government, rather than work. There are people who openly resent the presence of people who were forced onto boats at gunpoint and then managed to find their way to Berlin. Monika and Jörg, friends of Richard, express a typical ignorance when they joke about the refugee women having many diseases. Richard eventually comes to see the aggression with which German and Italy deny refuges to the Africans as a warlike action.
The Value of Work
Richard is ambivalent about leaving the university, although there are no signs at the outset that his career was unsatisfying to him. He realizes that his work as a professor gave him a sense of identity that he now lacks. His career had other benefits such as paying a good wage and allowing him to advance the field of knowledge in his chosen area of research, but it was his status as a professor that changes the most for him after he retires. He has a difficult time thinking of himself as a professor emeritus. His greatest challenge after he stops working is knowing what to fill his time with. Richard’s job provided a sense of purpose because he was always focused on a specific project that required his expertise.
As the refugees tell him their stories, many of them begin with talking about their jobs in Africa. Rashid worked in a metal shop and had been designing an ornate gate when the civil unrest began. Awad had been a skilled mechanic. Yussuf tells Richard that he would like to be an engineer, but most of the refugees do not even discuss the jobs they might do in Europe because they are not allowed to work. Rashid says that working is as natural as breathing to him; therefore, not working robs him of something vital. Idleness is unnatural for the men in the home. Richard wonders why the men are not permitted to find employment “in a country where even the right to a place in heaven is predicated on work” (66). Because the men are not able to earn money, it grows easier for the public to view them as indigent loafers who want to live off of welfare, ignoring the fact that the men all say they want to work more than anything.
The Problems of the Privileged
Richard spends the first quarter of the novel wondering what to do with his time. By the end of the novel he “knows that he’s one of the very few people in this world who are in a position to take their pick of realities” (219). He has endless options because he has retired from a successful career, has enough money to live on, owns his home, and wants for nothing, save for his brief infatuation with the pretty Ethiopian German teacher.
As he spends more time with the refugees, Richard experiences a change in the way he perceives his challenges; most of them stop looking like challenges at all. Wondering what book he should read, or when to visit a doctor, are not challenges on part with being in a foreign country with no work, no prospects, and facing down a government that seems intent on refusing to help them. At the various dinner parties in the novel, the pettiness of the concerns of himself and his friends grow more intolerable for Richard. Cocktail party chatter contains little of substance in the novel because the people involved in the conversations do not have anything dire or expedient to discuss. They are all in similar positions as Richard: liberal, educated, affluent, and living lives of relative ease.
By the end of the novel, Richard is so dissatisfied with his own inability to help the refugees that he buys a plot of land for Karon’s family and insists that the men sleep in his house. He has come to care for the men enough that he is willing to share their problems because he knows that he and the men are more similar than he ever could have guessed. People like Monika and Jörg show no evolution in the way they view the world and their own problems, and Richard eventually stops associating with them.
