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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Trust, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
U.S. Foundational Myths
Gender and Subjugation
Wealth
Power and Morality
Self-Interest vs. the Common Good
Summary
Analysis
Benjamin Rask is born wealthy, which deprives him of the opportunity to have a “heroic rise.” His family emigrates from Denmark to Ireland in the 1660s. Over the next century, they amass a fortune from the tobacco trade with the Colonies. Part of the family then moves to America, so they can have more control of the supply. Benjamin’s father, Solomon, eventually becomes the sole owner of the company. He has an apartment in New York where he entertains prominent people when he’s in the city. But he’s not usually there; usually, he’s traveling from one plantation to another in Virginia, North Carolina, and the Caribbean and to his private estate in Cuba.
The observation by Harold Vanner (the fictional author of Bonds) that Benjamin is “deprived” of the opportunity to have a “heroic rise” shows the irony Harold uses to discuss Benjamin. In essence, Harold underlines Benjamin’s enormous privilege by framing that privilege in terms of deprivation, satirizing the tendency of wealthy people, including Benjamin, to claim that they are underdogs. By doing that, Harold shows that Benjamin had a leg up, so Benjamin will never be completely responsible for his own success. Notably, though Harold mentions the wealth Benjamin’s family gained from plantations, he does not discuss slavery, signaling either shortsightedness on his part, on Benjamin’s family’s part, or both.
Themes
Wilhelmina Rask, Benjamin’s mother, leaves the New York apartment whenever her husband Solomon returns. She spends her time at friends’ summerhouses upstate. Benjamin is a model child, though he is prone to spending his time alone. He excels in boarding school but remains without friends throughout his time there. During his senior year, Solomon dies of heart failure. The following May, just before Benjamin’s graduation, Wilhelmina dies of emphysema. In college, Benjamin continues to excel academically but doesn’t make friends. When he returns to New York after graduating, he has a fortune but no interests or passions.
Harold portrays Benjamin as an extravagantly wealthy man whose life is devoid of passion and close relationships. Benjamin grew up in a home with parents who didn’t seem to like each other and later struggles making friends. After both of his parents die one after the other, it seems that Benjamin is alone in the world, underlining Harold’s point that while Benjamin has wealth, he doesn’t seem to have any of the intangible things—like relationships, passion, or love—that make life worth living.
Themes
The tobacco business doesn’t interest Benjamin. He sells Solomon’s estate in Cuba and invests the money in the stock market and gold bonds. The investment in gold pays off, and Benjamin’s fortune grows substantially. After that, Benjamin becomes more and more involved in his company’s investments. He develops a knack for noticing patterns in the stock market and gravitates toward high-risk, high-reward investments. His accountant always advises against those investments, so eventually Benjamin fires him and takes sole control of the company’s finances.
Before investing becomes Benjamin’s primary—and, apparently, sole—passion, it doesn’t seem that Benjamin has been passionate about much of anything. Harold notably portrays Benjamin as something of a renegade, contributing to the trope of a lone genius who defies conventional wisdom and triumphs by following his convictions.
Themes
Benjamin makes the bottom two floors of his brownstone into an office. He sells his father’s tobacco business so he can focus on his new financial business. With the profits from the sale, Benjamin has even more money to invest. He becomes fascinated by money. He thinks of it as a living thing and loves the complexity of investing. He becomes a prominent figure in the financial world. He builds a mansion and joins charities, boards, and associations. He doesn’t like doing any of it and would rather keep to himself. He feels like he’s acting. He’s genuinely rich, but to avoid appearing eccentric, he feels like he has to invent a persona to act how people assume a wealthy person acts.
Benjamin’s idea that money is a living thing points to the idea that he views his investing as a relationship with money. That relationship seems to take the place of relationships with other people. Harold then introduces a tension between Benjamin’s renegade persona, which he has relied on to accrue exorbitant wealth and launch his career, and the pressure to conform to social expectations. In that conflict, Benjamin feels like he can be the most authentic version of himself while investing, reinforcing the idea that Benjamin’s closest relationship is the one he has with money.
Themes
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New York bustles with optimism. Benjamin doesn’t interact with the city much outside of newspapers and the ticker tape of the stock market. He sees, though, how monopolistic companies have concentrated wealth in smaller and smaller segments of the population; ironically, the wealth amassed by those companies leads to a feeling of collective jubilation. Everyone’s sure they’re a member of the elite or on their way to becoming one. There’s a run on the stock market in 1907. Benjamin has vast reserves of money, so he’s able to invest heavily when stock prices go down. When the market rebounds, Benjamin has reached a new echelon of wealth. He searches for signs of acknowledgment of his newfound higher status whenever he interacts with people.
Harold again accentuates Benjamin’s isolation from people. That isolation seems to contribute to Benjamin’s view of himself as superior to others, as he searches each interaction for evidence that others are sufficiently deferential to his status. That sense of superiority shows a hierarchical understanding of the world in which those with wealth are considered more important, and more worthy of respect, than those with less money. Benjamin then looks down on those with less money by criticizing what he views as their foolish belief that they are on their way to becoming members of the elite.
Themes
Benjamin’s company grows so large that he’s forced to show someone the ropes. He develops a working relationship with a young man at his company, Sheldon Lloyd. Unlike Benjamin, Sheldon sees money as a means to an end. He likes to spend his money and perfectly fits people’s expectations of how a financier should act. During The Great War, Benjamin invests in sectors related to the war. As he reaches what seems like a midpoint in his life, a sense of “genealogical responsibility” strikes Benjamin. He starts considering marriage.
While Sheldon sees money as a means to an end, Benjamin sees it as an end in and of itself. That suggests that Benjamin is something of an ascetic—one who refrains from indulgence, often for religious reasons—while Sheldon is a hedonist. That portrayal suggests that there is a kind of moral purity to Benjamin’s pursuit of money. He wants money, Harold suggests, not because he’s materialistic or status-obsessed but because he is devoted, perhaps religiously devoted, to the process of accruing it and to the work itself.
Themes
