THE NOVELS OF KURT VONNEGUT, JR.

sV David H Goldsmith

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

June 1970

Approved by Doctoral Committee ii

ABSTRACT

This study was a detailed examination of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a writer who was ignored by both critics and public until recently, but who now is attract­ ing considerable notice. Formerly dismissed as a science- fiction writer, Vonnegut in the past few years has been accorded a respectable place in contemporary literature. This study attempted to account for that phenomenon.

Research for the project consisted mainly of reading the primary sources and book reviews, because there was still little available in the way of valuable critical material on the author. For this reason, there are no footnotes except explanatory ones in the paper. It was a work of original criticism.

Vonnegut was found to be a novelist whose subjects are serious ones, but whose technique is comic. A chrono­ logical study of his novels indicated a trend away from pessimism toward a more sanguine view of life. An analysis of his technique showed it to be, if not innovative, fresh and imaginative, leading to a novel which is actually a pastiche of what are normally considered non-narrative materials. Since Vonnegut is probably still in mid-career, only tentative conclusions could be reached about his work. 1X1

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ...... 1

SUMMARIES OF THE SIX NOVELS...... 14

Player Piano ...... 14

The Sirens of Titan...... 24

Mother Night ...... 36

Cat * s Cradle ...... 46

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater...... 56

Slaughterhouse-Five...... 69

VONNEGUT’S THEMES...... 79

VONNEGUT'S HUMOR...... 100

VONNEGUT'S TECHNIQUE...... 110 1

INTRODUCTION

The elevation of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to a respectable place among contemporary American novelists has been one of the most encouraging literary phenomena of the past decade. For years considered nothing more than a science- fiction hack, Vonnegut has recently been praised by some of the most important critics of modern literature, and his works have become common sights both on bookstore shelves and in college classrooms. Articles about him have begun to appear not only in such popular periodicals as Time and Esquire but in the scholarly journals also, although his popular success still runs ahead of his crit­ ical acceptance; at this writing no study of his work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies or American Literature.

Nevertheless, Graham Greene and Leslie Fiedler have cham­ pioned him, and it seems only a matter of time before he achieves the status now accorded to such contemporaries as Bellow, Malamud, and Barth. This study will attempt to explain some of the reasons for Vonnegut's acceptance as a writer of importance by a detailed examination of his novels, their themes, techniques, and humor. It must be acknowledged at this point that because Vonnegut, at forty seven, is still in mid-career, some of the conclusions reached will have to be tentative; but since he has such a considerable body of work behind him—six novels and two 2

volumes of stories, nearly all of which deal with the

same few themes—it seems safe to make certain assertions

about his work up to the present and perhaps a few well-

qualified speculations about his future production.

Since Vonnegut’s personal life plays such an impor­

tant part in his work, it is first necessary to recount

briefly the major events in it which have shaped his career.

Vonnegut—the name comes from a German river called the

Vonne—was born into a successful middle-class family in

Indianapolis in 1922. His father and one of his grand­

fathers were architects, while his other grandfather owned

a brewery. An older brother became a physicist. Following

a typical midwestern boyhood and graduation from high school,

Vonnegut enlisted in the army as an infantry private during

World War II. He served as a battalion scout and was cap­

tured by the Germans while on patrol. They put him to work

in a factory in Dresden making malt syrup for pregnant women,

and while there he survived the fire-bombing raid of February

13» 1945. After the war he attended Cornell, Carnegie Tech,

and the Universities of Tennessee and Chicago, with indif­

ferent results. For a time he worked as a public relations man for General Electric in Schenedtady, New York, the ’'Ilium”

of his novels. In 1949 he determined to make a living as a writer, and quickly began publishing short stories in such

periodicals as Collier's, Cosmopolitan, The Lady’s Home Journal,

and The Saturday Evening Post, and science-fiction magazines 3

such as Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction. Vonnegut did not take this work seriously; he did it ”in order to finance the writing of novels,” the first of which appeared in 1952, Player Piano. In the eighteen years since then he has published five others, The Sirens of Titan (1959),

Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You,

Mr. Rosewater (1965), and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and two volumes of short stories, Canary in a, Cathouse (1956), and Welcome to the Monkey House (1968). He presently lives with his wife, their three children and the three children of his deceased sister, in the village of Barnstable on

Cape Cod.

Three events stand out in this history, and find their way into Vonnegut's writing: his unhappy college experiences, his work for General Electric, and, most important, his wartime adventures. From his academic training and a later stint as a teacher at the University of Iowa's Writer's

Workshop in 1965-6, Vonnegut developed a distrust of academe and became convinced of the need for individual rather than corporate solutions to man's problems. His brush with science, tangential though it was, instilled in him a pro­ found dislike of technology as panacea; it is possible that his brother's proofession has influenced him also in this respect. Most important of all, the Dresden bombing, sense­ less and nightmarish, spelled doom for the comfortable middle—class ideologies of his Indianapolis upbringing. Not 4

generally known about even today in the United States, the fire-bombing raid on Dresden was probably the most ghastly atrocity committed by the Allies during the war.

Dresden had so little strategic importance that it was never bombed prior to the r&id, and the citizens (and prisoners) assumed it never would be. As Vonnegut describes it,

. . . the city was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It was sup­ posedly an "open” city, not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or war industries there. But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling add drive fire­ men underground. And then hundreds of thousands of tiny in­ cendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep the firemen in their holes, and all the little fires grew, joined one an­ other, became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto: fire storm. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. And so what? We didn’t get to see the fire storm. We weee in a cool meat-locker under a slaughter­ house with our six guards and ranks and ranks of dressed cadavers of cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep. We heard the bombs walking around up there. Now and then there would be a gentle shower of calcimine. If we had gone above to take a1"look, we would have been turned into arti­ facts characteristic of fire storms: seeming pieces of charred firewood two or three feet long—ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will. The-malt syrup factory was gone. Everything was gone-but the cellars where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men. So we were put to work as corpse miners, breaking 5

into shelters, bringing bodies out. And I got to see many German types of all ages as death had found them, usually with valuables in their laps. Sometimes relatives would come to watch us dig. They were interesting, too.

This was a unique if grisly experience, like being

an American at ground-zero at Hiroshima, and what made

it even more horrible to Vonnegut, was that, as a priso­

ner, he was ironically protected from the bombs and the

fire. Planes from- his country did the bombing, and he,

perpetrator, observer, and target all at the same time,

survived. Little wonder that Malachi Constant, the Ameri­

can millionaire in The Sirens of Titan, would later state,

"Somebody up there likes me.” And less wonder that Winston

Niles Rumfoord would cause him to change the phfease to

read, ”1 was»a victim of a series of accidents, as are we

all. »

Rarely has a single incident so dominated the work of

a writer. The guilt Vonnegut felt about Dresden stuck to

him like a Lord Jim complex. He tried unsuccessfully for nearly twenty-five years to write a novel about this ex­ perience, always putting it off in favor of other projects, but he was never able to exclude it entirely. Fire and fire departments appear in all of his novels. (Vonnegut was himself* a volunteer fireman for a time.) In The Sirens

i of Titan hei examines the possible reasnns for mass execution of the sort accomplished at Dresden by having nearly 200,000 6

Martians slaughtered by Earthlings according to a prear­ ranged plan known only to one man. The hero of this novel,

Malachi Constant, is an unwitting tool in this scheme, as was Vonnegut at Dresden. In Mother Night he again attempts to cope with his guilt by making his protagonist a reputed traitor who hangs himself for ’’crimes against himself.”

In the introduction to the 1966 paperback edition of this novel, Vonnegut accepts the blame for his country’s (and

Germany’s) inhumanity. In Cat’s Cradle, ice is substituted for fire, but the results are the same, as is the cause.

The protagonist here also plays the same roles the author played in Dresden; Sin the destruction of the world by

”ice-nine” he is on? the scene of the fatal accident, has traveled to it (by plane) with the Americans who brought the substance to San Lorenzo, and he survives (at least temporarily) to write about the event. God Bless You, Mr.

Rosewater concerns the efforts of Eliot Rosewater to expunge the guilt he feels for having accidentally killed some

German firemen while serving with the infantry in Germany.

One of his Foundation’s telephones in Rosewater County,

(Muncie) Indiana, takes fire calls, and the horn that he has donated to the firehouse is

the loudest alarm in the Western Hemisphere. It was driven by a seven—hundred-horsepower Messer- schmitt engine that had a thirty-horsepower electric starter. It had been thesamain air-raid siren of Berlin during the Second World War. The Rosewater Foundation had bought it from the West German 7

government and presented it to the town anon­ ymously .

Eliot also has in his office a book titled The Bombing of

Germany, with a detailed description of the fire storm that racked Dresden, and when he has his nervous breakdown on a bus bound for Indianapolis, it is the bombing of that city that he sees last before blacking out mentally. Finally, with Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut was able to deal directly with his wartime nightmare. This time he likens it to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and concludes that "this

[novel] is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt." One hopes that, having looked back on the ruins for some twenty-five years now, he will at last be able to wipe the salt from his body and begin anew.

Although Vonnegut’s stylistic ancestors are identified later in this study as Anatole France and Carl Capek, he is entirely an American writer. In his concern with moral issues and with the time continuum he seems a direct descendent of

Hawthorne and Faulkner, although the great difference in style and tone serves to obscure thisSfact* Vonnegut does not seem so much concerned with the fall of Adam as he does with the consequences of that fall on Adam's descendents, but the two are so intertwined as to be nearly the same theme. Of course, he is a comic writer, so any comparison with the great moralists of our literature must be quali­ fied by that fact; it need not be, however, in a discussion 8

of the relation of Vonnegut to Mark Twain. The parallels

are many. Twain was first thought of as a writer of child­

ren’s books and as a humorist; Vonnegut was labeled a

science-fiction writer and a black humorist, none of these

four appelations being the kind a serious writer likes to

see listed after his name. Twain was one of the few nine­

teenth century novelists to dabble in non-gothic fantasy,

and it takes no procrustean ability to see the similarities

between Eat * s Cradle and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur

Court, or between The Sirens of Titan and The Mysterious

Stranger. Vonnegut has not written a Huckleberry Finn, but

Billy Pilgrim and, to some extent, Eliot Rosewater bear

considerable resemblance to Huck, as does Kilgore Trout to

Nigger Jim. Twain was accused of writing non-literature

(whatever that is) just as Vonnegut has been described as

a modern proponent of the anti-literary novel (whatever

that is). The truth, of course, is much Simpler than the

terminology; Each is a comedian, literary prankster, and tail-tale teller, and each suffered because he refused to

dress his serious themes in respectable trappings. Twain

is much more the pessimist, perhaps because his pessimism

came to him much later in life. Vonnegut was in his early twenties when he watched the world go awry; he did not react to it with the bitterness of old age, and his most recent works indicate that, barring some unforseen world cataclysm,

he will not sink into the nihilism apparent in Twain’s last 9

writings. The philosophy in Sirens is much more sophisti­ cated than that of The Mysterious Stranger—as well it should be—even if essentially the same conclusions are reached.

The metaphysics in each novel ultimately ends with the belief that the universe is a joke, but Twain’s joke is much more cruel, as Philip Traum is much more a nightmare than Winston Niles Rumfoord.

In low comedic technique Vonnegut owes much to Twain, especially in the use of non sequitur. Such typical pas­ sages as the following are strongly reminiscent of Twain’s more ribald descriptions, which begin innocently enough but then twist, illogically and hilariously: "He [Norman

Mushari] was of Lebanese extraction, the son of a Brooklyn rug merchant. He was five feet and three inches tall. He had an enormous ass, which was luminous when bare." Or:

I looked up Fata Morgana at this point in my reading: learned that it was, in fact, a mirage named after Morgan le Fay, a fairy who lived at the bottom of a lake. It was famous for appearing in the Strait of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily. Fata Morgana was poetic crap, in short.11

As Twain was fond of throwing a bone to his reader and then abruptly pulling it back, so is Vonnegut. After quoting a eulogy by Eliot Rosewater on science-fiction writers,

Vonnegut begins the next paragraph with "Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn’t write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn’t matter." Beyond 10

the obvious fact that all modern American comic novelists owe a debt to Twain, it would seem that Vonnegut, with his relaxed, colloquial style, owes a special one.

Placing Kurt Vonnegut in the tradition of American literature is not a difficult task; finding comparisons between him and his contemporaries proves far more elusive.

Among earlier twentieth century novelists, his work bears some resemblance to Lewis' in its satiric content and use of striking psychological detail, but there the similarity ends. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is similar thematically to West's Miss Lonelyhearts, but onefehesitates to continue that comparison because of the antipodal difference in the tone of their work. Since Vonnegut is a fantasist, and fantasy has not been an important literary mode in America, recent ancestors are hard to find also. Even today, the work of contemporaries who empty the technique does not afford much comparison with Vonnegut, or shed much light on his novels. Although some critics put Catch-22 and

Cat's Cradle in the same pigeonhole, the books are only superficially similar. Heller's target is limited--the

U.S. Air Force-while Vonnegut is more catholic in his animosity, and the styles of the books are in no way alike.

James Purdy's Malcolm bears some resemblance to portions of

Vonnegut's writing, most particularly Slaughterhouse-Five, and Cabot Wright is a hero with the same "flamboyantly sick" intentions as Eliot Rosewater, but both Purdy and Vonnegut 11

have left black humor behind and are seeking new directions.

Indeed, as will be discussed more fully elsewhere, Cat ’s

Cradle is the only novel of Vonnegut•s which can accurately be termed black humor, so any mention of him in relation to that ’’school” must be heavily qualified. For this reason,

Thomas Pynchon, who is undeniably a fantasist, bears very little stylistic similarity to Vonnegut thus far; V. strikes one as a European novel, although it must be admitted that

The Crying of Lot 49 in its brevity and its version of the apocalypse is similar to Vonnegut’s middle works. The novels written in the last fifteen years in America which are most like ones of Vonnegut are Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King

(in which the protagonist is very similar to Eliot Rosewater in his life style) and Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian.

There is very little other comparison between Bellow and

Vonnegut, but Southern’s portrayal of Guy Grand as a dis­ enchanted, cynical millionaire, while the obverse of Eliot

Rosewater, has all the elements Vonnegut is accustomed to work with—brevity, fantasy, and comedy. Indeed, Southern’s screenplay, Dr. Strangelove, with its grotesque characteri­ zations and doomsday comedy, seems a cross between Mother

Night and Cat»s Cradle, although Southern’s less than serious attitude toward writing prevents further comparison, as is also the case with such writers as Richard Brautigan and

Donald Barthelme.

