Vonne Gut Reactions: Timequake

Ting-a-ling...

I recently completed my quest to read and review all of Kurt Vonnegut's fourteen novels, a task I had originally set for myself during school year 2012-13 and which I completed in the summer of 2015.

And so it goes.

First, let me point out that Timequake was the least fictional of Vonnegut's novels. He offers up the following in the book's introduction after speaking about Hemingway and he last novels, his fish, as it were...My great big fish, which stunk so, was entitled Timequake. Let us think of it as Timequake One. And let us think of this one, a stew made from its best parts mixed with thoughts and experiences during the past seven months or so, as Timequake Two.

Hokay?

And that's a fairly apt description of the Timequake that I held in my hands. It's not a linear story, but it does contain parts of a linear story. It also contains what might be called essay fragments written from Vonnegut's point of view that aren't any part of the story, that only sometimes relate to the story, and that are told directly to the readers without any pretense of inclusion in a fictional narrative.

This is, in the end, the purest of Vonnegut. He includes Kilgore Trout - offers a far more sympathetic salute to the man than he did when the character first met his author and alter ego in Breakfast of Champions - and the Tralfamadorians. He offers up his viewpoints sometimes couched in fiction but quite often without the thinnest of veils that Vonnegut has offered us through the course of his writing. Vonnegut even gives us a sketch of Trout, himself, as shown above.

Here Kurt - it feels wrong to call him by his first name, he's too big for that, too massive in my head - Vonnegut is saying good bye and possibly realizing that he doesn't have another novel in him any more. The book was published in 1997, and though Vonnegut would live another decade, he never published anything more that would be called a novel.

To my notes...

• dedication - "All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental." This is a sentiment that has been espoused by Vonnegut in many of his books: that we are here entirely by luck. Some of his characters are crippled by this, and others are freed. It's all in your attitude, I guess.
• p5 - "Human rights? What could be more indifferent to the rights of any form of life than an H-bomb?" - Another common Vonnegut thought: that weapons of war are indifferent to who they are killing. This leads to the just and the unjust being endangered just alike.
• p10 - "I made sandwiches of German soldiers between an erupting Earth and an exploding sky, and in a blizzard of razor blades." - Vonnegut has frequently described horrific acts in odd, uncommon descriptions. Here Trout is describing what he did during World War II and how he viewed those acts.
• p11 - "If I had it to do all over again, I would choose to be born again in a hospital in Indianapolis. I would choose to spend my childhood again at 4365 North Illinois Street, about ten blocks from here, and to again be a product of that city's public schools." - Vonnegut goes on to describe how he would live his life exactly as he had the first time. He doesn't think that doing things any differently would have made him any happier. 
• p12 - "If this isn't nice, what is?" - One of Vonnegut's most famous lines...
• p16 - The Booboolings (from another planet) have a 'weird' custom through which they talk to their offspring and explain how they should act, how they should feel, how they should believe. The Booboolings even make their youngsters read books and explain how they should feel about the situations therein. - Yup, Vonnegut observing his world and explaining it from the perspective of an alien.
• p18 - The Booboolings stop this custom when television is introduced. Instead of needing to divert themselves and their children from boredom (as they did with the books), they simply sit and watch televisions..."and automobiles and computers and barbed wire and flamethrowers and land mines and machine guns and so on." - Technology hasn't made our world any better in Vonnegut's eyes.
• p19 - "The moral at the end of that story is this: 'Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.' "- Yeah, Vonnegut doesn't have the most positive image of women.
• p23 - "My great-grandfather Peter Lieber...was a Freethinker, which is to say a skeptic about conventional religious beliefs...as would be Kilgore Trout and I." - Vonnegut is long-known to be an areligious man. That comes up again later in the book again.
• p28 - "The late British philosopher Bertrand Russell said he lost friends to one of three addictions: alcohol or religion or chess." - I don't know that chess is a major addiction that I can think of, but the inclusion of religion there again echoes Vonnegut's areligious status.
• p30 - "in Timequake One...by the year 2000, [writers] had become 'as quaint', in the opinion of the general public, 'as contemporary makers in New England tourist towns of the toy windmills known since colonial times as whirligigs." - Again, echoing the Booboolings, Vonnegut thinks that writers have become obsolete since the invention of television, and I don't think he believes that's a positive thing.
• p43 - Tralfamadore makes another, final appearance. This time it's as a planet where 'representatives of all the chemical elements held a meeting...to protest some of their members' having been incorporated into the bodies of big, sloppy, stinky organisms as cruel and stupid as human beings." - It's actually a fascinating idea, and I would very much read the story, maybe even use it in class. It's not a short story that is developed beyond the sketch stage as are so many of Trout's short stories.
• p44 - In the short story of the elements' conference, "Sulfur...made a motion that all chemicals involved in medical research combine wherever possible to create ever more powerful antibiotics. These in turn would cause disease organisms to evolve new strains that were resistant to them." - We've seen the idea of antibiotics leading to stronger diseases, though there they were tests from the Tralfamadorians to make better space travelers (the diseases). Clearly the idea of antibiotic-lead evolution was an idea that stuck with Vonnegut.
• p46 - From Trout's memoir of the timequake, My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot, "Listen, if it isn't a timequake dragging us through knothole after knothole, it's something just as mean and powerful." - In spite of Vonnegut's famous quote about how nice this is, he really does espouse the belief that much of life is suffering, that life is generally a horrible time.
• p51 - Here is the joke to which I linked at the very top. It's dirty, I warn you, but it's a great example of Vonnegut's characters making tragedy into dark humor.
• p56 - Vonnegut offers this quote from his sister Allie, "If there is a God, He sure hates people. That's all I can say" - Vonnegut saw some pretty awful things in his life - suicide, war, hatred - and that (or something) left him pretty skeptical about God and how He could create a world such as this.
• p57 - "For anybody who could believe in God, as you once did, it would be a piece of cake to believe in the plant BooBoo." - See, believing in God is like believing in a ridiculous, fictional story.
• p63 - Trout here, not Vonnegut, "If I'd wasted my time creating [three-dimensional] characters," Trout said, "I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in." - Yeah, that's Vonnegut as Trout right there.
• p68 - Vonnegut's three favorite quotes...
  • A friend, Ted Adler, had rebuilt an ell for Vonnegut and at the end stepped back in shock and said, "How the hell did I do that?" because it was too well done for his understanding.
  • "The second is Jesus Christ's 'Who is it they say I am?' "
  • "The third is from my son Mark, pediatrician and watercolorist and sax player. I've already quoted him in another book: 'We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.' "
  • That about sums up Vonnegut's thoughts on the world...shock at beauty...skepticism and irreverence at religion...be kind to each other because the world's hard enough.
• p71 - Hitler's last words, according to a short story by Kilgore Trout: "I never asked to be born in the first place." - see the dedication...we're here randomly.

