Norman Mushari discovers a legal loophole allowing a foundation officer deemed insane to be removed from control of its funds.

Mushari reads Eliot Rosewater's letter to his future successor and contacts Eliot's wife Sylvia to gather evidence of instability.

Eliot disrupts a performance of the opera Aida by loudly yelling advice at the characters suffocating onstage.

Eliot calls Sylvia from Rosewater, Indiana, declaring his mission to love and care for the town's discarded people.

Eliot opens a foundation office in a dingy attic above a lunchroom with signs reading 'ROSEWATER FOUNDATION. HOW CAN WE HELP YOU?'

Diana Moon Glampers calls the Rosewater Foundation during a thunderstorm and tells Eliot, 'God bless you, Mr. Rosewater.'

Senator Rosewater recalls how Eliot accidentally killed three unarmed civilian firefighters while storming a Bavarian factory during WWII.

Mushari secretly listens as Eliot recites his baptism speech for Mary Moody's twins to Sylvia over the phone.

Fred Rosewater slips a noose around his neck in the cellar moments before Mushari comes downstairs to find him.

Mushari tells Fred Rosewater that the Indiana branch of the family is swindling him out of millions; Fred faints.

The people of Rosewater County fall into panic when they believe Eliot is permanently leaving for Indianapolis.

Eliot arrives in Indianapolis and hallucinates a vast firestorm consuming the entire city.

Eliot wakes beside a fountain in Dr. Brown's psychiatric hospital garden, where Kilgore Trout has joined Senator Rosewater and the lawyers.

The Senator reveals that 57 women have claimed Eliot fathered their children as part of Mushari's bribery scheme.

Eliot claims all 57 children as his legal heirs and orders their surnames changed to Rosewater, securing the fortune.

Norman Mushari, an ambitious young lawyer, discovers a legal loophole that could let him strip Eliot Rosewater of control over the family's $87 million foundation and install a pliable distant cousin in his place. After years of erratic behavior, Eliot abandons his privileged life to settle in Rosewater, Indiana, where he devotes himself entirely to the town's poor and desperate. Mushari gathers evidence of mental incompetence while simultaneously manipulating Fred Rosewater, a struggling insurance salesman who doesn't know he stands to inherit a fortune. Eliot suffers a psychological collapse, hallucinates a firestorm destroying Indianapolis, and spends a year recovering in a psychiatric hospital. Back in the hospital garden, he reunites with his father, his lawyers, and the novelist Kilgore Trout, who defends the sanity of Eliot's mission. In a final act of cunning generosity, Eliot outmaneuvers Mushari by claiming fifty-seven children as his heirs and ordering the Rosewater fortune distributed among the people of the county.

Eliot Rosewater's battle to keep his fortune and his purpose.

Eliot crashes a gathering of science fiction writers in Milford, Pennsylvania and delivers a drunken, impassioned speech praising their work.

Eliot hitchhikes to a Swarthmore bar, buys drinks for all volunteer firefighters present, and spends the night in jail.

Eliot and Sylvia move into the Rosewater mansion and begin hosting lavish banquets for the town's poor and unemployed.

Sylvia Rosewater has a mental health crisis and burns down the local firehouse before being admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Psychiatrist Dr. Brown coins the term 'samaritrophia' in a treatise to describe Sylvia's hysterical indifference to others' suffering.

Sylvia is sent to Switzerland for further treatment and decides not to return to Rosewater, beginning divorce proceedings.

A suicidal man named Sherman Wesley Little calls the Rosewater Foundation and is awarded a $300 fellowship to keep living.

Eliot writes the opening of an unfinished novel in his Domesday Book featuring a soul from 1587 reluctant to be reborn on Earth.

Eliot explains the 'Money River' to his father, describing how only the wealthy know how to exploit inherited privilege.

Colonel George Rosewater, blinded in a Civil War explosion, returns home with nothing and builds a new life working in Rhode Island.

Fred Rosewater browses personal ads in a news store while fire chief Harry Pena writes a racy advertisement for Fred as a joke.