InEngland, the work of William Golding is similar to 12

Vonnegut’s in many ways. Golding’s favorite theme, original

sin, is not too different from the theme of guilt which

Vonnegut examines in most of his novels. Certainly, the

tendency of both authors to ask epistemological questions

is pronounced, although Golding emphasizes point of view

while Vonnegut, staying mostly with a third person omnis­

cient narrator, raises his epistemological questions by

characterization. What is the truth about Eliot Rosewater,

for instance? Or Kilgore Trout? Or the ubiquitous bird

which keeps repeating ”Poo-tee-wheet?” in the novels? He

seems to be asking the reader to examine the ways of knowing

he has come to take for granted by posing these questions

which seem unanswerable by traditional, rational means.

Golding's use of fantasy is also a basis for comparison.

Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, and Pincher Martin all

have, to some-.degree, fantastic frameworks similar to those

used in Cat’s Cradle, Mother Night, and Rosewater. Yet the

similarities between these two writers are essentially super­

ficial ones; Vonnegut is a comedian and Golding a tragedian, making them fundamentally as different as Butler and Hardy.

Of all the novelists who have made their reputations

since World War II, the one who bears the greatest resemblance

to Kurt Vonnegut is Germany’s Gunter Grass. This fact should not be surprising if one remembers that the most important

event in Vonnegut’s life took place in Nazi Germany. Each

deals with the theme of guilt, especially war guilt, each 13

works within an eccentric ambience, and each is a satirist.

Grass’ novels are filled with the same kind of grotesque characters found in Vonnegut’s. Oskar the dwarf not only travels back and forth in time like Billy Pilgrim, but he also shares the same angsts the children of Cat and Mouse rebel against the same kind of disinterested state control as the insurrectionists in Player Piano; the viewers of the wartime fantasies in Dog Years are as distrusted by them as Vonnegut’s Earthlings in The Sirens of Titan. Every­ where in the novels of these two writers one finds the same absurd yet not hopeless world, one which they are seeking to change with their hilarious commentaries on it.

Now that Kurt Vonnegut has been seen in the context of this variety of labels, literary ancestors, and com­ patriots, it is now time to examine him more closely, beginning with a discussion of each of the six novels. 14

PLAYER PIANO

Player Piano (1952) is a work of science-fiction in

that it is set in the future and uses mechanical gadgetry

to some extent. Its thematic concerns, however, are eco­ nomic and political, its tone polemic. Of previous novels it most closely resembles 1984 and Brave New World.

The setting is Ilium, New York, sometime in the future, when war has been abolished and the scientific revolution has extended the fruits of its technology to all citizens.

Ilium is a microcosm of society,

divided into three parts. In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all of the people live.

During World War II, business and industry discovered that they could function more efficiently without inefficient people; the result is that society has become almost fully automated, with the exception of such skills as barbering and bartending, deemed necessary when attempts to automate them failed.

They’d set up the experimental unit with coin machines and endless belts to do the serving, with full light, with continuous soft music from a tape recorder, with seats scientifically designed by an anthropologist to give the average man the absolute maximum in comfort. The first day had been a sensation, with a waiting line extending blocks. Within a week of 15

the opening, curiosity had been satisfied, and it was a boom day when five customers stepped in. Then this place had opened up almost next door, with a dust-and-germ trap of a Victorian bar, bad light, poor ventilation, and an unsani­ tary, inefficient, and probably dishonest bar­ tender. It was an immediate and unflagging success.

Nearly everything else has been automated, however, with the natural result that millions of people have nothing to do. Upon graduation from secondary school, each person has an ’’Achievement and Aptitude Profile” keypunched for him, reducing him to an IBM card. Any man or woman whose

IQ is insufficient to qualify him for college work leading to the Ph.D. and thence into a supervisory position is forced into either the army or the Reclamation and Recon­ struction Corps, the ’’Reeks and Wrecks," who are, simply road repairmen. The only cash they receive for this work is spending money, since regular deductions are made from their paychecks for car and furniture payments, rent, and the myriad insurances that make their lives secure. The women, blessed with fully automated homes, likewise have nothing to do.

Pride in accomplishment exists only on the managerial level, and it is a bogus pride kept alive by a lodge brother atmosphere and yearly retreats to "The Meadows," where careers are made or broken amidst

an orgy of morale building—through team athletics, group sings, bonfires and skyrockets, 16

bawdy entertainments, free whisky and cigars; and through plays . . . which pleasantly but unmistakably made clear the nature of good deportment within the system . . .

This elite class of engineers and managers, all with Ph.D’s,

keeps the machinery running smoothly, although they too

actually have little to do and are occasionally put out

of work by a machine of their own invention. They form

also a sort of religious hierarchy, constantly concerned with rationalizing its own existence and proclaiming the

superiority of the system. The hero of the novel, Paul

Proteus—the reference here would seem to be to Steinmetz rather than the Greek god—is of this class, and the con­ flict in the story is played out through his gradual aware­ ness that theysystem strips the masses of their dignity, and his unsuccessful attempts to reform it.

Proteus* credentials are impeccable; he is the son of the nation’s "first National Industrial, Commercial, Com­ munications, Foodstuffs and Resources Director, a position approached in importance only by the president of the United

States," He is happily married to a rather unintelligent but faithful girl whom he rescued from false pregnancy, and who would rather die than admit that she is in the elite only through marriage. Director of the Ilium works, Proteus is soon to be tapped for a more important, regional position

He betrays, however, some atypical weaknesses. He is fond of the inefficient Building $58 for its historical interest 17

because it is Edison’s old machineshop, built in 1886^,

he drives an old car with a broken headlight, and he

occasionally slips off to Homestead to drink in the Vic­

torian saloon there. Through his best friend, Finnerty,

who is thoroughly disillusioned with Utopia, Proteus meets

the underground resistance in the area and eventually, in­

advertently aided by his wife, leads the insurrection

against the government, which ends in an orgy of destruc­

tion and the defeat of the rebels.

Proteus’ allies in the struggle are Einnerty, the

archetypal Irish rebel; the Reverend James J. Lasher,

Chaplain, Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, the genius

behind the revolt; Professor Ludwig von Neumann, ’’who had

taught political science at Union College in Schenectady

until the Social Sciences Building was torn down to make

space for the new Heat and Power Laboratory”; Luke Lubbock,

head of one of the numerous social lodges the masses join

in search of dignity; and Harold, an Amos-and-Andy Negro

perpetually at war with a ’’traffic safety education box—

a tape recording and loudspeaker arrangement—which had been

fixed to a lamp post outside his bedroom window.” Harold’s

resentment against this invasion of his privacy is typical

of the harrassed citizens’:

^Vonnegut might have charged Edison with the crime of initiating automation, but he does not, nor does he in the short story, ’’Torn Edison’s Shaggy Dog,” which lays the blame on a precocious canine. 18

’’’Look out!’ it say. ’Don’t you go crossin’ in the middle of the block!’” said Harold, mim­ icking the tape-recording. ”Fo’ two years, ol’ loudmouth and me done lived together. An’ evah last time some’un come on pas’, they hits ’at ’lectric eye, and ol’ loudmouth, he just naturally gotta shoot off his big ba-zoo. ’’Don* step out ’tween two parked cars,’ he say. No matter who ’tis, no matter what tahm ’tis. Loudmouth, he don’ care. Jus’ gotta be sociable. ’Cayful, now! Don’ you do this! Don’ you do that!* 01’ mangy dog come bah at three in the mornin’, and ol• loudmouth jus’ gotta get his two cents wuth in. ’If you drahve,’ he tells that ol* mangy dog, ’if you drahve, don’ drink!’ . . .”

Of these rebels, only Proteus has unselfish reasons for

attacking the system. Their plan, based on the fighting

qualities of the lodge members and the striking capacity

of bombs home-made from Coca-cola bottles, never has a

chance to succeed.

This first novel, with its conventional Orwellian

plot, is probably the least successful of Vonnegut’s full-

length works; The action unfolds without surprise, the

exposition, especially in the first chapters, is often clumsy

and tautological, and the characterization, including that

of the hero, is weak and tends to stereotype, a fault of

which Vonnegut will continue to be guilty in his later novels. Piano does, however, have much to recommend it.

Vonnegut’s narrative ability, while not yet coupled with

stylistic brilliance, is nonetheless considerable; in addi­ tion, this is one of the earliest novels to deal with the

problems created by automation. The satiric attack on the 19

American ethic of efficiency, and progress at any cost, has even greater relevance today. The uneducated urban

Negro of 1970 is in the same predicament as the citizens of Player Piano.

Vonnegut’s satiric tone is Horatian, although he is not above stooping to Swiftian vulgarity on occasion.

Discussing the requirements for entry into the managerial elite, Proteus and his conspirators ruefully concede that sex can still break down any barriers, that low-IQ women can marry into the intellectual priesthood. ”’Sex can still batter down all sorts of social structures—you’re right,’ Lasher agreed. ’Big tits will get you in anywhere,’ said Finnerty.” Except for these descents, however, he concentrates on the striking, amusing detail, concentrates on it so much, in factor that it often serves the place of characterization: Anita, Proteus’ wife, ends nearly every conversation with him by saying, ”1 love you, Paul,” thus establishing her place in his world. Proteus invariably replies, ”1 love you, Anita.” This repetition of phrase serves to characterize her mind and marital tactics for the reader, but after the third or fourth time it becomes Difekens- ian stereotype. A ”tall, ruddy-faced man” appears several times in the novel, whenever something mechanical needs immediate repair. The first time, when he makes a fuel pump gasket from his hatbrim for Proteus’ used car, is important, and makes a point about the usurpation of a rather artistic 20

quality of man by automation, but the regular reappearance

of the tinker gives the reader a feeling of being tricked.

At times, however, Vonnegut is quite successful with

such overt manipulation of character. The regular appear­

ance in the novel of two foreigners, the Shah of Brahtpur

and his interpreter and nephew, Khashdrahr Miasma, and Dr.

Ewing J. Halyard, of the State Department, contributes an

hilarious counterpoint to the activities of the principals.

The Shah, fortified with a supply of Sumklish, the fisacred

Kolhouri drink,” is in the United States on an inspection tour, to see if its modern methods can help his backward, unautomated country, and he is totally unimpressed with what he sees.

’’The government does not own the machines,” [said Halyard.] ’’They simply take that part of industry’s income that once went into labor, and redistribute it. Industry is privately owned and managed, and coordinated—to prevent.the waste of competition. ... By eliminating human error through machinery and needless competition »through organization, we’ve raised the standard of living of the average man immensely.” Khashdrahr stopped translating and frowned perplexedly. ’’Please, this average man, there is no equivalent in our language, I’m afraid.” ’’You know,” said Halyard, ’’the ordinary man, like, well, anybody--these men working back on the bridge, the man in that old car we passed. The little man, not brilliant but good-hearted, plain ordinary, everyday kind of person.” Khashdrahr translated. ”Ahah,” said the Shah, nodding. ”Takaru.” ’’What did he say?” ’’Takaru, ” said Khashdrahr. ”Slave.” 21

During a visit to the home of a Reek and Wreck, the

Shah is shown the wonders of an automated kitchen:

"Now, if you’ll follow me into the kitchen,” said Doctor Dodge . . . "You’ll see the radar range. Cooks by high frequency, and cooks the inside of whatever’s being cooked as fast as the outside. Cooks anything in a matter of seconds, with perfect control. Make bread without a crust, if you want to.” "What is the matter with crust on bread?" asked Khashdrahr politely. "And this is the ultrasonic dishwasher and elothes-washer," said Dodge. "Hi-frequency sound passing though the water strips dirt and grease off anything in a matter of seconds. Dip in, take out, bingo!" "And then what does the woman do?" asked Khash­ drahr. ¡"Then she puts the clothes or dishes in this drier, which dries them out in a matter of seconds, and—here’s a nifty trick, I think—gives the clothes a spanking-clean outdoors odor, like they were dried in the sun, with this little ozonellamp in here." "And then what?" asked Khashdrahr. "She feeds the clothes through this ironer, which can do what was an hour’s ironing before the war in three minutes. Bing!" "And then what does she do?" asked Khashdrahr. "And then she’s done." "And then what?" Doctor Dodge reddened perceptibly. "Is this a joke?"

These sections, with the exception of the visit to a barber shop, during which the barber gives a totally unnecessary exposition of the author’s position, are the best parts of the novel. The satire here is cutting, and economical, and the final disposition of the Brahtpurians, thrown into the back of an ammunition truck by the rebels, and of Dr. Halyard, stripped of his Ph.D. because of the 22

discovery of a clerical error at Cornell, adds a final,

appropriate comment.

Player Piano is longer than any of Vonnegut’s other

novels, with the exception of The Sirens of Titan, by

some one hundred pages, much of it in the very effective

subplot, but much of it also in padding, and extensive

and obvious foreshadowing of the conventional big scenes

which occur periodically and predictably. The prose is

reminiscent of Steinbeck at his worst, and Budd Schulberg,

the images by their very scarcity tend to draw attention

to themselves, and the symbols—for instance, a cat swept

up and spat out by an automated vacuum cleaner, a checker

game between the hero and a robot—are bludgeon-sized.

What saves the novel from mediocrity and may give it a

niche in dystopian literature is Vonnegut’s wry imagination.

If the overall polemic falls short of its mark, the details

along the way are often quite telling: the displaced worker

who makes his living as a TV hustler, winning bets that he

can identify the lyrics of popular songs on a television

set with the sound turned off; the one remaining farmer, who, unimpressed by a Doctor of Realty, tells him that he

is »doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit, ’• and that he can be found "out in the barn shoveling [his] thesis;" and perhaps the best scene in the novel, the nightmarish

rally at the Meadows, during which the engineers engage in an orgy of rationalization and corporate soul-searching 23

at the end of which Proteus is expelled from the frater­ nity. Although Player Piano exhibited many of the typical first novel faults, it was clearly more than a science- fiction potboiler, and gave plentiful evidence that Vonnegut in 1952 was a young writer with talent and a mind to speak if he could find a mature style. 24

THE SIRENS OF TITAN

It was seven years later, in 1959, before Vonnegut

got a second novel published, and in paperback form. This book, The Sirens of Titan, despite its humble origins and its science-fiction trappings, is a serious and highly original metaphysical treatise, which, although different in style, is in the tradition of Siddhartha, Per Zauber- berg, and L’Etranger. Beneath the surface interest and amusement generated by space ships, an invasion of Earth by Mars, a sojourn in the caves of Mercury, and an exile on one of the moons of Saturn, Vonnegut is wrestling with nothing less than the cosmological question.