• p81 - Vonnegut is describing Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms as his nephew sees it, "he was close to tears because he had to read, having been forced to do so by a professor, A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway." Vonnegut recaps the novel and says thusly, "The tears Hemingway has made you want to shed are tears of relief! It looked like the guy was going to have to get married and settle down. But then he didn't have to [because she and the baby died]. Whew! What a close shave!" - Wow, Vonnegut on marriage.
• p93 - From Trout's My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot again, "I didn't need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of [poop]. I already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books." - Yup, a ray of sunshine, our little Kurt.
• p104 - Discussing Isaac Newton's brain, "And well might any educated person excrete a sizable chunk of masonry when contemplating the tremendously truthful ideas this ordinary mortal, seemingly, uttered with no more to go by, as far as we know, than signals from his dog's breakfast [Vonnegut's description of a brain] from his three and a half pounds of blood soaked sponge. This one naked ape invented differential calculus! He invented the reflecting telescope! He discovered and explained how a prism breaks a beam of sunlight into its constituent colors! He detected and wrote down previously unknown laws governing motion and gravity and optics!" - Yeah, Newton is the bomb, but Vonnegut's description of all these idea (positive here, far more negative in the Booboolings) coming from a dog's breakfast, three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge is appropriate.
• p117 - Jane, Vonnegut's first wife, died a believer in God, an Episcopalian after having been raised a Quaker. "She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I loved her." Earlier, on page 73, Vonnegut mourned for his "buddy Bernard V. O'Hare, now dead, [who] lost his faith as a Roma Catholic during World War Two. I didn't like that. I thought that was too much to lose." - Vonnegut himself never had faith (he says as much in the next paragraph on page 74). He is happy for those who have faith and sad for those who lose it. That's really interesting.
• p139 - "In real life, as during  a rerun following a timequake, people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize." - Man, that's dark.
• p152 - Vonnegut proposes two amendments to the Constitution, "Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage." - Those are pretty liberal ideas there, Kurt. I wish they could come true, too.
• p162 - "[T]he British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin's theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747." - Not quite...more like believing a hurricane - given a billion chances - could put two parts together. Once those are put together and stay together better than they do separately, a billion more hurricanes will put a third part together. Repeat until a plane exists.
• p169 - " I had to add, though, that I knew of a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki." - Vonnegut has repeatedly said that the bombing of Hiroshima can be defended (he won't, but it can be) but that Nagasaki's can't be.
• p183 - One of my favorite foreign phrases, "Esprit de l'escalier!" and Vonnegut never explains it, so I won't either. I love that phrase.
• p191 - The Girl got to hear Vonnegut speak at Indiana University once. She related to me a story that he told there about a postal worker woman with whom he was secretly - even from her - in love. Here he tells that same story. It's beautiful.
• p202 - Vonnegut quotes from Abe Lincoln in Illinois: a play in three acts and includes a large passage from Lincoln. I quote a short part of that, "I have heard of an eastern monarch who once charged his wise man to invent him a sentence which would be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, 'And this too shall pass away.' " - I'm actually kind of surprised that Vonnegut didn't ever use that phrase as one of his books' choruses. 
• p211 -

  "I got a sappy letter from a woman a while back. She knew I was sappy, too, which is to say a northern Democrat. She was pregnant, and she wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby into a world this bad.
  
  I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably. They turned up in the most unexpected places. Perhaps you, dear reader, are or can become a saint for her sweet child to meet.
  
  I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!

  Vonnegut is just a walking contradiction - believing that the world is horrible, that the people in it do horrible things to each other, but also that there are saints.
• p216 - Vonnegut tells a story about a letter that he wrote once and anonymously to his uncle about his brother. It's too long to relate here (read it on Google Books if you want to). It made me laugh out loud.

Vonnegut ends the book in very touching fashion.

I'm thrilled that Kurt wrote such a wonderful and beautiful and meandering and personal final novel.

I thank him digitally.

And I am thrilled that he was here to make our world - my world, especially - a much better place.

Vonne Gut Reactions: Hocus Pocus

It's been a long while since I last reviewed one of Kurt Vonnegut's books, stopping a book and a half short of finishing his main fourteen novels. From there, maybe it'll be on to his collections, maybe not.

If Hocus Pocus is any indication, though, we are far from Vonnegut's prime, and it would be seven more years until he published his final novel, Timequake. From 1959 through 1990 - when Hocus Pocus was published - Vonnegut published a new novel every two to four years. After 1990 Vonnegut had only one more novel in him, and that one came out in 1997.

Here's to hoping that Kurt went out in a blaze of glory, because Hocus Pocus isn't that. (All page numbers refer to the edition seen above, that with the two white hands around a view of a park.)

• p44 - Our main character, Eugene Debs Hartke, find time and again that his life is influenced by chance. Here Hartke bumps into Sam Wakefield, a military recruiter, entirely by chance. His life's path - on to art school before the meeting - is forever changed. Vonnegut often wrote of chance having a much larger influence on our lives than most people would care to admit.
• p67 - Hartke meets Alton Darwin, a mass murderer in the prison where he would eventually work. He compares himself to Darwin thusly, "He hadn't killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn't had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our Government. Also he had done all his killing for reasons of money. I had never stopped to that."
• p117 - "A normal tour of duty in Vietnam was twice [6 months] and 1,000 times more dangerous. Who could blame the educated classes with political connections for staying home?" - Vonnegut wrote a number of times that the wealthy didn't have to send their children to war, that wars were fought on the backs of the poor.

• p137  - "He was a cuckold in the present, and crucifixion awaited him in the future." We've seen a number of Vonnegut characters described in a similar way, who they are and who they will be at the same time.
• p137 - Hartke reads a 'remarkable science fiction story" called "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore." It's been far too long since I've heard anything about Tralfamadore.
• p143 - Really, people were debating the realities of climate change as Vonnegut wrote this, too? Sheesh...
• p154 - I think this is the only time that the phrase "hocus pocus" is mentioned in the book. "then my list of those whose lives I took shouldn't include possibles and probables, or those killed by artillery or air strikes called in by me, and surely not all those, many of them Americans, who dies as an indirect result of all my hocus pocus, all my blah blah blah."
• p155 - Hartke is making a list of all the people he killed and women he slept with while he is in prison awaiting his trial for murders and kidnappings after the prison break. His lawyer asks him why. Hartke says, "To speed things up on Judgement Day."...his lawyer replies, "I thought you were an Atheist."...Hartke replies, "You never know." Vonnegut was a renowned Atheist, but he always held open the possibility that he might've been wrong.