Thirteen-year-old Lila Buntline runs a profitable business selling pornographic photos and fireworks to her Pisquontuit neighbors.

Caroline Rosewater and Amanita Buntline watch Harry Pena fish through opera glasses until host Bunny Weeks reveals Pena is bankrupt.

Noyes Finnerty watches Eliot congratulate the fire chief for an outdated award and declares Eliot has heard 'the big click.'

Kilgore Trout tells Eliot that his years of work in Rosewater County are one of the purest acts of altruism he has ever seen.

Before settling in Rosewater, Eliot's erratic behavior escalates through drunken speeches to firefighters and science fiction writers, signaling his rejection of polite society and his deepening attachment to outcasts. Eliot and Sylvia's early years in Rosewater are marked by genuine generosity toward the poor, but the effort costs Sylvia her sanity and ultimately their marriage. Across the country in Pisquontuit, Rhode Island, the forgotten branch of the Rosewater family and their neighbors lead quietly desperate lives shaped by poverty, vanity, and inherited failure. Kilgore Trout's novels thread through Eliot's daily existence, giving language to the fear of uselessness that haunts both rich and poor alike. The world Eliot inhabits is populated by overlooked figures — suicidal callers, bankrupt fishermen, entrepreneurial teenagers, and orphaned maids — sustained only by small acts of acknowledgment. The novel closes with Trout affirming that Eliot's years of work in Rosewater County represent one of the rarest and most radical acts of human love.

Broken communities, small-town lives, and the people Eliot's world revolves around.

Eliot reads Kilgore Trout's novel 2BR02B, set in a future America where ethical suicide parlors replace natural death.

Eliot's psychoanalyst discharges him as 'untreatable' and tells Sylvia that Eliot blames himself for his mother's accidental death.

Eliot is arrested in Vashti, Texas after delivering an inflammatory speech about wealth and revolution inside a firehouse.

Senator Rosewater, Sylvia, McAllister, and Mushari meet to legalize the divorce; Eliot refuses to leave Rosewater and does not attend.

Sylvia defends Eliot's philanthropy as beautiful but confesses she is not strong enough to remain by his side.

Senator Rosewater recalls Eliot throwing himself in front of a moving truck immediately after realizing he had killed unarmed firefighters.

Eliot gives poet Arthur Garvey Ulm a $10,000 check so Ulm can write the truth without financial pressure.

Eliot receives Ulm's completed 800-page manuscript dedicated to him but cannot remember who Ulm is.

McAllister mails Stewart Buntline a pamphlet on the evils of socialism to discourage him from giving away his $14 million inheritance.

Selena Deal, the Buntlines' orphaned maid, writes to the orphanage director describing the family's condescending and demeaning treatment of her.

Fred Rosewater discovers his family's history manuscript in the cellar, revealing that every Rosewater is descended from a man named Graham.

Fred Rosewater finds that termites have eaten the rest of the family manuscript, destroying his newly discovered sense of noble heritage.

Senator Rosewater confronts Eliot in his Rosewater office and reveals the firm's legal plan to have him declared mentally unfit.

Eliot asks each of the four men gathered in the hospital garden to swear aloud that he is a rational person.

Eliot writes Fred Rosewater a check for $100,000 after scaling back his initial spontaneous offer of one million dollars.

Eliot's trajectory is shaped by a series of quiet and violent turning points, from reading Kilgore Trout's speculative fiction to confronting his own psychological fragility through failed therapy. His guilt-ridden wartime trauma — killing unarmed firefighters and immediately attempting to die himself — becomes the hidden engine of his compulsion to save others. Key acts of generosity, like funding poet Arthur Garvey Ulm, reveal Eliot's impulsive idealism even when the outcomes are ambiguous or forgotten entirely. In Rhode Island, Fred Rosewater's discovery of his family's buried manuscript briefly fills him with pride before termites and reality strip it all away. When Mushari's legal threat becomes real, Eliot must demonstrate his rationality to a circle of skeptics who hold his future in their hands. His final gambit — acknowledging fifty-seven children and writing Fred a check — resolves the conflict through an act that is equal parts madness and genius.