The novel’s plot, even to one not enamored of the science-fiction sub-genre, is fascinating. In the days of the "nightmare age,n "between the Second World War and the

Third Great Depression,” Winston Niles Rumfoord, wealthy

Newport socialite, has accidentally flown his space ship into a "chrono-synclastic infundibulum,” a curved time fun­ nel, which has resulted in the disintegration of Rumfoord and his dog, and their subsequent reappearance as "wave phenomena—apparently pulsing in a distorted spiral with its origins in the sun and its terminal in Betelgeuse.” Rum­ foord, who, because of his accident, can read minds and see into the future, summons to his estate Malachi Constant, the richest and luckiestwian in America, to tell him of a future that includes being bred like a farm animal on Mars— 25

with Rumfoord’s wife, Beatrice—and visits to Mercury and Titan before returning to Earth.

Constant, whose first name means "faithful messenger,"

Vonnegut points out, tries to forestall this prophecy by selling his space ship, going on a fifty-two day debauch, and sending Mrs. Rumfoord insulting letters:

Hello from sunny California, Space Baby! Gee, I am sure looking forward to jazzing a high-class dame like you under the twin moons of Mars. You’re the only kind of dame I never had, and I’ll bet your kind is the greatest. Love and kisses for a starter. Mai.

Beatrice, for her part, is prepared to take cyanide rather than to prove her husband right.

After this rousing beginning, Vonnegut digresses in order to make one of his frequent attacks on acquired and inherited wealth, a digression, however, which accumulates evidence to support the thesis of the novel. Malachi Con­ stant’s father has amassed a huge fortune by an uncanny ability to play the stock market; his system, we discover, has been simply to take a Gideon Bible, start with the first sentence in Genesis, divide the letters into pairs, and buy stock of corporations having those initials, and so on through the Bible. Out of this successful system has come Magnum

Opus, Constant’s super-conglomerate, "a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws with­ out actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance."

Suddenly the system stops working, and Malachi, bankrupt and 26

harrassed by creditors, accepts a lieutenant-colonelcy in

the Army of Mars. The same day Beatrice is kidnapped by

other Martian agents, setting the stage for the fulfillment

of her husband's prophecy.

The next third of the novel describes the invasion of

Earth by Martians (who are transplanted Earthlings), the

defeat and slaughter of the invaders, and the subsequent

revelation that the entire campaign, encompassing as it did

the kidnapping of thousands of people, the establishment of

an entire society on Marts, and the invasion itself, made

possible by a new power source called the "Universal Will

to Become," had all been engineered by Winston Niles Rumfoord

for the purpose of inaugurating a new religion on Earth—

the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Rumfoord, whose

vantage point in the galaxy enables him to see how ridiculous

is the idea.of a personal deity, is playing the role of a

Nietzschean Superman. He brings out the Winston Niles Rum­

foord Revised Authorized Bible, for the three million con­

verts, provides them with martyred saints (the Martians),

sickens them on war (the invasion, because the Martians had

nothing but outdated weapons and attacked in forces no more than battalion size, was a massacre that not even Earthlings

could enjoy^i, and gives them for the first time a sound, em­

pirical basis for a religion.

"Why should you believe in this religion, rather than say another?" said Rumfoord. "You 27

should believe in it because I, as head of this religion, can work miracles, and the head of no other religion can. What miracles can I work? I can work the miracle of pre­ dicting, with absolute accuracy, the things that the future will bring."

The religion’s motto is, "Take Care of the People, and

God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself."

Beneath all this fantastic detail, of course, Vonnegut is seriously grappling with the theological and metaphysical ajspects of suffering. Rumfoord’s Martians are Vonnegut’s

Job, as this excerpt from an Utterly Indifferent sermon demonstrates:

"0 Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia—what could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that couldst possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truth­ ful and dignified at last. No longer can a fool like Malachi Constant point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, 'Somebody up there likes me.’ And no longer can a tyrant say, ’God wants this or that to happen, and anybody who doesn’t help this or that to happen is against God.’ Oh, Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain!"

—The Reverend C. Horner Redwine

Malachi, meanwhile, is performing another function of 28

Rumfoord*s plan. He is in exile in the caves of Mercury,

awaiting return to Earth as the Messiah, who will prove

this time not that there is a beneficent God, but exactly

the opposite. He is, inhis apotheosis as Space Wanderer

and his real identity of Malachi Constant, both Christ and

Satan. When,«upon his arrival in Newport, he utters the

prophecy-fulfilling words, "I was a victim of a series of

accidents as are we all," and Rumfoord exposes him as the

hated Constant, he becomes an object lesson for all mankind,

and, because he is to be further exiled to Titan, Va digni­

fied sacrifice to remember and ponder through all time.”

At this point in the novel, it would seem that Vonnegut

is expounding, through his agent Rumfoord, a cynical brand

of Deism, simply manipulating his characters by means of

Rumfoord*s fantastic scheme, to prove his contentions.

While this is true, if the allegory stopped there if would

not have the impact the author obviously intends. What makes this novel unique is that in the final chapters Von­ negut shows the reader that Rumfoord himself is but a dupe of a higher power—a messenger from another galaxy—and that the chain of unknowing does not stop even there, be­ cause the force that is pulling Rumfoord*s strings is being guided by an equally meaningless power from above!

The messenger is Salo, a tangerine-colored robot from

Tralfamadore (all of whose inhabitants are robots), whose duty it is to carry a "sealed message from *One Rim of the 29

Universe to the Other.’” We are led to believe that it is a message of great importance; indeed, after Salo is forced down on Titan by the mechanical failure of his

Universal-Will-to-Become-powered space ship, the Tralfama- dorians go to great lengths to get him a replacement part.

As a matter of fact, as Rumfoord discovers just before his death, everything that has happened on Earth for the past

203,117 years has been guided by Tralfamadore, for the single purpose of getting the part to Salo. What were con­ sidered some of our greatest achievements in art, science, religion, politics, and architecture, prove to be nothing more than giant letters in the sand:

It was through this viewer [on his space ship] that he got his first reply from Tralfamadore. The reply was written@on Earth in huge stones on a plain in what is now England. The ruins of the reply still stand, and are known as Stonehenge. The meaning of Stonehenge in Tralfamadorian, when viewed from above, is: "Replacement part being rushed with all possible speed.”

Stonehenge wasn't the only message old Salo had received. There had been four others, all of them written on Earth. The Great Wall of China means in Tralfamadorian, when viewed from above: "Be patient♦ We haven’t forgotten about you.” The Golden House of the Roman Emperor Nero meant: "We are doing the best we can." The meaning of the Moscow Kremlin when it was first walled was: "You will be on your way before you know it." The meaning of the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, is: "Pack up your things and be ready to leave on short notice." 30

Thus, Malachi and Beatrice, instead of being Rumfoord*s

puppets, turn out to be working for Salo. Their Martian

son, Chrono, delivers the vital piece of metal, ’’about the

size of an Earthling beer-can opener,*’ which has been his

good luck charm. Rumfoord, of course, has the same master.

His new religion of the Utterly Indifferent, although more

than ever appropriate, turns out to be just another agent

for making the right things happen at the right time.

And what is this momentous message that is so impor­

tant two hundred centuries of earthly life have gone into

the spreading of it?

He [Salo] held out the square of aluminum in a cupped foot. ”A dot,” he said. ”A single dot,” he said. "The meaning of a dot in Tralfamadorian," said Old Salo, "is—" "Greetings."

The novel ends with Malachi, who has decided that a

"purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved," returning to die in Indianapolis, Indiana, because it was the first place in the United States where-a white man was hanged for mur­ dering an Indian. "The kind of people who’ll hang a white man for murdering an Indian—" said Constant, "that’s the kind of people for me." Beatrice and Rumfoord are already dead, Constant’s son Chrono is living with birds on Titan, and Salo, finding nothing better to do, decides to continue 31

on his fool’s errand.

In its philosophical implications The Sirens of Titan

is a deeply pessimistic book. It describes a universe

completely without free will, its inhabitants, whether the

human beings of Earth or the robots of Tralfamadore, work­

ing inanely for a non-purpose. The customary goals and

comforts man has sought through the ages are shown to be worthless or chimerical. Wealth, as possessed by Constant

and his father (who spends his entire adult life in a hotel

room) leads either to debauchery, or, in the hands of a

stoic, becomes nothing more than a plaything. Power, of the awesome sort that Rumfoord gains, does not bring happi­ ness—and turns out to be illusory. Fame, even the apotheo­ sized kind that Malachi achieves in his role as Space Wan­ derer, is shown to be Lilliputian against the backdrop of space. Vonnegut rejects the solace of religion, by obliquely but nevertheless quite palpably attacking existing religious dogma with his Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. He is saying, in effect, that if a creed with a living founder, capable of seeing into the future and existing at an infinite number of points in the galaxy, has no more ultimate meaning than to perform a useless service for a planet inhabited by machines, what are we to conclude about traditional earthly faiths, which have none of these advantages?

Malachi’s edict, "to love whoever is around to be loved," is neither original nor profound. It is a modus 32

operandi, not a metaphysical solution. Perhaps the only

hint of daylight in this dark wood is, as Rumfoord points

out, "that this supremely frustrated man [Malachi] was the

only Martian to write a philosophy, and that this supremely

self-frustrating woman [Beatrice] was the only Martian to

write a poem.”

Despite the pessimistic conclusions reached in The

Sirens of Titan, however, and the underlying malaise and

confusion of the principal characters, the novel is so

interesting and witty that in a first reading its more

substantial aspects tend to be submerged. The plot is as

intricate as that of a whodunit, each chapter telling the

reader a bit more that he needs to know but adding new

threads to be unraveled. And Vonnegut wisely refuses to let his depressing conclusions destroy his sense of the

ludicrous; if the humor is often black, it is nevertheless there. Chapter one contains a lengthy and hilarious satire of an evangelist named Bobby Denton (Vonnegut is fond of using forms of real people’s names, which protects him

from lawsuits but still makes it plain whom he means), explaining to his Love Crusaders why man is not meant to explore space, except on the "most wonderful space ship of all creation”—Earth. Freudian journalism is made fun of in this critique of a book about Magnum Opus:

Gomburg's book, while first-rate on business details, suffers from Gomburg’s central thesis, to the effect that Magnum Opus was a product of a complex of inabilities to love. Reading between 33

the lines of Gomburg’s book, it is increas­ ingly clear that Gomburg is himself unloved and unable to love.

The twenty-one months of Mars are the Earth’s twelve, plus Winstnn, Niles, Rumfoord, Kazak, Newport, Chrono,

Synclastic, Infundibulum, and Salo, leading to the jingle:

Thirty days have Salo, Niles, June, and September, Winston, Chrono, Kazak, and November, April, Rumfoord, Newport, and Infundibulum. All the rest, baby mine, have thirty-one.

Even during the pathetic Martian invasion, in which

150,000 invaders are killed, the pain is dipped in wry humor. The only victory the Martians score is "the capture of a meat market in Basel, Switzerland, by seventeen Para­ chute Ski Marines.” The mayor of Boca Raton, Florida,

(later to become a United States senator,) after the Boca

Ratonians destroy a force of thirty-five attackers, cries,

"Send us more Martians." And the commander of the Parachute

Ski Marines, happily ensconced in the meat market in Basel, replies to demands to surrender, "Nuts!"

Vonnegut, as in Player Piano, uses the sharp, economic detail for his best effects. For instance, the only reading materials on the space ship that sends Malachi to Mercury

were two comic books, left behind by the shipfitters. They were Tweety and Sylvester, which was about a canary that drove a catscrazy, and The Miserable Ones, which was about a man who stole some gold candlesticks from a priest who had been nice to him. 34

Chrono’s teacher on Mars is

a frail old lady named Isabel Fenster- maker. She was seventy-three, and had been a Jehovah’s Witness before . . . [being] shanghaied while trying to sell a copy of The Watchtower to a Martian agent in Duluth.

Vonnegut’s talent at instant charactseni’zation is at the

same time one of his greatest; strengths as a stylist

and one of his major weaknesses. He is too often content

to caricature rather than to develop in death.

The Sirens of Titan represents a significant advance over his first novel In style, however, and shows that the intervening seven years during which Vonnegut was writing articles and stories for popular magazines had no ill effect on his abilities. Instead of the weighty, some­ times awkward prose of Player Piano, Sirens moves rapidly, the exposition being done in bits and pieces, rather than long, redundant sections. In this novel also he begins to use the technique, which, although not new, he refines in subsequent novels into a highly individual prose style, viz., the use of non-narrative materials to advance the plot and develop character and mood. In Sirens this use is confined to a few letters, a journal kept by Malachi on Mars, and quotations from materials connected with the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, for instance, The Winston Niles

Rumfoord Authorized Bible, The Winston Niles Rumfoord Pocket

History of Mars, Sarah Horne Canby’s Unk and Boaz in the 35

Caves of Mercury, and the aforementioned Reverend Redwine’s sermon. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the fifth novel, this technique is expanded to include quotations from songs, speeches, family histories, tabloids, and even graffiti, all created by Vonnegut. It comprises so much of his later novels that the traditional concepts of summary and scene are almost buried under the collage, much to the behefit of the reader. And in this excellent fantasy, The Sirens of Titan, which to date has never been published in hard cover, the origins of Vonnegut’s mature style can be found. 36

MOTHER NIGHT

With the publication of Mother Night in 1961, Vonnegut

first began to attract the notice of the critics; that is

to say, this novel was reviewed. Though still thought of

as a science-fiction writer, he was now granted the addi­

tional tag of black humorist, and the reaction to his third

novel was favorable.

Mother Night, one hundred pages shorter than his pre­ vious two novels, and the approximate length that the next three would be, is something of a curiosity. It is a gothic novel in the expanded sense of the term, yet it is filled with sentiment. Its characters are nearly all grotesques, yet they are the most lifelike he was to create until Eliot

Rosewater. It is an examination of man’s guilt, in which the protagonist, once his innocence is established, commits suicide.

In this book Vonnegut attempts for the first time to deal with the single most important event in his life, the experience in Dresden during the fire bombing. Although he never mentions the bombing directly, the hero, Howard W.