• p163 - The phrase "what's the hurry, son?" is repeated three times. Each time, it pulls Hartke into a totally different pathway in the world. Again, random chance, but this time with an echo throughout time.
• p166 - A character relates a childhood story of being trapped in an elevator. He was panicked, but he assumed that the adults outside the elevator were focusing on this major event in American history, that even the President of the United States was being updated. Because of this, when the elevator doors opened, he assumed there would be a huge uproar when the doors opened. And there wasn't. There was nothing. Hartke asks, "You know what you have described to perfection?"..."What it was like to come home from the Vietnam War."
• p176 - Vonnegut mentions the towns of Cairo, Illinois. Only, "he pronounced it 'kay-roe.' "...and Peru, Indiana pronounced "pee-roo" not "puh-roo"...and Brazil, Indiana being said as 'brazzle.' I know all of those towns...and Versailles, Indiana - ver-sales.
• p185 - "I have looked up who the Freethinkers were...who believed...that nothing but sleep awaited good and evil persons alike in the Afterlife, that science had proved all organized religions to be baloney, that God was unknowable, and that the greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community." - that sounds a whole lot like Vonnegut's humanism.

• p200 - "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore" explains that the Earth was created in order to improve the space-travel-readiness of bacteria from Earth and that the words of the Bible were written down from those same alien bacterial engineers. That's about right for Vonnegut's beliefs about organized religion.
• p238 - A Japanese man is discussing the parallels between war and commerce. "So now we count dollars the way you used to count bodies. What does that bring us closer to? What does it mean? We should do with those dollars what you did with the bodies. Bury and forget them! You were luckier with your bodies than we are with all our dollars." - Vonnegut has long had a disdain for commercialism.
• p242 - "I think any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever the people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today." - Yup, vintage Vonnegut right there. The wealthy are running our world. The rest of us are at their whims.
• p251 - Vonnegut relates the story of "a talking deer in the National Forest...who gets tangled in barbed wire during the summer months, trying to get at the delicious food on the farms. He is shot by a hunter. As he dies he wonders why he was born in the first place. The final sentence of the story was the last thing the deer said on Earth. The hunter was close enough to hear it and was amazed. This was it: 'What the blakety-blank was that supposed to be all about?' " Yup, Vonnegut.

The whole story, honestly feels like Vonnegut-by-numbers. All of the beats are there, even the occasionally humorous beats.

But the book feels flat, empty, like not much of anything.

The story of Eugene Debs Hartke isn't interesting. He seems to bop from pillar to post, to deal with women either as someone to sleep with (the majority of women) or to take care of (his wife and mother-in-law), and to drift from one job to another without any care or control of what he wants to do.

He seems a passive participant in his own story. Meh...

Hopefully I'll get something better from Timequake. 

Vonne Gut Reactions: Bluebeard

Twelve down...two more to go...I'm not making 'em all in 2012, but I'll have 'em wrapped by by early in 2013, at least.

Bluebeard is an odd Vonnegut book in that it almost doesn't feel like a Vonnegut book at all. Yes, there are a number of Vonnegut ticks throughout the book, but there are also a number of aspects that feel almost as if Vonnegut was trying something else here, something that is paralleled in the story of Rabo Karabekian, the book's main character.

Let's take a look at the two sets of things - Vonnegut-isms and non...

This book is clearly a Vonnegut story because (pages refer to the edition shown above)...

• Rabo Karabekian - Our main character first appeared in Breakfast of Champions as the painter of a The Temptation of Saint Anthony, for which $50,000 was paid, making it the most valuable work in Midland City, OH's new art museum.
• introduction - "Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions and hence distressing seriousness." - Vonnegut has long espoused his belief that money only has value because we, as a group, have convinced each other that it has value. This is, of course, true, but it appears again and again in this book as the pieces of modern expressionistic artwork switch very quickly from worthless to immensely valuable.
• p32 - "everyone alive is a survivor" - We first heard this in Galapagos. Vonnegut often ascribed the survival or heroism or success - as well as death, cowardice, failure - to random chance rather than to any skill - intellectual or physical. Those of us who survive are simply the ones who survive. And so it goes...
• p27 - " 'Never trust a survivor,' my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, 'until you find out what he did to stay alive.' " - Vonnegut saw horrors and war. In his books he continually states of those horrors, of the reluctance of the survivors to speak of the horrors, and what some of the survivors had to do to become survivor.
• p46  - The book is titled Bluebeard, and here Vonnegut summarizes the tale of Bluebeard and his one room kept secret from his many wives. Karabekian keeps a similarly locked room, his potato barn, and allows full access to his world except for the barn. Vonnegut makes this comparison openly and without artifice. He keeps few secrets from the readers.
• p147 - "Another was triangular in cross-section, so that the wound it made wouldn't close up again and keep the blood and guts from falling out." - Roland Weary states something similar in Slaughterhouse Five.

The book is, however, quite unlike Vonnegut's other stories in many ways...

• The main character ends up happy this time. This really is something unique in Vonnegut's stories. Bill Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse Five ended up resigned to his fate, as did Paul Proteus in Player Piano, Eliot Rosewater in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, Walter Starbuck in Jailbird, and Rudy Waltz of Deadeye Dick. Others have ended up dead or dying: Malachi Constant (Sirens of Titan), Howard Campbell (Mother Night), narrator John (Cat's Cradle), and Leon Trout (Galapagos).
  
  Here Karabekian seems to actually be happy at the end of the book, and the ending felt hopeful. That's new...
• Circe Berman is a female character who isn't placed on a pedestal, isn't two-dimensional, and is a force for good (and some minor misery) for our main character. She is a very successful author - under a pseudonym. She brings Karabekian out of his self-imposed exile from the world and leaves him far happier than she found him. This might be the first positive female character that we've seen in a Vonnegut story, and even she's not 100% positive.

This is one of the few Vonnegut books that has absolutely left me happy at the end of the book. Even Slaughterhouse and Breakfast of Champions, books that I think are far greater than this one didn't leave me absolutely happy.

I know we only have two books left in Vonnegut's career, but I can understand how critics at the time could have thought that this book - coming only two years after Galapagos - would have signaled a return of Vonnegut from the doldrums of Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, and Slapstick.

Hocus Pocus next. I'm about a fourth of the way through reading that as I write these words.

Vonne Gut Reactions: Galapagos

It's been too long, but we're too late to apologize now.

Galapagos is the first really excellent Vonnegut book that I've read since Breakfast of Champions. That's a run of three pretty mediocre books - Deadeye Dick, Jailbird, and Slapstick. This is a return to Vonnegut's strength, to a story that matters to him and consequently to us.

This may also be Vonnegut at his most hopeful - as only Vonnegut could be, however. Our tale is told by a ghostly narrator who died in the building of the ship on which much of our tale revolves. Our narrator, Kilgore Trout's son, has chosen to avoid heading into the blue tunnel of the afterlife, a fate that his father begs him to take. Instead, Leon Trout stays on Earth to hope to understand the human condition just a little better and is given a million years to do so.

In the million years of watching, Trout sees humankind evolve from what we are to an ocean- and island-dwelling species with fins and fur suited for fishing in the waters off the Galapagos islands on which our entire species lives. The book thankfully focuses on the events that lead to our modern Noah's Arc of fewer than a dozen survivors finding themselves shipwrecked on Santa Rosalia island on which they are to make their home in perpetuity. The world's economy collapses, Peru attacks Ecuador, mental instabilities bring together our cast of characters, accidents and chance clear the remainder of the book's characters, and natural selection works its magic from there.

Vonnegut's main themes here are ones that we have seen before: the failings of our big brains and the effects of chance events on our future. Repeatedly Vonnegut explains that our big brains - shrunken to allow for more streamlined swimming a million years in our future - and their failings constantly lead to problems in our modern world, allowing us to lie, to delude ourselves, and to choose actions clearly designed to overcome evolution and somehow remove ourselves from the gene pool. Chance also plays a huge part in shaping events, bringing together figures that will become our species's eventual genetic starting points.

Things I noticed along the way...(pages refer to the edition of the book shown at the top there)

• p8 - "...every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about thee kilograms! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute." - the first mention of our big brains being the source of so many of our problems
• p14 - "in his native city of Midland City, OH" - Hey, we've seen Midland City before.
• p18 - "Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical." - A number of times in his books, Vonnegut had given us examples of objects whose value has changed dramatically because of one person's efforts or words or beliefs. This shows up again late in Galapagos when 'the nature cruise of the century' becomes The Nature Cruise of the Century because Jackie O signs on to take it and because the cruise's promoter refuses to refer to it as anything but 'the nature cruise of the century'.
• p19 - "The two with stars by their names would be dead before the sun went down." - Vonnegut again tells us of the fate of our characters long before that fate takes place.
• p24 - "It was all in people's heads. People had simply changed their opinion of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg." - Again, opinions changing the value of something - and our big brains causing problems.
• p65 - " 'Marriage: a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.' Ambrose Bierce (1842-?)...'Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine --/A sad, sour, sober beverage --by time/Is sharpen'd from its high celestial flavour,/Down to a very homely household savour.' Lord Byron (1788-1824) " - Two quotes from Vonnegut that don't present a positive view of marriage. Shocking...
• p70 - "I have already given my opinion as to the cause for the craze back then for having machines do everything that human beings did -- and I mean everything." - One of Vonnegut's recurring themes throughout his books is our urge to develop machines to replace ourselves and our subsequent dissatisfaction with being replaced.
• p74 - " And the people would eat all the food, gobble, gobble, yum, yum, and it would become nothing but excrement and memories." - Vonnegut seems to see everything we do as pointless and dramatically impermanent. 
• p81 - "And if I were criticizing human bodies as they were a million years ago, ... I would have two main points to make -- one of which I have surely made by now in my story: 'The brain is much too big to be practical.' " - Yup, big brains are the source of so many of our problems.
• p90 - ""He had just moved into new offices within the hollow crown of the Chrysler Building, formerly the showroom of a harp company" - We got to meet that harp company back in Jailbird.
• p108 - " Of course I love you,/So let's have a kid/Who will say exactly/What its parents did:/ 'Of course I love you,/So let's have a kid/Who will say exactly/What its parents did: ...Noble Claggett (1947-1966)" - We've seen a number of repetitive poems in Vonnegut's works (Yon Yonson from Slaughterhouse, for example). The mating dance of the blue-footed booby is also mentioned as being repetitive and without reason in this book.
• p111 - "Human beings use to be molecules which could do many, many different sorts of dances, or decline to dance at all-- as they pleased." - Vonnegut often refers to humans as nothing more than molecules or machines or animals trained or programmed to do what they do.
• p120 - "The other nobody was her husband, who himself played a crucial role in shaping human destiny by booking, when facing his own extinction, that one cheap cabin below the waterline." - Mary's husband Roy booked that cabin because he had gone insane, his big brain betraying him. If the cabin hadn't been booked, Mary wouldn't have become the Mother Nature to the future human race. Random events...
• p136 - "If I'm what's bothering you, you can tell me to take a flying f*** at a rolling doughnut, and I'll be the first to sympathize." - Vonnegut has used this phrase "a flying f*** at a rolling doughnut" before, in Slapstick.
• p149 - "His brain was telling him all sorts of things that were not true -- that he was the greatest dancer in the world, that he was the son of Frank Sinatra, that people envious of his dancing ability were attempting to destroy his brains with little radios, and on and on." - Dwayne Hoover had this happen to him. So did, perhaps, Billy Pilgrim. It's a common problem for Vonnegut's characters.
• p162 - "But then some tiny animals evolved into rodents. These easily found and ate the ggs of the tortoises -- all of the eggs." - The eventual downfall of the human race - other than the few survivors on Saint Rosalia - is a bacterium that evolves to destroy the eggs of human women. A parallel between us and animals...
• p219 - "I was the ghost of a ghost ship. I am the son of a big-brained science fiction writer, whose name was Kilgore Trout." - This is the first time that our narrator is given a name, and he is connected to Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's literary alter ego.
• p226 - "Mary said things like this to *Wait in so many words, but her tone alone would have delivers the same messages: 'We love you. You are not alone. Everything is going to be all right,' and so on." - Vonnegut often explains that all we hope for is a bit of reassurance, kindness, and connection. Here, a dying man is comforted by just those simple messages.
• p229 - "and he was mowing the lawn of a fabulously well-to-do automobile dealer and owner of local fast-food restaurants named Dwayne Hoover." - Hey, Dwayne, it's been a while since we've seen you. In these pages we find out that Dwayne's son - "a good dancer and very musical, just like *Wait" - was actually not Dwayne's genetic son.
• p255 - "Like the people on this accursed ship, my boy, they are led by captains who have no charts or compasses, and who deal from minute to minute with no problem more substantial than how to protect their self-esteem." - Vonnegut doesn't have a whole lot of faith in our leaders.
• p292 - "Have natural rafts of vegetable matter from anywhere arrived here in my time, with or without passengers? No." - One of the theories (source) of how some of the larger land animals got to the Galapagos Islands is that they arrived via natural rafts, the mechanism of which is seriously in doubt. Vonnegut mentions this in passing, and I found it funny.

This cover, by the way,
 is my favorite of the various
ones I found online.

Vonnegut commits his apocalypse via evolution (bacteria evolving to feed upon human eggs) but also offers his version of salvation via the same mechanism of natural selection and evolution. The first child born on Saint Rosalia is mutated because of her mother's exposure to radiation from Hiroshima and comes out with a thin coating of fur, protecting her from the rough rocks on and the cold water around the island. This advantageous trait is then passed along generation by generation as the last vestiges of humanity evolve to their new habitat.