Campbell, Jr., is a symbol of the Allied guilt, and his life in Germany during the war is parallel to Vonnegut’s position as a prisoner-worker for the Germans in Dresden. Vonnegut is examining his individual as well as the collective guilt of the parties involved in World War II, as well as all wars 37

The book purports to be the reminiscences of Camp­ bell, who has been a sort of "Nazi Edgar Guest," although the comparison to Pound is more accurate. A playwright, married to a German girl and living in Germany in the thirties, Campbell is approached by an American intelligence agent, Frank Wirtanen, and asked to become a spy while posing as loyal to the Nazis. We are not told this until chapter eight, however, while Vonnegut gives us a chance to observe Campbell in his prison cell in Israel, to which he has been abducted by Israeli agents he could have easily avoided. In the prison also is Adolf Eichmann, who asks

Campbell is he should get a literary agent. "For book clubs and movie sales in the United States of America, absolutely," Campbell tells him. His guard is an Estonian

Jew who spent two years in Auschwitz, in which he was a volunteer corpse carrier. From him Campbell learns 6f the daily, grisly announcement, "Leichentrager zu Wache," which was always "crooned, like a nursery rhyme," and which meant

"Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse." It is with the corpse- makers as well as the corpse-carriers that Vonnegut deals in this novel.

The plot of Mother Night is a relatively simple one, but because Vonnegut configures it like a murder mystery

(which, in an ironic sense, it is) the reader is kept guessing until the final page. Briefly, and chronologically, this is what happens: Campbell, released after the war by his intel­ 38

ligence contact, buries himself in Greenwich Village to mourn his dead wife, the beautiful actress Helga Noth

(in Slaughterhouse-Five she is called North), and live out

quietly the remaining years of his life listening to one of his twenty-six recordings of Bing Crosby singing White

Christmas and playing chess with a neighbor, George Kraft.

This self-entombment, however, is interrupted by the appear­ ance of an article, titled "American Tragedy!", which appears in The White Christian Minuteman, a right-wing hatesheet, written by the Reverend Doctor Lionel Jason David Jones,

D.D.S., D.D., who considers Campbell an unsung hero. Jones also produces Helga, still beautiful if white-haired, back from slave labor in Russia. Helga’s reappearance leads to several chapters of flashback, during which we see Campbell in Germany at the time of the fall of Berlin. The reunion idyll is broken up by the beating of Campbell by a veteran and the disclosure that Helga is really her little sister,

Resi, who is working for Kraft, who in turn is really Iona

Potapov, a Russian spy. The two of them plan to spirit

Campbell off to Mexico and then to Russia under the pretext that they are protecting him from further ¡^eatings and ab­ duction by the Israelis. During a meeting of Jones* Iron

Guardsmen of the White Sons of the American Constitutuion, however, they are arrested by American agents (Campbell is soon released), Resi commits suidide, and Kraft goes to

Leavenworth. Campbell then returns to his flat to confront 39

his conscience, Bernard B. O’Hare, who has come to kill him in the name of humanity but who instead gets a lecture and a broken arm from Campbell. The ’’traitor” then turns himself in to the Jewish couple living in the building and hears again the phrase, Leichtentrager zu Wache, which the old woman croons to him as they wait for Israeli agents.

In the final chapter, the hero decides to commit suicide.

If the conclusion of the novel seems enigmatic, it must be remembered that the book was Vonnegut’s first literary response to the second world war, and its atro­ cities on both sides. In the introduction to the 1966 paper­ back reprinting, he states,

If I’d been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and Gypsies around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes.

Vonnegut did not have the typical war experience, however.

He was not a Nazi, nor was he simply a G.I. in Europe, fighting ”to make the world safe for democracy.” Because of his unique experience in Dresden, where he was at the same time, attacker, victim, and observer, he saw the war in a different light. After this experience he could not write The Young Lions, or King Rat. As a matter of fact, 2 until 1969 he could wnite no war novel at all. Mother Night

2 The title comes from a speech by Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. 40

is not a war novel, nor even a novel about the causes of war. It is about man’s capacity to hate, and to cloak this hate in the respectability of the righteous cause.

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith," says Campbell, "I consider a capacity for it terri­ fying and absolutely vile." To Bernard B. O’Hare, drunk, unarmed, "drugged by . . . fantasies of good triumphing over evil," he says,

"There are plenty of good reasons for fight­ ing, "... but no good reason ever to hate with­ out reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive."

There are, fittingly, no heroes in Mother Night, only those people of varying levels of guilt. The worst are

O’Hare, who, if raised in Germany, would have been an SSj man; Mrs. Epstein, who turns Campbell in; and Br. Jones and his professional haters. About Jones, Campbell-Vonnegut says,

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

Not quite so culpable are Kraft, Resi Noth, Resi's father,

(who, in a vicious little scene in which he mentally tortures 41

a slave woman, illustrates how those sensitive to Art

can be, nevertheless, bestial) or the callous Col. Frank

Wirtanen, who blithely sends his spies to their deaths.

These people committed their crimes without passion, with­

out enjoyment. They were caught up in the maelstrom of hate.

And what of Howard W. Campbell, Jr.? In other words, what of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.? Why does Campbell decide to

commit suicide because of "crimes against himself?" He

seems to harbor no hate for anyone, neither for those who betray him (Kraft, Resi), scorn him (O’Hare, the Epsteins), nor those who glorify him as a Nazi (Jones, et. al.) He is not even guilty of the crime with which he »is'.legally charged; he has been a hero, and not a traitor. If this were not so, the novel would lose a good deal of its impact. But neither Wirtanen,Resi*s father, (who suspects him all along of being an American spy) nor Campbell himself feels he is anything but guilty. To begin with, his motives for espionage are anything but noble. "He didn’t mention the best reason for expecting me to go on and be a spy. The best reason was that I was a ham. As a spy of the sort he described, I would have an opportunity for some pretty grand acting." And perhaps he did his job too well. As Mr. Noth says, hypothesizing Campbell’s double-agentry,

"... you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us. ... I realized that 42

almost all of the Ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler—but from you. . . . You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane,"

Wirtanen flatly considers him a Nazi:

"Three people in all the world knew me for what I was,” I said. "And all the rest—" I shrugged. "They knew you for what you were, too," he said abruptly. "That wasn’t me,” I said, startled by his sharpness. "Whoever it was--" said Wirtanen, "he was one of the most vicious sons of bitches who ever lived."

And Campbell himself pronounces the final verdict by hanging himself. In this act Vonnegut seems to be taking his share of the blame for the bombing of Dresden.

The characters in this novel, in addition to not being what they seem at first—Vonnegut’s caution against throwing the first stone—are finely drawn grotesques.

The details about their lives remind one of Sinclair Lewis in his blackest mood, but they are often extremely funny. -j The Reverend Dis. Jones was once a promising dental student but has been dismissed from the University of Pittsburgh:

The syndrome of his failure was anything but simple. His examination papers were quite probably the longest such papers ever written in the history

3Jones is probably modeled after Gerald L.K Smith. 43

of dental education, and probably the most irrelevant as well. They began, sanely enough, with whatever subject the Examination required Jones to discuss. But regardless of that sub­ ject Jones managed to go from it to a theory that was all his own—that the teeth of Jews and Negroes proved beyond question that both groups were degenerate.

His bodyguard is August Krapptauer:

. . . former Vice-Bundesfuehrer of the German- American Bund. Krapptauer was sixty-three, had done eleven years in Atlanta, was about to drop dead. But he still looked garishly boyish, as though he went to a mortuary cosmetologist regu­ larly. The greatest achievement of his life was the arrangement of a joint meeting of the Blind and the Ku Klux Kian in New Jersey in 1940. At that meeting, Krapptauer declared that the Pope was a Jew and that the Jews held a fifteen- million-dollar mortgage on the Vatican. A change of Popes and eleven years in a prison laundry had not changed his mind.

The bit players also have an air of the gothic about them:

Andor Gutman, one of Campbell’s guards in Israel, he< who volunteered for a corpse-carrier’s job in Auschwitz; Lazio

Szombathy, a Hungarian freedom fighter who finds American freedom specious and hangs himself; and The Black Fuehrer of Harlem, Jones’ chauffeur, who longs for a black hydro­ gen bomb—nearly everyone in the novel is a freak of some sort, made that way by war and hate.

In Mother Night Vonnegut continues to advance stylis­ tically, using the same ironic tone, simple syntax, and frequent short punch lines as in The Sirens of Titan. The prose is smoother, better controlled, and the primer sent­ ences are more in keeping with the pseudo-documentary style 44

of this novel. Non-narrative materials are used even

more frequently and add a great deal of enrichment to

the work. The reader is treated to snatches of songs,

"quotations" from New York newspapers, a summary of an

article from a men’s pulp magazine, letters—one from

"Creative Playthings, Inc.—biographies, and, best of

all, excerpts from Howard W. Campbell’s magnum opus,

Memoirs of Monogamous Casanova, both in the original

German and in English translation. A 1937 poem from this

collection of "poems, stories, plays, letters," "Reflec­

tions on Not Participating in Current Events," although

judged by Campbell a very bad one, succinctly states the

angst of the novel.

I saw a huge steam roller, It blotted out the sun. The people all lay down, lay down; They did not try to run. My love and I, we looked amazed Upon the gory mystery. "Lie down, lie down!" the people cried. "The great machine is history!■ My love and I, we ran away, The engine did not find us. We ran up to a mountain top, Left history far behind us. Perhaps we should have stayed and died, But somehow we don’t think so. We went to see where history’d been, And my, the dead did stink so.

Mother Night, strictly speaking, is not a piece of black humor, for its intent is not to amuse. It is, rather, a dreadfully depressing treatise on man’s inability to 45

combat the steamroller of history with anything other

than blind, unreasoning hate or feigned indifference.

The humor arises not out of an existential acceptance of the absurdity of the Sisyphusian condition but from the

Swiftian eye of the author, who, had he lived earlier, might have been the first condemned man to comment that it was a nice day for a hanging. Thematically, the novel bears more resemblance to Heart of Darkness than to

L1Etranger; for sheer despair it rivals The Dream Life of

Balso Snell. It is one of those relatively few minor classics which fascinate and repel at the same time—

L ’Assommoir and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird come to mind—and Vonnegut’s wit does not much ease the pain. When he was to deal with this subject again, in Slaughterhouse-

Five, it would be with the more tolerant eye of an older man; in Mother Night there is no attorney for the defense, only the prosecution. And the verdict is guilty. 46

CAT'S CRADLE

Cat's Cradle, published in 1963, is probably the only

novel of Vonnegut’s that can accurately be described as

black humor. As such, it represents another turning point

in his intellectual struggle to accept man’s fate. His

first two novels are semi-detached examinations of the

plight of man in an indifferent society (Player Piano) and

an even more indifferent universe (The Sirens of Titan).

Mother Night is an impassioned statement of outrage. With

the fourth novel, Vonnegut begins to mellow a bit—a trend

that will continue in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and

Slaughterhouse-Five. Although the plot of Cat's Cradle,

ending as it does in the destruction of life on earth, is

as potentially pessimistic as any other he has used, the

author’s reaction to this tragic turn of events is to thumb

his nose at the One responsible. The satire is there, but

it is Horatian. The denouement is catastrophic, but this

time there is an added element to make it less horrible.

Without being facetious, it is possible to assert that Cat's

Cradle is Vonnegut’s "Ash Wednesday."

Bokononism—the gentle religion practiced only on a

small Caribbean island and unknown in the powerful United

States of America—which tells its adherents to "Live by the

harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy

and happy," is the real hero of this novel. It is palpably a hoax, because it is believed in neither by its originator and prophet, Bokonon, the former Lionel Boyd Johnson,

Negro, ex-infantryman, sailor, gardener, carpenter, and

alumnus of Charles Atlas’ body-building school, nor by

its sworn enemy, ’’Papa” Monzano, dictator of San Lorenzo,

who has made adherence to the religion punishable by

death (although he is a secret practitioner himself.) But

to its followers, the underprivileged inhabitants of the

island, it provides the most important element in their

drab lives—hope. As Bokonon says in one of his calypsos,

which are the equivalent of the Judaeo-Christian psalms:

I wanted all things To seem to make some sense, So we all could be happy, yes Instead of tense. And I made up lies So that they all fit nice, And I made this sad world A par-a-dise.

Bokononism has, in fact, been manufactured by two marooned

soldiers, Johnson and Earl McCabe, one of whom becomes the

outlawed prophet, the other the political leader.

When it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.

The putative hero of the novel is a writer and a

Melville admirer. He begins his book with the admonition, 48

"Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They

called me John." Jonah, or John, working on a non-fiction

book titled The Day the World Ended, is searching for

information about the late Dr. Felix Hoenikker, father of

the atomic bomb. His quest takes him to Ilium, New York,

to discover more about Hoenikker’s three children, Newt,

a midget, Frank, who is wanted by the police, and Angela,

a six-foot, "horse-faced platinum blonde" clarinet player,

and then to San Lorenzo, where Frank has become "Minister

of Science and Progress" to Papa Monzano. Not so coinci­

dentally, according to Dokonon, Newt and Angela are on the same flight as Jonah—the reason it is not coincidence is that they are part of the same karass, a religious cell organized by God without the knowledge of its members, for a purpose equally beyond their understanding. The wampeter, or pivot, of their karass is a nasty little invention of

De. Hoenikker*s, called ice-nine, which he has fabricated in his spare time, and is more dangerous than all the atomic weaponry of the major powers. It is a form of ice which, because its melting point is 114.4 degrees fahrenheit, has the capacity to freeze instantly any water with which it comes into contact. Dr. Hoenikker, the epitome of the dis­ interested scientist, has casually given his three children a chip of the material (which they dutifully divided) upon his death on Christmas Eve—a combination Nativity-Thanatos present. 49

The remainder of the novel chronicles the hero’s

increasing understanding of Bokononism, his elevation to

the presidency of San Lorenzo and betrothal to the beauti­

ful Mona Aamons Monzano, who goes with the office, the

death of Papa Monzano by ice-nine, and the subsequent

accident in which Papa’s body slides into the Caribbean,

thus freezing the earth’s water and ending life on the

planet. Johah, Mona, and a handful of others survive on

the island, but because of the ever-present danger of

imbibing ice-nine, their survival will be only temporary.

It is during six months of living on frozen animals and canned goods that Jonah writes his account. At the very end he meets a disgusted Bokonon, ”his feet . . . frosty with ice-nine," who tells him that he has written the last sentence of his bible:

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabeeand lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

This is also the last sentence of the novel.