It's nice to read a great Vonnegut book again.

Three more books to go before the end of the year.

Ranking Vonnegut's books based on which ones I enjoyed most (not necessarily which are the best or the worst)...

1. Salughterhouse Five, of the Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death (excellent)
2. Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday (excellent)
3. Cat's Cradle (really, very good)
4. Galapagos (really, very good)
5. Mother Night (really, very good)
6. God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine (good)
7. Jailbird (good)
8. Player Piano (meh)
9. Deadeye Dick (meh)
10. Slapstick (meh)
11. The Sirens of Titan (painful)

Still to come...Bluebeard...Hocus Pocus...Timequake...

Vonne Gut Reaction: Deadeye Dick

It's been too long. We've got four books - after today's review - left and a couple of months to finish this quest. So, let's get it on...

Today we take a look at Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut's second novel set in Midland, Ohio, home of Dwayne Hoover and the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts which we last saw welcoming Kilgore Trout in Breakfast of Champions. This book doesn't focus on Dwayne Hoover or the Arts Center, though both do play minor parts. We'll get to them in a few lines...

My thoughts as I read the book...(all pages refer to the 1982 edition, the printing with the iconic V-style cover)

• p1 - "They say the year is 1982, and that I am fifty years old....Blah blah blah." For a man who has made a living out of telling stories, Vonnegut seems to show a large amount of disdain for the written word. His view seems to be that people live, people die, and not much of anything that happens really matters. Ah, humanism...
• p12 - "My mother's peephole opened in Midland City in 1912." - Again we get Vonnegut's view of life as a very limited glimpse of the world. In Slaughterhouse 5, he described Earthlings' view of the world as being chained to a railcar able only to look at the world through a long pipe constantly travelling through the world. Vonnegut seems to prefer the Tralfamadorian view in which all time - past, present, future - are viewed as a whole. Here, though, we get humans and our peepholes on the world opening and closing as we are born and die.
• p20 - "Father once said to me when he was an old man, after he had spent two years in prison, after he and Mother had lost all their money and art treasures in a lawsuit..." - Vonnegut again tells us the end - or at least what is coming - in the story long before he needs to, a common practice of his. 
• p21 - "Little did I suspect back then that I myself, Rudy Waltz, would become a notorious murderer known as "Deadeye Dick." - Again, not even foreshadowing as much as total revelation of where we are headed.
• p33 - "Midland City has now been depopulated by a neutron bomb explosion." - The future is again revealed with no fanfare whatsoever. In the opening preface, Vonnegut explains that the neutron bomb explosion represents his hometown of Indianapolis where the city still stands but where the people he knew are long gone.
• p42 - Celia Hildreth is greeted by Rudy's father as though she were Helen of Troy. Vonnegut's women have often been placed on pedestals, unable to be real people, trapped as idealized lovers or beauties. Celia is such a woman, though we do eventually get to see her revulsion at this behavior, her confusion and hatred at her own gorgeous face because no one ever sees beyond this to the person that she really is. She eventually destroys this gorgeous face through the abuse of amphetamines and eventual swallowing of Drano.
• p50 - "She was married to Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer" - Dwayne is back from Breakfast of Champions, and he appears throughout the book to be the same person with an unhappy wife - the aforementioned Celia - and a disowned, homosexual son who plays at the local piano bar. Celia eventually dies, and we are spared reliving Dwayne's devolution into insanity that is covered in Breakfast of Champions. 
• p80 - "...a few months before the dedication of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts" - The arts center plays heavily in Breakfast of Champions, and here we get a fair bit of background into its creation - the reasons for Fred T Barry's championing of the center, Rudy Waltz's mother's opposition to the center, Midland City's indifference to the center, the center's eventual fall because of lack of maintenance.
• p81 - "No that I have known Haiti..." - Vonnegut's protagonists often find themselves ending their stories on tropical paradises - Galapagos, Cat's Cradle, Slapstick, Deadeye Dick. I wonder if Vonnegut at some point in his life visited a beautiful island locale and loved it that much, wishing to go back someday.
• p93 - "There stood my mother, Emma, who was herself a child. Outside of school, she had never had any responsibilities, any work to do. Her servants had raised her as children. She was purely ornamental." - Again, a woman on a pedestal. At one point in the story, Vonnegut says that much of our lives is spent as epilogue, the declining action after our greatest moment. Rudy's mother's story was epilogue from the moment that she got married, so much of her life being largely pointless. In other words, she's a fairly typical Vonnegut female.
• p133-4 - Rudy has a daydream about being a neuter and leading a parade of neuters. - Many of Vonnegut's characters - Dwayne Hoover, Billy Pilgrim, others - have these waking dreams that distract them from their humdrum lives.
• p168 - "One of the ten greatest paintings in the world, as far as he was concerned, was 'Crucifixion in Rome,' by John Rettig...It now hangs in the Cincinnati Art Museum." - So much of Vonnegut's world is of a Midwest that I know, and often I wonder which of the things in it are real.  Apparently this one is real and is, indeed, housed in Cincinnati, Sadly, though, I can't find an image of it online.
• p185 - In Rudy's play, Katmandu, Rudy tinkers "with the idea of having the voice of God coming from the back of the theater...The actress playing Celia could ask why God had ever put her on earth. And then the voice from the back of the theater could rumble, 'To reproduce. Nothing else really interests Me. All the rest is Frippery.' " -  Yup, that's pretty much Vonnegut to a tee. We're here for a while. We're born. We die. We should try to make each other happy - or at least not hurt each other, but it's all just frippery.
• p221 - "He sold his company to the RAMJAC Corporation..." - We've seen the RAMJAC Corporation before, in Jailbird. Turns out that the copyright on this edition of Deadeye Dick is 1982 by the Ramjac Corporation

Deadeye Dick is a fine book, a fun read, a decent enough tale, but it is one of Vonnegut's lesser works. There isn't any theme here outside of that maybe random actions shape our lives - a bullet fired at random, a neutron bomb set off by accident, a freak snowstorm, a poorly chosen art tutor. We are products of these actions, none of which are meant for any reason, none of which are intentional choices. We simply are.

In this telling of that same tale by Vonnegut, though, there simply isn't much humor to be had. Life happens, and nobody chuckles here.

That's Vonnegut for ya.

Next up, my second reading of Gallapagos.

Other reviews of Deadeye Dick...

• from Bob Corbett
• from the NYTimes

Vonne Gut Reactions: Slapstick, or lonesome no more

Let's see if I can name from memory where we've been so far in this quest...