Cat’s Cradle (the significance of the title will be discussed later) is Vonnegut’s first full-fledged satire.

Although witty ridicule was a vital element in all of the first thee novels, it did not dominate the proceedings as 50

it does in the fourth. Religion, politics, business, science, and a gaggle of minor geese are all gleefully plucked here. Bokononism, of course, is a satire on primi­ tive Christianity, with its ex-carpenter founder, its

Caesar (McCabe), its outlawed status, its parabolic teach­ ings. Mr. Johnson’s religion, however, takes itself much less seriously, and is more overt about the canonical nature of its pronouncements. As the first sentence of The Books of Bokonon says, ’’All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” And the author-protagonist also warns us, "Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.”

The religion, incidentally, is also founded on a variation of Charles Atlas’ principle of dynamic tension, the building of muscles by exercising them against each other. In Boko­ nonism, Papa Monzano is the opposing muscle, the Yang to

Bokonon’s Yin.

"Papa” Monzano, he’s so very bad, But without bad "Papa" I would be so sad; Because without "Papals" badness, Tell me, if you would, How could wicked old Bokonon Ever, ever look good? states one of the calypsos. Thus, for once, the devil gets his due.

The religious satire in Cat’s Cradle is gentle, however, because Bokononism performs a necessary function—and its essential untruth does no one harm. It has no priesthood 51

to be corrupted and no property to be hoarded. Its ritual

consists simply of boko-maru, the act of taking one»s shoes

off and sitting sole-to-sole [sic] with another person,

for "the mingling of awarenesses." Most of all, it provides

theology:

Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?" Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land; Man got totell himself he understand.

The other satirical targets in the novel do not get

off so easily. Politics and business are seen as inter­ twined snakes sucking the eggs laid by the hapless citizens.

One of the characters in the book, H. Lowe Crosby, is moving his bicycle factory from Chicago to San Lorenzo to avoid labor problems, because "the people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!" He favors hanging teenage car thieves in front of their homes as a warning to lawbreakers. His predecessors on the island, the management of Ca&tle Sugar, did their mercantile best to denude the island of its land, resources, and dignity. Before being forced out by the revo­ lution, they ruled absolutely.

"The form of government was anarchy, save in limited situations wherein Castle Sugar wanted to own something or to get something done. In such situations the form of government was feud­ alism. The nobility was composed of Castle Sugar’s plantation bosses, who were heavily armed white men from the outside world. The knighthood was 52

composed of big natives who, for small gifts and silly privileges, would kill or wound or torture on command.”

The only representatives of government or business

presented favorably are the new American ambassador, who

was purged during the McCarthy era because of a letter his

wife wrote the New York Times suggesting that overseas

Americans should not expect to be loved; and Julian Castle,

the ex-sugar millionaire, who has become the Schweitzer of

San Lorenzo. The first is an exile, the second a nihilist

saint.

Science, with its endless tinkering with things it

only vaguely understands, from its lofty position immune to criticism by those who cannot fathom its teminology,

is personified by the Novel Prize winner, Dr. Hoenikker, who forgot his wife shortly after her death, never (accor­ ding to his children) read a novel in his life, and kept on his desk not a picture of his family but one of cannon­ balls stacked on a lawn. Vonnegut characterizes him bril­ liantly in a single paragraph*:

’’Angela was one of the unsung heroines of the atom bomb, incidentally, and I don’t think the story has ever been told. . . . Father got so interested in turtles that he stopped working on the atom bomb. Some people from the Manhattan Project finally came out to the house to ask Angela what to do. She told them to take away Father’s turtles. So one night they went into his labora­ tory and stole the turtles and the aquarium. Father never said a word about the disappearance of the turtles. He just came to work the next day and 53

looked for things to play with and think about, and everything there was to play with and think about had something to do with the bomb.”

It is Hoenikker who gives the novel its title. In

a scene reminiscent of Gulliver in Brobdingnag, in which

the scientist’s ’’pores looked as big as craters on the

moon,” Hoenikker for the first time gets down on the floor

and plays with one of his children. He has accidentally

made a cat’s cradle out of some string, and, reminded of

his childhood, attempts to communicate with his son Newt.

’’’And then he sang. ’Rockabye catsy, in the tree top’; he sang, ’when the wind blows, the cray-dull will rock. If the bough breaks, the cray-dull will fall. Down will come cray- dull, catsy and all.”'

Through his playing with ice-nine, motivated by the same kind of disinterested curiosity, the world comes crashing

down.

Cat’s Cradle» published two years after Catch-22» was inevitably compared to it, and there are obvious simi­ larities in theme and characterization. Vonnegut’s novel, however, is stylistically quite different; while Heller’s inventiveness if confined to details of plot, Vonnegut’s extends to the manner in which those details are presented.

After inventing his religion, he weaves it throughout the story by quoting its calypsos. After introducing the island locale, he provides information about it in the form of a 54

history written by Julian Castle’s son, San Lorenzo, the

Land, the History, the People, to the extent of creating

part of an index for it, a hilarious parody of this schol­

arly practice. Later we hear the San Lorenzan national

anthem (it is sung to the tune of ’’Home on the Range”).

We hear it in English, but Vonnegut could have rendered

it in the ’’original’’ island dialect, because he has in­

vented that also. Although a New World tongue, it sourlds

much like Anthony Burgess’ Nadsat from A Clockwork Orange;

"Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” comes out "Tsvent-kiul, tsvent-kiul, lett-pool store,"—a Rasselas-Candide coin­

cidence, since both of the novels came out in the same year. Finally, the chapter headings must be mentioned, because Vonnegut is using everything but the squeal here.

There are 127 of them, and the novel is only 191 pages long; their ballooned proportions contributes to the needlework of devices he has stitched together. Read alone, they resemble a list of short story, play, novel, and essay titles budding authors are wont to keep in note­ books—some of them, such as "The Swiss Family Robinson,"

"Of Mice and Men,” and "Bell, Book, and Chicken in a Hat- box," are, or nearly are. Read in context they form a witty commentary on the economical body of the novel.

This satirical mosaic reminds one of the oldtime advertisements printed in various styles, and, while on first reading it suffers (as does The Sirens of Titan) from 55

the very dexterity of its author’s scattershot approach, it is really a well-controlled piece of writing. And underneath the tour de force is a meaningful fantasy for our times. 56

GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) is unquestionably

Vonnegut’s best novel to date. Instead of focussing on the abstract, philosophical aspects of the human condition,

as he had done previously, this time he sought a practical answer, one that could be of more tangible use than the nihilistic whining of Howard W. Campbell or the hero of

Cat’s Cradle. This time he asked an answerable question, viz., ”how to love people who have no use." Although the angst is still evident, and the major villains of the other novels—business, fire, and automation--are just as viru­ lently active, they do not triumph this time. Eliot Rose­ water triumphs.

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut perfects the mosaic style he first tentatively used in The Sirens of Titan.

The traditional concepts of summary and scene are all but submerged under a collage of songs, speeches, family histories, quotations from tabloids, and graffiti. From the epigraph—

"The Second World War was over—and there I was at high noon, crossing Times Square .• with a Purple Heart on." —ELIOT ROSEWATER President, The Rosewater Foundation to the novel’s final scene, when Christ Eliot, raising a tennis racket over his head like a scepter, tells his 'flock

"to be fruitful and multiply"—the puns, irony, parodies, 57

and low comedic effects punctuate every satiric sentence with hilarious interabangs. In addition, the one serious

fault hitherto evident in his writing, the lack of charac­ terization in depth, is overcome, not only in the protag­ onist, who is one of the most endearing eccentrics to be found in literature since Oblomov, but in the less impor­ tant characters as well. The novel is a classic of its kind, and there are not many of its kind.

The book’s subtitle is Pearls Before Swine, but it, could easily be Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Becomes an

Alcoholic Who Chases Fires. Eliot, who is a Christ figure, a Hamlet, a Lear, a Miss Lonelyhearts with a Million, has ensconced himself in a dingy attic in Rosewater County,

Indiana, with two telephones, one red (for fire calls) and one black (with the Rosewater Foundation’s number), over which he acts the part of financial and social ombudsman to the suffering souls of Rosewater County. Eliot hopes that by daily dispensing his fortune of three and a half million dollars a year interest to the victims of the Ameri can economic system (of which he is one of the chief bene­ ficiaries) and offering love to those whom money will not help, he can expunge the guilt of his inherited wealth and his accidental murder of three German firemen during World

War II.

The circumstances that have led Eliot to this intem­ perate response are chronicled in the opening chapters of 58

the novel. He has returned to civilian life a hero,

married a beautiful girl, earned a doctorate in inter­

national law, and taken over the Rosewater Foundation in

its original, intended form, dispensing money for birth

control clinics, cancer research, and college sabbaticals.

The first evidence thatsomething is wrong with him comes

when he gets drunk and breaks in on a science-fiction writers

conference in Milford, Pennsylvania. What he tells them

gives the reader an indication of how Vonnegut feels about this maligned form of fiction and his own status in 1965,

as a member of its brotherhood.

"I love you sons of bitches," Eliot said in Milford. "You’re all I read any more. You’re the only ones who’ll talk about the really ter­ rific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, »-mistakes, acci­ dents and catastrophes do to us. You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell."

From Milford Eliot goes to Swarthmore and delivers a tear­ ful lecture in a bar on the dangers of breathing oxygen and the glorious fidelity of volunteer firefighters, and thence across the country, drinking with firemen, trading away his expensive clothes for Robert Hall suits and war 59

surplus jackets, losing all his friends in the process.

He drove away his rich friends by telling them that whatever they had was based on dumb luck. He advised his artist friends that the only people who paid any attention to what they did were rich horses’ asses with nothing more athletic to do. He asked his scholarly friends, ’’Who has time to read all the boring crap you write and listen to all the boring things you say?” He alienated his friends in the sciences by thanking them extravagantly for scientific advances he had read about in recent newspapers and magazines, by assuring them, with a perfectly straight face, that life was getting better and better, thanks to scientific thinking.

Eliot was, as Vonnegut says, "a flamboyantly sick man.”

After a brief rejuvenation through psychoanalysis, he cracks up again during a Rosewater Foundation sponsored performance of Aida, when he yells to Aida and Radames not to sing in their airtight crypt. "You will last a lot longer if you don’t try to sing," he tells them. A disappearance and more alcoholic peregrinations follow, until Eliot gets the idea to move to Rosewater County,

Indiana, where he becomes Fire Lieutenant, and he and Sylvia snub the petit bourgeois of the town to "throw lavish ban­ quets for morons, perverts, starvelings and the unemployed."

The results of this quixotic gesture are predictable:

Sylvia has a nervous breakdown, burns down the firehouse, and is sent away to a sanatorium; Eliot, to the further chagrin of his senator father and the respectable citizens of the county, moves from the mansion to an attic over a 60

lunchroom and liquor store, and re-establishes the Found­ ation in a different form. This time fee will spend its money not from the top down, but from the bottom up. We see him,

an athlete gone to lard, a big man, six- feet-three, two hundred thirty pounds, pale, balding on all sides of a wispy scalplock. He was swaddled in the elephant wrinkles of war- surplus long underwear. Written in gold letters on each of his windows, and on his st*eet-level door, too, were these words:

ROSEWATER FOUNDATION HOW CAN WE HELP YOU?

What has just been described is only the first fifty pages of the novel, its introduction. Again, as in Mother

Night and Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut saves the main narrative until he can intensify the reader’s curiosity and lay suf­ ficient groundwork so that the chronological story can be told economicallyj in the three novels mentioned, he uses approximately 150 pages more. In effect, he is writing novels with the limited focus of a short story—and it should be noted that one nevet has the feeling the books are novellas. First Vonnegut buttonholes the reader with intriguing exposition that does not seem like exposition, then he swiftly brings the conflict to its denouement, a technique similar to that used by Scott and Conrad, and

Sinclair Lewis on occasion, but Vonnegut’s extreme brevity makes the device that much more effective. 6l

The last three-quarters of the novel show Eliot in

philanthropic action, fighting for his sanity, and to keep

his wife from divorcing him, while an unscrupulous Lebanese

attorney, Norman Mushari, works in the background to steer

the Foundation money into the hands of Eliot’s feckless

cousin, Fred Rosewater. Fred is Gloucester to Eliot's

Lear. Although the novel is more than half over before he

appears, he is fully drawn, and except for his cousin the

most interesting character in the book. Existing at a

lower level than the tragi-comic Eliot, Fred leads a pathe­

tic life, selling insurance in Pisquontuit, Rhode Island,

(^pronounced TPawn-it’ by those who loved it, and *Piss-

on-it’ by those who didn’t”), killing time in drug stores

where he looks longingly at the pictures in girly magazines

but buys Better Homes and Gardens. He looks as if ”he had

been kicked and kicked and kicked every day of his life.”

And indeed he has, spiritually by the empty life he leads,

and physically by his social-climbing wife’s end tables

strewn all through the house. His only happiness comes

when a naive bride, to whose husband he has sold a huge

insurance policy, thanks him for creating a large estate

for her. "God bless you, Mr. Rosewater," she says, in the most ironic sentence of the novel.

When Norman Mushari comes to Fred’s house to tell him that he has a chance to become a millionaire, he is in the

cellar about to put a rope around his neck. Vonnegut, with 62

his characteristic incisiveness, shows Fred reacting to

Mushari’s call down the stairway. "Fred moved quickly,

barely escaped being caught in the embarrassing act of

destroying himself." A poignant quirk of human nature is

thus encased in aspic.

The less important characters in Pisquontuit are

neatly, if more superficially, encapsulated by quick

strokes that get at their essentials. Stewart Buntline,

the town millionaire who is a mirror image of Eliot, has

long ago given up the idea of putting his money to other than selfish use, and spends his time drinking Scotch and

reading about the Civil War. He looks like "a cross . . . between Cary Grant and a German shepherd." When asked for advice about Wall Street, he tells friends to buy Polaroid, although he himself doesn’t even know if he owns any of its stock. His wife Amanita frequents a local color restaurant run by a homosexual, with whom she jocularly flirts, and eats the fisherman salad, "a peeled banana thrust through a pineapple ring, set in a nest of chilled, creamed tuna and curly coconut shreds." Their daughter, Lila, sells pornography to her high school classmates.