• Player Piano - interesting idea, moderately interesting book
• The Sirens of Titan - mostly uninteresting book
• Mother Night - first success, least sci-fi book so far
• Cat's Cradle - outstanding, largely cohesive book
• Slaughterhouse Five - excellent, great read
• Breakfast of Champions - darker by far but still well written
• Slapstick - bit of fluff

After checking to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything, I find that I had forgotten God Bless You, Mr Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine. Not too bad a bit of progress through Vonnegut's bibliography so far. Easily on pace to finish in the calendar year and with the accelerating pace of summer, perhaps by the time school's back in session August 13 (blech).

I know Galapagos hasn't come up in this reading series yet, but I've read it before, so I'm going to mention it. This novel felt very much of a kind with Galapagos to me. Both are set in a quasi-dystopian future in which American (assumedly Earthin) society has dissolved. The main story of the book is told in reflection by an elder relating how the world that you and I know turned into the world that exists in the book.

Spoilers ahead (in case you hadn't noticed the spoiler-ific nature of most of my Vonnegut reviews)

In Slapstick our narrator is the last President of the United States of America, a mean who began life as a neanderthaloid (something similar to a Mongoloid but with a larger brow and assumedly without the corresponding mental deficiencies - though the doctors and parents assume that Wilbur Swain and his twin sister, Eliza, are mentally deficient at birth and for the first dozen or so years of their lives.The twins are soon shuffled off to a family mansion in Vermont where they live secret lives as geniuses, teaching themselves to read and write, to speak numerous foreign languages, and continuing to pretend to the servants taking care of them - and to their parents on the annual visit to honor the children's birthday - to be illiterate and unable to communicate beyond baby babbled of bluh and duh and the occasional fuffday. When the children do finally reveal their intelligence, they also reveal that this intelligence dulls considerably when they are separated from each other, even going so far as to name their separate, duller identities Betty and Bobby Brown.

The two are separated and put on drastically different paths, Wilbur heading to school and eventually university and medical school where he graduates last in his class of doctors in training. All of this happens while his sister is placed in a mental institution. When the two meet again later in life, they briefly and orgiastically (Vonnegut's description, not my addition) return to brilliance and part ways to see each other only once more before Eliza's eventual death on Mars. (yup, death on Mars - doesn't fit with the rest of the story in the least)

Wilbur is eventually elected President on the strength of his one apparently singular campaign promise to make each person in America part of an extended family by giving everyone a new middle name. These middle names will instantly give every American thousands of new brothers and sisters and hundreds of thousands of new cousins leaving everyone (as the title says) lonely no more.

This doesn't work quite perfectly as plagues - both bacterial and caused by miniaturized Chinese people (but you can, of course protect yourself by eating fish guts - seriously, I'm not making this up, it's all part of Vonnegut's plot in the book) - decimate the world population.

So, what'd I notice?

• After reading Slaughterhouse Five Calen asked me if I knew whether Vonnegut came from a religious background and whether that religious background had been challenged by Vonnegut's experiences in World War II. I think Vonnegut cleared this up pretty well in Slapstick's introduction where he describes his family from a generation or more before his. He explains that his family was of German descent and so tightly bound to Indianapolis that any relatives who left town returned to the bosom but that his generation had lost its German heritage in light of World War I and become more mobile with both he and his brother leaving town and not returning except for funerals. Vonnegut's quote regarding his family is "They were all religious skeptics, by the way." (page 6)
• Throughout the book Vonnegut's literary technique of repeating a phrase - "And so it goes" or "And so on" - is replaced here with a simpler and more nonsensical "Hi ho" which ends well over half of the book's paragraphs.
• Vonnegut dedicates this book to his sister Alice and writes this about her, "Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had lead a blameless life, she had never thought of her awful luck as anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her." Again, nothing that happens is directed from above or from some actors of fate. Our world is the way it is because it's the way it is. (page 13)
• This book is largely free of the recurring characters that Vonnegut had used throughout his previous books - with two minor exceptions. He brings back the lawyerly Norman Mushari, Jr. who we last saw in Rosewater trying to take a little piece of the Rosewater fortune. (page 111) The last President of the United States is also flown back to Indianapolis (or as it's known by then as Daffodiltown) by Captain Bernard O'Hare who we last saw in Slaughterhouse Five. (page 197).

I finished Slapstick and don't know what I'd just read. It's a nice enough read, pleasant, funny read, but it's a diaphanous tale, one that slips right through the fingers upon further examination.

Was Vonnegut bemoaning the loss of connected families? Was he eulogizing his lost sister? Was he turning away from then personal narratives of Slaughterhous and Breakfast? Was he just writing a simple tale to clear his head?

I would say yes to all of those.

Next up, Jailbird...

Vonne Gut Reactions: Breakfast of Champions, or goodbye, blue Monday

From Tom Conoboy's Writing Blog...

I’m never entirely sure whether Vonnegut is an optimistic pessimist or a pessimistic optimist but, whichever, it is a stance that allows no certainties except, perhaps, this: the ingenuity of man means that, however aracadian the situation we find ourselves in, sooner or later we’re bound to find a way of screwing it up. But then, being ingenious, we’ll find a way of remedying it. But then, being ingenious, we’ll find a way... And so it goes.

Vonnegut's position as optimist or pessimist is always in doubt. He states with no doubt that he isn't against war because being against war is like being against the weather. Mankind will war, ad we will use our babies to fight those wars. He sees religion as a pointless opiate and writes his surrogate character, Kilgore Trout, as an author whose works are appreciated only by crackpots, whose books are only stocked in pornography stores and then only as seldom-sold window dressing, and whose only friend is a pet bird who chooses his cage over freedom.

I contrast Kurt Vonnegut's position to that of one of our other great modern philosophers, Randal Graves, who once stated 'I hate people, but I love gatherings.' Vonnegut seems to hold the opposite position in that he seems to have loved people but hated gatherings. His faith in people is nearly unflappable, but his lack of faith in gatherings of people, in institutions and governments, religions and societies, is almost equally as complete. Throughout my tour of Vonnegut up to Breakfast, this pessimism about human groupings has been presented with levity, and the few times when it wasn't - the anti-religious, post-Mercury return to Earth scenes in Sires of Titan, for example - have made for the least enjoyable portions of Vonnegut's books for me.

Along these lines Breakfast of Champions was a tough read for me because the levity, the light-hearted, hopeful tone with which society's flaws were presented is almost entirely absent. In Vonnegut's own admission from his preface here, this is the work of an author turning fifty and clearing his mental bilges. He has spent much of his first six novels building up a quasi-connected world populated with Rumsfoords, Campbells, Trouts, Pilgrims, Rosewaters, Pefkos, and other denizens of Indianapolis and Illium. Vonnegut has spread these characters around his literary world, rewriting their family and personal histories, reshaping their careers and relationships as they were needed to fit the current story. In this novel then Vonnegut wipes the slate clean, dropping himself into the story's climax as a not omnipotent author shaping his characters to his whims, filling in identities and backstories as his characters interact with each other - as though he were both all-powerful creator and passive observer at the same time.