The relationship between Lila and the news store was wonderfully symbiotic, for hanging in the store’s front window was a large medallion of gilded polystyrene, awarded by the Rhode Island Mothers to Save Children from Filth. Representatives inspected the store’s paperback selection regularly. The polystyrene medallion was their admission that they had not found one filthy thing. 63

They thought that their children were safe, but the truth was that Lila had cornered the market. There was one sort of smut that Lila could not buy at the news store—dirty pictures. She got them by doing what Fred Rosewater had done often lusted weakly to do—by answering raunchy ads in The American Investigator.

Contrasted to these solid citizens of Pisquontuit are Selena, a servant girl who discovers that Mrs. Bunt­ line has been playing her 33 l/3 Beethoven recordings at 78 rpm, and who gives us the ironic meaning of the novel * s subtitle when she comments that money in the hands of the ignorant rich is "pearls before swine;" and Harry

Pena and his sons, honest fishermen, who, although they are losing their business, are used by Vonnegut as exam­ ples of the efficacy of Voltaire’s work ethic.

The Mary rubbed herself gently against one side of the bowl. Harry and his sons, all in a row, reached into the sea with iron hands, pulled net into air, fed it back to the sea. Hand-over-hand, the three were making smaller, ever smaller, the place where fish could be. And, as that place grew ever smaller, the Mary crept sideways across the surface of the bowl. No one spoke. It>was a magic time. Even the gulls fell silent as the three, purified of all thought, hauled net from the sea.

The final section of the novel concerns Eliot’s next breakdown, his year’s incarceration in a sanatorium, and his final victory over Norman Mushari, which is accomplished simply by giving one hundred thousand dollars to the Pis­ quontuit Rosewaters and by acknowledging all the iligitimate 64

children attributed to him in Rosewater County (fifty-six),

none of which is actually his.

"Let their names be Rosewater from this moment on. And tell them that their father loves them, no matter what they turn out to be. And tell them—” Eliot fell silent, raised his tennis racket as though it were a magic wand. "And tell them, he began again, "to be fruitful and multiply."

The lesson that Eliot Rosewater has learned is one

that Vonnegut has himself learned: "that people can use

all the uncritical love they can get," as Kilgore Trout, the discredited science-fiction writer in the novel puts

it. That it is little enough comfort in this absurd world

Vonnegut acknowledges. "This is news?" Eliot’s father answers Trout sarcastically. Elsewhere, Vonnegut states it in other terms. "Make love when you can," he says in the introduction to the 1966 paperback reprinting of Mother

Night. "It’s good for you." What this simple acceptance of man’s dilemma, which has been so cruelly impressed on

Vonnegut and Eliot Rosewater in their wartime experiences means is that the crest, if not the summit, has been reached.

No longer will they search for vain answers; rather, they will concentrate on the few practical acts that can have positive results. They will love people. The Dresden night­ mare has not been explained, but it has been accepted as a harsh fact of our existence, which, although we may be partly or wholly to blame for it, we must, somehow, learn to live with. Only after reaching these conclusions about life 65

would Vonnegut be able to write directly about the bombing, to make it the primary subject of a book, which would be

Slaughterhouse-Five.

It is, however, the style and not the theme which makes

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Vonnegut’s best novel to date.

None of his techniques is original—most of them date back at least to Tristram Shandy. It is, rather, in the exten­ sive and imaginative use of them that he excels. It might be argued that Dos Passos does something similar in the USA trilogy, but his camera eyes, newsreels, etc., are not used for narrative purposes; neither is the spurious journal of

Captain John Smith used in that fashion in Barth’s witty

The Sot-Weed Factor, where it functions as subplot. Von­ negut literally fills his books with what would ordinarilly be extraneous material, but he weaves it into the fabric of the story to such an extent that it becomes as important as the main narrative itself. Not the least of its advan­ tages, this pastiche technique makes Rosewater extremely easy to read. The book begins with its epigraph, previously quoted, introducing the protagonist of the story and setting the eccentric tone of the novel. Then follows some expo­ sition on the Foundation, done in pseudo-documentary style,, and punctuated by a surprise shift in level of usage:

These facts became known to young Norman Mushari when, upon graduating from Cornell Law School at the top of his class, he went to work for the Wash­ ington D.C. law firm that had designed both the 66

Foundation and the Corporation, the firm of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee. He was of Lebanese extraction, the son of a Brooklyn rug merchant. He was five feet and three inches tall. He had an enormous ass, which was luminous when bare.

A long letter from Eliot, illuminating his character,

digs deeper into the history of the family and provides

Mushari with the evidence that Eliot is insane. This is

followed by three chapters of exposition describing Eliot’s

meanderings, but the narrative is broken frequently by a

piece of poetry (by Eliot), a tape of his speech to the

science-fiction writers in Milford, a quotation from the

Kama Sutra, a speech delivered from the Senate floor by the senior Rosewater, letters from Hamlet (Eliot) to

Ophelia (Sylvia), and a treatise by Sylvia’s psychoanal­ yst on her illness.

Once we have off ideally met the protagonist in chap­ ter five, Vonnegut relies chiefly on scene, but other elements are present also: two poems by Blake, bits of graffiti, a letter to Eliot from an aspiring novelist— and part of his novel—entries from the Foundation’s re­ cords, and part of Eliot’s own unfinished novel. In the

Pisquontuit section of the book, Vonnegut provides quota­ tions from The American Investigator, a lengthy history of the Rosewaters in the nineteenth century, part of

Kilgore Trout’s novel, Venus on the Half-Shell, social welfare pamphlets, and more letters. In the final chapters 67

relating Eliot’s breakdown and recovery Vonnegut uses

poetry, more quotations from the tabloid (this time about

Eliot himself), and a passage from The Bombing of Germany,

an actual book, about the Dresden fire storm. Taken all

together, these interruptions comprise a significant per­

centage of the novel, and, at the same time, further the

story while often commenting on it at the same time. The

Senator’s speech, for instance, shows why he and his son

are strangers, why Vonnegut hates the excesses of the free

enterprise system, and what Eliot in Quixotic fashion is

trying to do about them. The graffiti and the quotations

from personal advertisements in the tabloid, while they

seem to be asides, actually help establish the unloveable

quality of the people Eliot seeks to love, "the swine."

The letters and journals, of course, are basically expo­ sitory in nature, but they have the advantage of being

’’primary sources;" the reader pays closer attention to them and gives them greater credence than he would con­ ventional exposition. And Vonnegut has given them the greatest verisimilitude; they nearly achieve the status of fiction and non-fiction at the same time. One finds himself reading what he momentarily thinks is a real letter from Eliot Rosewater included in what he knows to be a novel by Kurt Vonnegut.

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut brought to fruition his steadily advancing prose style and fashioned 68

from it a witty but compassionate and meaningful story.

In both technical achievement and maturity of outlook

this novel surpasses those he has written before and since

And in Eliot Rosewater, he finally has created a character

of Dickensian scope and quality. 69

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

The American novelist usually produces his war novel in the first few years after he has returned from the battle. He writes it while he is still in the first throes of revulsion at what he has been a part of. It is always a passionate book, peopled by heroes and villains, and deals with the two major aspects of war, killing and sex.

After twenty years, it often seems somewhat jejeune.

Had Kurt Vonnegt written his war novel in 1948 instead of 1968 he would probably have made the mistakes typical of youth, of seeing war as a glorious combat between Right and

Wrong, of judging the experience a rite of passage from youth to manhood. He probably would have been guilty of the myopia that Mary O’Hare, one of the people to whom

Slaughterhouse-Five is dedicated, charges him with in the first chapter of the book:

"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 war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs."

Vonnegut was not able to finish his war novel,, however, until twenty-three years and several thousand discarded pages after the fact, until he has already published five other novels and two volumes of short stories. His abortive attempts were undoubtedly frustrated by the singularity of 70

his wartime experience, and by the enormous horror of what he had to tell. Slaughterhouse-Five, or. The Child­ ren 1s Crusade, is a product of a mature mind and a polished style; there are no heroes or villains in it, no paeans to bludbruderschaft, no condemnations of basic training in­ justices or glorifications of alcohol and brothels,sno glory. Only about one-third of the book deals with actual wartime exploits, and this part is told almost reluctantly, with every effort made to show that it is no more important than the civilian scenes. It is an apologetic novel from the very beginning chapter, when the author compares himself to Lot’s Wife, trying to look back at Sodom and Gomorrah, those biblical Dresdens destroyed by fire and brimstone.

"I’ve finished my war book now,” he says. "The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt."

The book is a failure, unhappily, for even though it must be judged a success as an anti-war polemic, artisti­ cally it is Vonnegut’s weakest novel since Player Piano.

Ironically, the reviews of the book were almost uniformly laudatory. It captured the lead review in the New York Times

Book Review, and major critics who obviously had read only one, or none, of Vonnegut’s other novels, praised it highly.

Daniel Stern was a lone dissenting voice. One feels that the critical huzzahs were aimed less at Slaughterhouse-Five than at the body of Vonnegut’s long-neglected work; surely 71

the warm reception the previous autumn of a volume of

mostly mediocre short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House,

would support that contention. Vonnegut and his alter ego,

Kilgore Trout, were at last being vindicated. One can cer­ tainly excuse the over-enthusiasm of Robert Scholes, for

instance, who, confronted with a best seller by a novelist he had been almost single-handedly championing for years, could not bring himself to point out its weaknesses. The novel does contain all the elements that have made Vonnegut the excellent novelist he is, the brevity, the simplicity of style, the outraged humanism, and the wry humor that he has poured into this fantasies which were once dismissed as science-fiction. It also has, however, two faults of which Vonnegut had hitherto never been guilty: the plot is utterly predictable, and the tone of the novel is senti­ mental. In addition, the prose style, which in previous novels sometimes threatened to become a bit too precious, does so here, and Vonnegut’s attempt to give it solidity by the use of eccentric tactile imagery only adds to the atmosphere of preciocity.

.2Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel about which it might be said with only a bit of facetiousness that it is written entirely in medias res. After a non-fictional first chapte describing his problems in writing the book, Vonnegut intro duces the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, with the statement,

"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." From then on 72

until the last of the book’s 186 pages, we view Billy in

Parmenidesian fashion, at the various stages of his life,

but primarily three: his wartime nightmare, his postwar

life as an optometrist in Ilium, New York, and his capti­ vity on the planet Tralfamadore as a zoomate to Montana

Wildhack, the former blue movie queen. These three settings

switch constantly and usually without transition; no vital word or recollective scene such as triggered Benjy Compson’s

shiftings are needed. The purpose of this technique is not so much stylistic as ideational. Vonnegut, taking the stance of the Eliot of Four Quartets, is trying to show us that ’’all moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, and always will exist.” We are all "bugs in amber," as his Tralfamadorian abductor tells Billy. But in Von­ negut’s universe, there is no good or evil, nor any free will. What is, is. When Billy tells a Tralfamadorian crowd that the most important thing he has learned on the planet is how to live in peace, after spending most of his life on savage Earth, the inhabitants laugh at him.

"Would—would you mind telling me—" he said to the guide, much deflated, "what was so stupid about that?" "We know how the Universe ends—" said the guide, "and Earth has nothing to do with it, except that it gets wiped out, too." "How—how does the Universe end?" said Billy. "We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button and the whole Universe dis­ appears." So it goes. 73

"If you know this," said Billy, "isn’t there some way you can prevent it? Can’t you keep the pilot from pressing the button?" "He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way."

Actually, the most important thing that Billy learns is that no one really dies—"When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral." On these two rather ancient beliefs, then, the objective idealism of Parmenides and the concept of immortality in some form, Vonnegut bases the rational structure of the novel. The are, quite simply, the comforts which have enabled him to live with his wartime nightmare. In such a philosophical system, no single event, however horrible, can have great significance because it is not perceived as a fixed point in time, nor do the victims of death cease to have some kind of consciousness. Billy Pilgrim’s own death, scheduled for February 13, 1976, is described in the novel as "simply violet light and a hum." Then Billy returns to life at an earlier time and place. All of Von­ negut’s attempts to explain the sorry condition mankind is in, after the deep pessimism of The Sirens of Titan, can be viewed as slightly more optimistic than the previous. Mother

Night, Cat’s Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater are each slightly more hopeful than the preceding. Slaughterhouse

Five brings the author to mature, if still irascible, accep­ 74

tance of the human condition. One of the Tralfamadorian

maxims is that we should concentrate on the pleasant moments

of our existence; indeed, their literature is based on this

premise:

Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out—in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams. "Exactly,” said the voice. "They are telegrams?" "There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular re­ lationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."

The parallel between the Tralfamadorian literary method and Kurt Vonnegut’s in Slaughterhouse-Five is obvious.

The novel’s tripartite plot needs little more des­ cription that has already been given. Chronologically

(which is, of course, not the way the author intended us to read it) the wartime exploits of Billy come first. These are divided into three segments: his wanderings in the

Ardennes Forest during the Battle of the Bulge, his capture and transportation back to Germany, with a stopover at a prisoner-of-war camp inhabited by stiff-upper-lip British officers, and his witnessing of the fire bombing raid on 75

Dresden, twenty-one years to the day before Billy’s pre­ dicted death. Billy, a chaplain's assistant still dressed in his off-duty low cut shoes, is only dimly aware of what is happening to him. He has no malice toward his enemies, feels no comradeship for his fellow soldiers. His only urge is to survive, and even that is not too strong. When he is put to work digging corpses out of the rubble of

Dresden, he does it without protest, although a Maori pris­ oner working with him dies of disgust. The ghastly exper­ ience is simply too unreal for him to digest, and the full shock of it does not come until he is back in civilian life, when he symbolically returns to it again and again in his time travels. Billy’s middle-class life in Ilium with a fat, uncomprehending wife, daughter, and Green Beret son, is noteworthy only for its occasional excesses of conduct- going on a radio talk show in New York to tell of becoming^ unstuck in time, committing himself to a mental ward of a veteran’s hospital, or watching war movies backwards on television the night of his daughter’s wedding (the same night he is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians). His life on

Tralfamadore is uniquely placid. Comfortably cared for in the zoo, he fathers a child by the beautiful Miss Wildhack, and continues his time travels back on Earth. The novel ends during a Dresden scene;,which is appropriate, but hardly crucial to the book’s structure.

Slaughterhouse-Five is something of a cannibal. The 76

Dresden aspect of the novel has been referred to as far

back as Player Piano, the protagonist bears a distinct

resemblance in malleability to Unk (Malachi) in The Sirens

of Titan, and in his penchant for going around the country

doing outrageous things, to Eliot Rosewater. The settings

of Ilium and Tralfamadore appear in several books as do many of the minor characters—Bernard O’Hare, Eliot Rose­

water (whom Billy meets in the hospital), Kilgore Trout,

Resi North [sic], Lance Rumfoord, Howard W. Campbell, Jr.,

and the ubiquitous little bird, crying "Poo-tee-wheet?” who is present at the apocalypse in Cat1s Cradle, during

Eliot’s incarceration in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and whose question is the concluding speech of Slaughterhouse-

Five . (The bird is a feathered Job.) Many plot details have been used before, such as the kidnapping and mating of humans by inhabitants of another planet (Sirens), the accidental amassing of great wealth (Sirens and Rosewater), and the physical or spiritual estrangement of husband and wife (all five previous novels). This cannibalization gives the book a certain charm and a sense of recognition for readers familiar with Vonnegut’s work (such as one gets in Balzac, for instance,) but although it may be good Tral­ famadorian literary style, on Earth it rings rather false.

One may come away from Slaughterhouse-Five with a cheated feeling, as if he’s read the novel before. Although Faulk­ ner manages to avoid this in his Yoknapatawpha County novels, 77

Vonnegut does not here, perhaps because the central event of the book has been so long anticipated.

Vonnegut’s satiric targets—-wealth, religion, govern­ ment, the military (science is let relatively alone here)

—are on hand also to get their whippings, but often the lashes are so whimsically applied as to vitiate the punish­ ment; for instance, this passage on Christianity:

The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn,.if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He con­ cluded that at least part of the trouble was slip­ shod storytelling in the New Testament. He sup­ posed 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 language of the novel depends much more on metaphor than any of the previous, and the metaphors are somewhat more eccentric, e.g., "every time he inhaled his lungs rattled like greasy paper bags," "[Billy] had chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches," and was "shaped like a bottle of Coca-cola." Vonnegut’s fondness for once- created images is also present. Although no one’s heart goes off "like a burglar alarm" as it does in several other places in his writing, his characters nestle like spoons whenever they get the chance to in the novel, which is often

The best that can be said of the images in the book is that they are often striking and fresh, and the worst is that 78

they nearly always call attention to themselves. The novel is glossy but rather insubstantial, and one hopes that now this subject (Dresden) has been fully dealt with,

Vonnegut will take up where he left off, both thematically and stylistically, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. 79

VONNEGUT’S THEMES

The universe of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels is a hostile and ridiculous one, in which a sense of humor and an eye

for the absurd are necessary. The humanist in Vonnegut is often defeated by the pessimist in a continuous teleological tug-of-war. The tussle is to decide whether or not there is any meaning in Stonehenge beyond its ironic and essen­ tially useless message to the Tralfamadorian messenger, whether the destruction of the Earth by fire or ice would subtract from a universal total, or merely exchange some frozen popsicles or charred hunks of steak for a figure that already adds up to zero. The hero of Cat’s Cradle puts it this way:

I blurted out my dream of climbing Mount McCabe with some magnificent symbol and planting it there. I took my hands from the wheel for an instant to show him how empty of symbols they were. "But what in hell would it be?" I grabbed the wheel again. ’’Here it is, the end of the world; and here I am, almost the very last man; and there it is, the highest'mountain in sight. I know now what my karass has been up to, Newt. It’s been working night and day for maybe half a million years to get me up that mountain.” I wagged my head and nearly wept. "But what, for the love of God, is supposed to be in my hands?"

Except for the brilliant The Sirens of Titan and its implication of nothingness, each of Vonnegut’s novels indi­ cates a belief in a meaningful universe, and each of his heroes (again with the exception of Sirens): Proteus,

Howard W. Campbell, Jr., Joaah> Rosewater, and Billy, is a 80

modern pilgrim engaged in an uncertain quest along an

unmapped route. Although the pilgrims must often go it

alone, Vonnegut provides an unusually large number of

messiahs, real and phony, major and minor, to aid in the

quest. Not S'urprisingly, the first one, Winston Niles

Rumfoord, is as deluded as those he seeks to lead, yet his messianic intentions, if a bit cynical, are nonetheless

sincere. He is out to prove to the inhabitants of Earth that their old religions are useless and myopic, while his at least has the benefit of being headed by someone who can see into the future. His elaborately engineered

invasion of the planet, while based on an advanced degree of Machiavellian callousness toward the individual, accom­ plishes its purpose of uniting the people of Earth under one banner. His use of Malachi Constant as an unwilling junior partner in the reformation is for a valid sacri­ ficial purpose:

"We are disgusted by Malachi Constant,” said Winston Niles Rumfoord up in his treetops, "because he used the fantastic fruits of his fantastic good luck to finance an unending demonstration that man is a pig. He wallowed in sycophants. He wal­ lowed in worthless women. He wallowed in lascivious entertainments and alcohol and drugs. He wallowed in every known form of voluptuous turpitude. "At the height of his good luck, Malachi Con­ stant was worth more than the states of Utah and North Dakota combined. Yet, I daresay, his moral worth was not that of the most corrupt little fieldmouse in either state. "We are angered by Malachi Constant," said Rumfoord up in his treetop, "because he did nothing 81

to deserve his billions, and because he did nothing unselfish or imaginative with his bil­ lions. He was as benevolent as Marie Antoinette, as creative as a professor of cosmetology in an embalming college. "We hate Malachi Constant,” said Rumfoord up in his treetop, "because he accepted the fantas­ tic fruits of his fantastic good luck without a qualm, as though luck were the hand of God. To us of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, there is nothing more cruel, more dangerous, more blasphemous that a man can do than to believe that—that luck, good? or bad, is the hand of Godl"

Rumfoord’s religion is, finally, spurious; the three

people most intimately involved with its inception, Mala­

chi, Beatrice his wife, and Chrono his son, are not be­

lievers. Beatrice spends her hast days on Titan writing

"a book called The True Purpose of Life in the Solar System,"

refuting her other husband, Rumfoord’s, claims, and Chrono

flits about the satellite making miniature Stonehenges in

true primitive fashion. Malachi, manipulated as he was by

Rumfoord, leastof all believes the tenets of the Church of

God the Utterly Indifferent. More important than this, of

course, is the fact that Rumfoord discovers he is an un­

witting agent of Tralfamadore, making any success he might

have had meaningless in the larger scheme of things. All

that he has actually accomplished is the death of thousands

of people. Rumfoord bears an embarrassing resemblance to

Yahweh in this respect. Essentially a tribal god, Rumfoord

fails to see the larger pattern into which his chosen people

fit, and thus causes more harm than good, the "good" being 82

the exhortation to love other people, which is the only ethic the novel suggests.

The next major messiah to appear is Lionel Boyd

Johnson, alias Bokonon. His contributions seem more sub­ stantial, because they are based on love and compassion for others, but they are basically as cynical and turn out to be as illusory as Rumfoord’s. And like his predecessor,

Bokonon becomes disillusioned with his own teachings, when the world is destroyed by the freak accident of ice-nine.

He had been forced into believing them by the nature of his role, which in itself is a trenchant comment on all messiahs and would-be messiahs:

"But the people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play the under­ stood., that any human being anywhere could under­ stand and applaud." "So life became a work of art," I marveled. "Yes. There was only one trouble with it." "Oh?" "The drama was very tough on the souls of the two main actors, McCabe and Johnson. As young men, they had been pretty much alike, had both been half-angel, half-pirate. "But the drama demanded that the pirate half of Bokonon and the angel half of McCable wither away. And McCabe and Bokonon paid a terrible price in agony for the happiness of the people— McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Boko­ non knowing the agony of the saint. They both became, for all practical purposes, insane."

Vonnegut aims at the messiahs his half commendatory, 83

half condemnatory barbs because he is attempting to show,

especially in Sirens and Cradle, the futility of, first,

metaphysics, and then organized religion, while conceding

the comforting qualities of each. And each time he is

employing the satirist’s weapon of dystopian divorcement

to remove his targets from the battleground of uncomfortable

reality.

The character and role of Kilgore Trout, the next messiah, however, seems somewhat less clear. When he first

appears in Rosewater it seems apparent that if he is not

actually the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, representing the ineffectuality of the Christian ethic today, he is at least a Christ figure. The fact that the eccentric Eliot

Rosewater is the only one who can appreciate him is appro­ priate, because Christ Kilgore’s teachings are no more pala­ table to the other characters than Prince Myshkin’s or

Faulkner’s corporal’s would be. If one interprets Eliot’s recovery from his nervous breakdown and subsequent acknow­ ledgment of all the bastards of Rosewater County, Indiana, as a triumph, then Trout must be given at least part of the credit for it, which would make him the most effective messiah in the novels. And this is the impression one gets from Rosewater. However, in the next novel, Vonnegut goes to some length to vitiate this impression by showing his

’’cracked messiah” at Billy Pilgrim’s eighteenth wedding anniversary party, ’’gobbling canapes . . . talking with a 84

mouthful of Philadelphia cream cheese and salmon roe to

an optometrists•s wife,” and in general playing the lit­ terateur among the peasantry. Instead of working in a

TV stamp redemption store here, he is in charge of news­ boys (an irritating habit of Vonnegut’s, by the way; in his use of characters in several novels and stories he is not consistent in their names, occupations, etc.) and exhibits very little compassion for them, exhorting them as he does to "get? their daily customers to subscribe to the fucking Sunday edition, too." Yet Trout is the only character in the novel to believe Billy’s contention that he travels in time; indeed, he suspects it. Perhaps Von­ negut is attempting to show that even such a sincere and perceptive thinker as Trout is forced by the ethically hostile climate of the modern world into the role of jester, or it could be that he is simply not willing to commit himself to a totally favorable picture of any character; certainly none exists anywhere in his work. In the basic­ ally absurd world of Vonnegut’s writing, it would be asking too much of any person to make perfect sense.

In addition to these acknowledged messiahs in thé novels, other characters fulfill a similar function on a lesser plane. Malachi Constant, already mentioned in this connection, is the putative messiah of The Sirens of

Titan; Eliot plays a crackpot Christ in Rosewater County,

Indiana; and in Mother Night there are several charismatic leaders of an even less respectable sort, notably the 85

Reverend Doctor Jionel Jason David Jones, D.D.S., D.D.

Each of Vonnegut’s novels contains at least one figure who is concerned with the theological well-being of the race, even if, like Rumfoord, he is a Machiavel, or like

Bokonon, a fraud, or, as Billy Pilgrim says of Trout in a moment of candor, "his prose [is] frightful. As far back as Player Piano, a clergyman is the real genius of the insurrection that Proteus leads.

One hesitates to draw more implications from this extensive use of the messiah other than the obvious one that Vonnegut, like Hesse, is a writer who is interested in theological problems and thus by including characters who represent various forms of the Promised One is able to comment on His illusory nature, yet indicate a yearning for Him nonetheless. It is perhaps significant that Kilgore

Trout plays only a minor part in the sixih novel, the author’s most resigned and hopeful to date. The next published work will help answer the question of whether the messiah belongs to the early, searching Vonnegut and will have no place in his later novels.

There is indeed a definite tendency away from nihilism and toward some sort of tentative affirmation in the six novels thus far. Placing the first book in the category of

"preparation," it is possible to make the following analysis of the thematic progress of his work: 86

The Sirens of Titan—Early disillusionment

Mother Night—Preoccupation with guilt

Cat’s Cradle—Folly of collective answers such as religion

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater—Possibility of individual answers

Slaughterhouse-Five—Mature acceptance of man’s condition

In each of the last four books Vonnegut becomes in­ creasingly less pessimistic. The meaninglessness of Sirens is replaced in Cat♦s Cradle by a nose-thumbing gesture at

’’You Know Who,” but at least there is a You Know Who. God

Bless You, Mr. Rosewater strikes the same wary but hopefully teleological note. Eliot, besieged by greedy relatives, deserted by his wife, fighting for what remains of his sanity, is still trying, on the novel’s last page, to put his money to work for the common good. He is still trying to "love the unlovables,” to play beneficent god to them in the hope that there really is a beneficent god, or at least an alert one. At the end of the novel he tells his flock to ”be fruitful and to multiply." And, one might add, while mul­ tiplying, to take time out for work. Vonnegut comes back again and again in his writing to the Voltairean work ethic, which is frequently the last refuge for the failed meta­ physician. In Player Piano, only those people who still have manual labor to perform are happy; in Rosewater, the fishermen-turned-soupmakers engage in an idyllic work scene, 87

which, although not illustrative of Vonnegut’s best prose,

indicates that if he ever writes a sentimental novel with

a conventional happy ending, the hero almost certainly

will wear a blue collar.

It. is difficult to understand why Vonnegut was dis­

missed for so long with the disreputable title of science-

fiction writer, since from the very beginning he has been

dealing with metaphysical, ethical, and epistemological

questions in his work. One must conclude that his imagi­

nation and talent for eccentric detail actually worked

against him with the critics, who rarely looked beneath

the surface gloss to the rugged terrain underneath. On

first reading, the intricate plot and fascinating detail

of The Sirens of Titan can indeed obscure the serious

intent and probing, if not traditionally scholarly exami­

nation of the cosmological question. Vonnegut, after all,

is a novelist, not an academician.?, or a philosopher, and

he deals with theme in the manner of a creative writer—

with all the stylistic devices at his command. Perhaps

he is too fond of space ships, time travel, and other gim­

mickry, but these phenomena, after all, represent the latter

half of the twentieth century far better than would the

riverboat journeys of Twain, the small town life of Sherwood

Anderson, or the physical encounters with death of Ernest

Hemingway—as critics are coming to realize. At any rate, neither Vonnegut’s motives nor techniques need be defended 88

in a discussion of his themes, which are without doubt

as respectable a collection as could be found anywhere in

the modern American novel.