This was a tough read because it is the first of Vonnegut's books to be largely joyless. That doesn't mean, however, that the book isn't a good one, however. I'll come back to my conclusion about the worth and quality of the book after I go through the details that I noticed along the way.

• As we have seen in nearly every one of the novels so far, Vonnegut gives away the ending of the novel within his opening line, "This is the tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. ... Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane." (page 7 in the volume pictured at the top of the page)
• Throughout the book, a number of Kilgore Trout's novels are given summaries, some a sentence or two, others as long as a page or so. Each one reads like an interesting idea written by a second-rate writer, both all show some aspect of Vonnegut's view of the world. Is this simply a further effect of Vonnegut's age fifty clearing of the ideas in his head? Did he draw each of these from some card catalog of book/story ideas that he'd been building up for years? If so, were they ideas for Kurt Vonnegut stories or for Kilgore Trout stories?
• Trout's future is foretold throughout the book. We see that he will win the Nobel Prize for Peace and become the most famous, most well-respected writer and philosopher in the world. This is remarkably far from the small, disheveled, utterly unknown man that we meet in this story. His ideas, however - those that would eventually bring him the Nobel Prize and fame, are fully seen here. We even get to hear his Nobel acceptance speech:

  "Some people say there is no such thing as progress. The fact that human beings are the only animals left on Earth, I confess, seems a confusing sort of victory.

  All of the glimpses of Trout's work that we get show mankind as destined to, in some way, poison the universe or our planet, make it uninhabitable or just short of so. I wonder if this is simply Vonnegut trying to distance himself - if even slightly - from his negative thoughts. (page 25)
• Welcome back, Eliot Rosewater. We'd seen the first piece of fan mail that Kilgore Trout receives before. We saw Eliot Rosewater write is a few novels ago. Again we see that Trout assumed the letter was from a child because of the awful handwriting - which we get to see from Vonnegut a few pages later. (page 30)
• The drawings from Vonnegut are somewhat new, as well. There have been occasional sketches from Vonnegut throughout the first half dozen novels, but here the drawings take on a far more prominent role, showing up in the dozens. It's interesting to see a man who clearly has very little skill in drawing putting his works out there so openly.
• Vonnegut clearly doesn't believe in fate or destiny, at least not in any deterministic plan sort of  way. If we do have a destiny, it isn't because any higher power set that destiny into motion but rather because we can't effect any change in the direction and arc of our life. Even when, late in the book, Trout arrives in Midland City and meets his creations, he isn't able to control them absolutely but rather to nudge them here and there, to set things in directions where he hopes his desires will be enacted. On his truck travels from New York City to Midland City (in a state that is never named in this book but that I assumed to be in Indiana), Trout thinks to himself...

  [H]is head no longer sheltered ideas of how things could be and should be on the planet, as opposed to how they really were. There was only one way for Earth to be, he thought: the way it was.
  
  Everything was necessary. He saw an old white woman fishing in a garbage can. That was necessary. He saw a bathtub toy, a little rubber duck, lying on its side on a grating over the storm sewer. It had to be there.
  
  And so on.

  I'm happy to see that Vonnegut didn't fall back on "And so it goes" as some sort of greatest hit from one of the kings of catchphrase comedy. (page 106)
• Vonnegut relates that the theory of plate tectonics - or at least the use of plate tectonics to explain the creation of all the coal under West Virginia - was just announced/proven/publicized as he was writing this novel. He uses the movement of geologic plates as an analogy to describe the forces underneath the surfaces of his characters, causing them to move in directions that they had never intended. (page 147-8)
• Vonnegut writes...

  I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works on either the painter or the novelist. ... I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, test to be passed, a beginning, a middle, and an end.
  
  As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for themt o behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in storybooks. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.
  
  Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
  
  And so on.
  
  Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be as important as every other. All facts would be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out.Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
  
  If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the word around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos, instead.
  
  It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

  I am stunned at how much of himself Vonnegut puts into his books. He doesn't just wear his heart on his sleeve, he explains every bit of his feelings and emotions in his books. I feel honored to be invited into Vonnegut's world. (page 214-5)
• Again, Vonnegut writes...

  As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we are all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than a Pontiac, a moustrap, or a South Bend Lathe.

  Again, heart on his sleeve all over the page, and very much in line with things that Vonnegut's books have been saying about the world and his characters. No one of us matters more than any other. This isn't hopeless to me; it's empowering. I am as important as any other person on the planet. I must be treated with the dignity - or with the same lack of dignity - that every other person deserves and gets. (page 225) 
• Apparently Vonnegut recognizes that he doesn't write female leads. It's not something that only Calen and I have noticed. Vonnegut's surrogate, Kilgore Trout, has only written one book with a female lead character. (page 238)
• Near the end of the book, Vonnegut explains his use of "and so on" or "and so it goes". He explains that every person, every character's story continues on beyond what he writes, that none of them start and end their time while they're characters in Vonnegut's books, so he writes 'and so on' because their story continues.

So, Breakfast of Champions is a big downer. It's not funny. It's not entertaining or fun. It's serious and a glimpse into Vonnegut's darker thoughts.

Luckily, it's an outstanding book along the way. It's an open, honest exploration of an author's thoughts about his world, his characters, and his works. One of the things that I - and so many people - love about Kurt Vonnegut is that there is no artifice in his works. He isn't hiding behind his works. Every word, every page, every story reveals something about himself, and we love him - and his books - for that honesty and openness.

I'm really curious to see where Vonnegut goes from here because his writing has been following a significant arc, and I'm not sure that the arc can continue from here. His writing has been getting more and more personal, more and more frustrated and dark along the way. At some point, there has to be a turn away from the darkness. If we continue in this direction, I'm not going to enjoy this trek nearly as much as I have so far.

Vonne Gut Reactions: An Interview with the Man, Himself

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

I had no idea that Vonnegut had been interviewed - and I use that term very lightly - by Jon Stewart.

Vonne Gut Reactions: Slaughterhouse Five, or the Children's Crusade

And here we are...

The master's masterwork...the biggest ball in the canon...Slaughterhouse Five, or the children's crusade.

This is the Vonnegut that I started with back in senior AP English, the first work from Vonnegut that I'd ever read. It's the book that I've read more frequently than any other, having picked it up every few years since 1991. When people ask me what my favorite book is, this is the one that I typically put forth as my choice.

This is also the book via which most people are introduced to Vonnegut, and that tends to put a lot of people off because it's a very interesting book being neither straight forward war novel nor science fiction exploration. The combination of the two, however, makes for a phenomenal and gorgeous exploration of both.

I am thrilled to have reread that novel after reading Vonnegut's other works because I found lots of interesting things that I'd never noticed before because I didn't know his earlier works.

• The opening chapter is as direct and open a work as we've seen from Vonnegut thus far. This is the only time when he has put himself into his works without pretense of surrogate, of Kilgore Trout or some other charade that the character wasn't Vonnegut.
• On page 9 (of the edition shown above - all pages will reference that edition, whichever it happens to be because it's the edition that my students read each year in one of our Junior-year English classes and the one that our school library has and which I read because I'd loaned my copy to Calen a couple of years back) Vonnegut tells of his time as a newspaper man reporting on the death of a man at the hands of a runaway elevator. Vonnegut glosses over the grisly details but remembers exactly that his copywriter was eating a 3 Musketeers Bar. Here, as he does quite often throughout the book, Vonnegut's focus isn't on the horrible details of the events that he saw but rather on the small, often trivial details that flood back to his memory around those events. He will, throughout this book that is tangentially about the bombing of Dresden, treat war in the same way, glossing of the worst details and focusing instead on something that was noticed in passing while the atrocities were committed.
• In the same chapter, Vonnegut visits an old war buddy of his and finds the buddy's wife angry at Vonnegut.

  Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. "You were just babies then!" she said.
  
  "What?" I said.
  
  "You were just babies in the war - like the ones upstairs!"
  
  I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
  
  "But you're not going to write it that way, are you." This wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
  
  "I - I don't know," I said.
  
  "Well, I know," she said. "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And was will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."
  
  So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies or anybody else's babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encourage by books and movies.
  
  ...
  
  "I tell you what," I said, "I'll call it 'The Children's Crusade.' "

  ...and he did. (page 14)

• While our protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is waiting to be loaded onto a boxcar as a German prisoner of war, he meets Wild Bob whose invitation to visit him if ever Billy is in Cody, Wyoming we will hear throughout the book. At this point, Vonnegut firmly places himself in the story, not as narrator, not as character, but rather as background soldier. "I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare." (page 67)
• Vonnegut reappears in a few pages, calling up Billy Pilgrim in the middle of the night, his breath smelling of mustard gas and roses through the phone. (page 73)
• Billy questions the Tralfamadorians (they're back again), asking 'why me?' when he is abducted. Vonnegut has the aliens answer with equally senseless questions 'Why you? Why us? Why anything? ... The is no why?"
  
  This very much matches Vonnegut's position on destiny and reason throughout his books that I've read so far. It is a major theme in this novel as things happen because they do, 'and so it goes.' The Tralfamadorians view their lives, their world in this fashion, seeing the future, the past, the present all as having already happened and looking for no reasons or ways to change those events. What is simply is. What will be already is, as well. 'And so it goes.' (page 77)
  
  This philosophy is echoed by the German guard when asked the same question, 'Vy you? Vy anybody?' (page 93)
• In Billy's morphine dream he dreams of giraffes with horns like doorknobs, and the narrators asks why? He receives no answer. Neither our lives nor our dreams respond to logic or searches for reason. (page 99)
• Eliot Rosewater makes an appearance in the book, a fellow mental patient beside Billy. The universe of Vonnegut's books begins to tighten together, something that becomes tighter still in the next book I'll be reading (and that I've read before), Breakfast of Champions. (page 100)
• An English colonel, a German prisoner of war, speaks to Edgar Derby, an American officer. The colonel says 'You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved face, it was a shock. 'My God, my God -' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.' "
  
  Again, echoing Vonnegut's recurring theme of wars being fought by babies. (page 106)
• In one of the few appearances in this novel, Vonnegut's anti-religious stance is related by the Kilgore Trout in his novel The Gospel from Outer Space:

  He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
  
  But the Gospels actually taught this:
  
  Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.
  
  The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
  
  Oh, boy - they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!And that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes. (page 108)

• The Tralfamadorians choose not to dwell on the same times in their lives, focusing on and living in the happy times instead. Does this echo Vonnegut's reluctance, the long time it took him to write his Dresden novel? (page 117)
• Lance Rumfoors and his bride, the former Cynthia Landry, pass by the window of Billy's honeymoon suite. They aren't the Rumfoords of Sirens of Titan, but they are clearly part of the same family. (page 120)
• Howard W Campbell, the main figure of Mother Night, is a strong presence here as a German soldier reads from Campbell's monograph about the poor spirit of the American soldier and again when he appears in Dresden recruiting American soldiers for his Free American Corps to fight for the Germans against the Russians. Vonnegut even tells us that Campbell would eventually hang himself while on trial as a war criminal. Again, Vonnegut's universe comes together more tightly. (pages 129 & 163)
• In Campbell's monograph he tells of the wealthy being embarrassed by the poor in America, of the American soldiers being dressed as poor, adding to their lack of dignity when fighting. This returns to another of Vonnegut's recurring theme of the divide between poor and wealthy in America. Campbell relates as myth the American espousal that it is easy for a poor person to work hard and become wealthy, meaning that any poor person must be a failure if they remain poor. (page 130)
• In the final chapter, Vonnegut returns to us directly and muses on death, one of the recurring themes of Slaughterhouse Five:

  Robert Kennedy, whose summer house is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
  
  Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
  
  And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.

  Edgar Derby is shot for no reason at all, certainly nothing that merited killing when reflected on the actions of World War II. Billy's fellow corpse miner rips his insides to shreds and dies in the last days of the war. Even Billy walks openly to his death.
  
  So it goes.

This is Vonnegut's most distilled treatise on the pointlessness of life and of death and particularly of war, the fact that our actions have repercussions but that those repercussions aren't all that important in the long run because the world will keep turning no matter what we do, no matter who live or dies.

Vonnegut has previously mused that trying to stop wars is like trying to stop the wind.

Under a heavier hand, thoughts like these could lead to abject hopelessness, but Vonnegut's tone is far lighter. Even though there is no rhyme or reason to the world, we should still be kind and loving to each other for as long as we can be. As Eliot Rosewater related, "There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

As Vonnegut writes here, "And even if the wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death."

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I continue to be on the lookout for a female character in Vonnegut's works. Here we have three women: Billy's wife, Valencia; Billy's daughter, Lily; and Billy's paramour on Tralfamadore, Montana Wildhack. None of the three are anything more than one-dimensional companions with whom Billy passively spends his time when not unstuck in time.

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This is the finest of Vonnegut's works so far, and it is a brilliant novel and musing on life, death, and war. I'm glad I reread it.

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I am always amazed that people look to ban this book. Rarely has there ever been a better message in a book than that no matter how hopeless and pointless the world may appear, we should be kind to each other and look at the best parts of our lives.