Player Piano is an interesting starting point, because

it shows Vonnegut rather dimly at first perceiving how he

feels about man’s place in the cosmos. Annoyed at the

trend toward automation and the submergence of the indivi­

dual in a collective state, he alternately pokes fun at the

situation and rather pessimistically describes the attempts

of a few right thinkers to do something about it. What

begins as a diatribe against his real life enemies—General

Electric, academe, and the United States government—gradu­

ally takes on more impressive proportions with the intro­

duction of two foreign observers, who force both the author

and the reader to examine the questions raised in a brighter,

more objective light. What starts as a sort of technological

bildungsroman focussed on Paul Proteus as hero adds layers

of meaning as Proteus' importance diminishes. He is on

stage more often than any other character, but Vonnegut manipulates him more as the novel progresses; the satiric

attack, while still individualized, begins to deal with its targets in a more universalized fashion. Proteus’ conspir­

ators in the insurrection are finally unmasked as unworthy,

exposed as, in their own ways, just as corrupt as the society they sought to overthrow, because none of them had any real concern for the people they were ostensibly trying to save. 89

The bottle went around the group. "The record," said Finnerty, and he seemed satisfied with the toast. He had got what he wanted from the revolution, Paul supposed—a chance to give a savage blow to a close little society that made no comfortable place for him. "To the record,” said von Neumann. He, too, seemed at peace. To him, the revolution had been a fascinating experiment, Paul realized. He had been less interested in achieving a premeditated end than in seeing what would happen with given beginnings. Paul took the bottle and studied Lasher for a moment over its fragrant mouth. Lasher, the chief instigator of it all, was contented. A lifelong trafficker in symbols, he had created the revolution as a symbol, and was now welcoming the opportunity to die as one.

Only Paul is ’’pure, ’’ and he is pure because he alone has been an idealist, has believed that individulism was worth salvaging, while the others, by their presupposi­ tions, indicate nothing but contempt for the masses. The point to all this is that Vonnegut is examining the question of man’s worth first through the eyes of man—his rebels— and he is illustrating man * s historically negative answer to the question, the answer that has resulted from, and then continued to produce, centuries of war, oppression, poverty, and the final debasement of the individual in modern society

In the next novel he raises his eyes to the heavens, and further universalizes the problem. The Sirens of Titan picks up where Player Piano left off, and, although he dis­ guises it by making the reader think that the conflict in the novel is between Winston Niles Rumfoord and humanity, represented by Malachi Constant, later to be known as "Unk,” 90

the opponent here is actually none other than God himself.

Does anybody up there really like us? Is there really anybody up there at all? Are those who are manipulating us here on Earth being in turn manipulated by a higher power? Vonnegut’s answer to all these questions is a firm, but not nihilistic no. Although the book is deeply pessi­ mistic in its philosophical conclusions, showing an Earth that is nothing more than a semaphore for the signal needs of another planet equally engaged in a meaningless pursuit, the story is told with a good deal of detachment, and there are some indications of meaning, e.g., the fact that Malachi writes a history of Mars and Beatrice a poem. Vonnegut has never in his writing seemed willing to settle for Carl

Becker’s conclusion that man has supplied his own meaning to the universe, but he seems to approach it here and in other places, most notably in the saintly Eliot’s attempts to love everybody. Yet The Sirens of Titan, taken on its face value, presents a world in which the Earth and the other planets in the solar systems are no better off than the citizens of Ilium who were being mechanically directed by computers and forced to perform according to the facts and figures punched on their IBM cards. The novel repre­ sents a cul-de-sac for the cosmological question, one which

Vonnegut was not to get out of until he had progressed to

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. 91

Rosewater and Mother Night, neither of which is actually a metaphysical novel, deal with opposite sides of another, related question, but one which has implications strictly on the terrestrial level—guilt. They form a sort of tandem of polarity on the problem. Hate is the dominant emotion of Mother Night; it is the villain, and although

Howard W. Campbell almost alone among the principals, does not hate, he is nevertheless responsible for promoting it in others, and in the end of the book he shares the guilt for its ubiquity in the world. The antidote to hate, "to love whoever is around to be loved,” is only briefly and weakly applied in the novel. In Mother Night Vonnegut momentarily abandons his logically reached conclusions about the nature of the universe, and returns to a more traditional, Christian view of things. After all, if what

Malachi discovers about the universe is true, then why should Campbell care one way or the other about the effect of the broadcasts he made for the Nazis on the holocaust of the Second World War? And why should Vonnegut still feel guilty for being a citizen of a nation that dropped terrible bombs on its enemies, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as Dresden? The fact that he does feel guilt is an indication that The Sirens of Titan was not the philosophical dead end it first appeared to be, an indication that was borne out later, first in Rosewater, and then in Slaughterhouse-Five 92

Between the two-part ethical discussion of hate and

love in the third and fifth novels, Vonnegut returned to the themes introduced in Player Piano, for the fourth novel, Cat1s Cradle, is simply an update of the problems first introduced there, done with greater novelistic skill and brevity. In place of the huge corporation that runs the country there is Papa Monzano and his tyranny, instead of lodges to pacify the masses there is Bokononism, instead of the cold computer there is the disinterested scientist; the outcome, seen through the eyes of the clear thinking protagonist, is, in both novels, holocaust. The book forms a link both to the preceding and succeeding ones, however.

The cat’s cradle made by Hoenikker for the amusement of his children is the very same thing as the messages spelled out for Salo, the visitor from Tralfamadore-—neither has any intrinsic meaning and neither is constructed or guided by an interested deity, be it god or father.

"For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grownups have been waving tangles of string in their children’s faces." "Um. " Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. "No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s . . ." "And?" "No damn cat, and no damn cradle."

The response of the inhabitants of San Lorenzo to this predicament is Bokononism, that quaint religion with 93

its ritual of boko-maru.

’’When Bokonon and McCabe took over this miserable country years ago,” said Julian Castle, "they threw out the priests. And then Bokonon, cynically and playfully, invented a new religion." "I know," I said. "Well, when it became evident that no govern­ mental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because truth was so terri­ ble, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies."

The better and better lies, of course, being Bokononism.

Eliot Rosewater applies the same principle when he answers

his telephone in the Foundation offices; he tells lies to

Diana Moon Glampers and the other unlovables. He tells

them, in effect, that they are worth something—otherwise,

why sould a man of his importance give his time, money,

and consideration to them. Vonnegut seems to be endorsing

happy illusion to start truth.

Man’s seemingly endless capacity for hate manifests

itself in Cat * s Cradle in the form of ice, but in God Bless

You, Mr. Rosewater fire is the agent, and the fire depart­ ment Vonnegut’s symbol of the antidote, love. (As far back

as Sirens the fire department bell was used to herald the

return to earth of Unk, the messiah.) Eliot, who has acci­

dentally killed some German firemen—performing the hateful act of war—venerates firemen, because, as Kilgore Trout tells him, 94

"Your devotion to volunteer fire departments is very sane, too, Eliot, for they are, when the alarm goes off, almost the only examples of enthu­ siastic unselfishness to be seen in this land. They rush to the rescue of any human being, and count not the cost. The most contemptible man in town, should his contemptible house catch fire, will see his enemies put the fire out. And, as he pokes through the ashes for remains of his contemptible possessions, he will be comforted and pitied by no less than the Fire Chief." Trout spread his hands. "There*we have people treasuring people as people. It’s ex­ tremely rare. So from this we must learn."

During one of his binges Eliot expounds on the reasons that firemen are the saviors of the Earth:

He went into a small bar there, announced that anyone who could produce a volunteer fireman’s badge could drink with him free. He built gradu­ ally into a crying jag, during which he claimed to lie deeply touched by the idea of an inhabited planet with an atmosphere that was eager to com­ bine violently with almost everything the inhabi­ tants held dear. He was speaking of Earth and the element oxygen. "When you think about it, boys," he said bro­ kenly, "that’s what holds us together more than anything else, except maybe gravity. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers—joined in the serious business of keeping our food, shelter, clothing and loved ones from combining with oxy­ gen. I tell you, boys, I used to belong to a vol­ unteer fire department, and I’d belong to one now, if there were such a human thing, such a humane thing, in New York City." This was bunk about Eliot’s having been a fireman. The closest he had ever come to that was during his annual child­ hood visits to Rosewater County, to the family fief. Sycophants among the townies had flattered little Eliot by making him mascot of the Volunteer Fire Department of Rosewater. He had never fought a fire. 95

With Rosewater, Vonnegut makes two advances themati­ cally; he stops stewing about the unanswerable questions concerning the purpose of life, and second, he proposes an individual, workable ethic for those who, like Rosewater and Vonnegut, are plagued by guilt about their roles in the tragicomedy of existence. As has been noted before, the ethic is neither original nor profound, but it is posi­ tive. Rosewater takes Malachi Constant’s advice to I'love whoever is around to be loved,” and carries it to its logi­ cal conclusion—he will love those people whom it is im­ possible to love for one’s own gain. His senator father and socialite wife are lovable for potentially selfish reasons, so he literally abandons them for the have-nots and lowlifes of Rosewater County. After all, if there is no god to love them, who else will? The therapeutic effects of this indiscriminate love are less evident on the donor than on the recipients. Confronted with his father’s accu­ sations that he made a mess of his life and hated those two people closest to him, Eliot has a nervous breakdown that sends him to a sanitarium, but the possible benefit to others, as envisioned by Kilgore Trout, is immense:

”It seems to me," said Trout, "that the main lesson Eliot learned is that people can use all the uncritical love they can get." "This is news?" the Senator raucously inquired. "It’s news that a man was able to give that kind of love over a long period of time. If one man can do it, perhaps others can do it, too. It means that our hatred of useless human beings 96

and the cruelties we inflict upon them for their own good need not be parts of human nature. Thanks to the example of Eliot Rose­ water, millions upon millions of people may learn to love and help whomever they see.”

Like Howard W. Campbell, war criminal, Eliot Rosewater,

war criminal, holes himself up in a small room away from

his own kind, but unlike Campbell, Eliot does not become

a recluse. In quixotic fashion he tries to atone for his

former hate by working and loving; Vonnegut’s ethical

modus operandi is, of course, nothing more than the work

ethic mixed with early Christian love, and Eliot Rose­

water’s earthly success at applying it is no greater than

was Christ’s, a fact of which Vonnegut must have been cog­ nizant when he wrote the ingenuously optimistic lines of

Trout quoted above—and it seems likely, in view of his portrayal of Trout as a crackpot, that he was.

It is not difficult to place Slaughterhouse-Five in this cosmos, although the book represents both a step for­ ward and one backward philosophically. Billy Pilgrim’s

(the theological implications in the name duly noted) two­ fold discovery that man does not die but exists at several points in the universe at the same time, similar to Winston

Niles Rumfoord’s encounter with the chrono-synclastic infun­ dibulum, and further that nothing happens on the Earth which will bring about the destruction of the universe, is comfort ing and indicates additional maturation by the author, but, on the other hand, the assertion that the universe will be 97

destroyed by Tralfamadorian means and that it is deter­

mined to happen that was by an inscrutable ’'structuring”

brings one back to the fatalism of Sirens. One could say

that since there is a structure, there must be a meaning,

and that since a fate for the universe has been preordained

there must be a preordinator, but the total lack of free

will in this system and the utter fecklessness of our

representative, Billy, combine to give the reader a less

than optimistic feeling. It is the tone of the novel rather

than the overt statemfents of the author that leads one to

believe that Vonnegut has finally washed the horror and

guilt of Dresden from his mind and has come to accept the

previously unacceptable—man’s capacity for evil, the tongue

in-cheek way this evil seems to be directed, or abetted,

by some exterior force, and the helplessness of the indi­

vidual to do much about either. Billy is battered but

alive, and will continue to live. These facts, and the

comfort they evidently give Billy’s creator (his literary

creator) produce the exact opposite of'a fatalistic mood

in the novel; if anything the book is sentimental.

Some reviewers felt the book was a diatribe against the futility of life, an expression of outrage, but if

Slaughterhouse-Five is that, then the first five novels must be shrieks of it; because compared to their red-hot indignation, the sixth is only a pale shade of pink. Von­ negut is surely not expressing outrage with the constant 98

reiteration of the resigned statement, "So it goes.”

The sixth novel is, unlike any of the others, com­

pletely without villains. Billy’s German captors are only briefly and not unsympathetically delineated, his abductors from Tralfamadore are more mentors than kidnappers, and those with whom he comes in conflict in his life in America never possess the civilized savagery of Kroner, Hoenikker,

Rumfoord, or Norman Mushari, nor the brute animosity of

Dr. Jones, Krapptauer, or Senator Rosewater. The novel’s subtitle, The Children’s Crusade, has potentially the bit­ terest implication—the comparison of the Allied war effort in World War II to the infamous children’s crusades of the middle ages, but this is only briefly accomplished, and in the non-fiction first chapter of the novel at that. The events of Billy’s life are often horrible, to be sure, but to one who has read Vonnegut from the beginning, it is appar­ ent that he has come to accept them as something it does no good to maunder about; Billy, the optometrist who fits people with glasses, has fitted Vonnegut with a pair, which, if not exactly rose colored, have enabled him to see things in their proper perspective. A romp in bed with Montana

Wildhack has just as much cosmic significance as an after­ noon spent digging corpses out of the rubble of Dresden, no more, no less.

It would be foolhardy to try to construct a cogent, organized philosophical system from Vonnegut’s writing; it 99

simply is not there. Although it is obvious that he has taken his novelistic work seriously from the beginning, and has sought meaningful content in each of the books, his stance has always been more descriptive than analyti­ cal, his attitude comic rather than tragic, although a discussion of his themes tends to obscure this last fact.

It seems evident also, that Vonnegut has said about all he has to say metaphysically—if Slaughterhouse-Five is any indication of the present state of his ethos. One can look for more time traveling from him, but probably back and forth over the old ground, a la Billy Pilgrim, and perhaps in the future novels his new, and old, characters will mirror the resignation apparent in the sixth novel.

If this turns out to be true, the ironic indignation that made his early works so interesting will be missing, as it is to great extent in Slaughterhouse-Five. So it goes. 100

VONNEGUT'S HUMOR

Although the themes of Vonnegut’s novels are serious

ones,the treatment of them is always wildly funny. Vonne­

gut is a satirist, a comedian, and a literary prankster.

His work is filled with every variety of comic technique,

both high and low. To label him simply a black humorist

is to concentrate too narrowly on Mother Night and Cat’s

Cradle—which do have an air of existential despair about them—and to neglect the more benign fun of the other four novels. Although on occasion he is Swiftian, more often than not he stirs echoes of Rabelais.

An analysis of the darker humor will show that it is nearly always the product of characterization. Vonnegut’s themes are not intrinsically depressing, his plots are even less so, and his settings, except for the sixth novel with its prison camp and Dresden episodes, do not in themselves contribute an air of despair. Only Mother Night with its theme of guilt, and Cat's Cradle, a vision of the apocalypse, have in them the sisyphusian view of life, and in each this view is muted by a good deal of hilarious comedy. Although the six novels end, successively, in an unsuccessful rebel­ lion, an exile on another body of the solar system, a sui­ cide, the end of the world, a quixotic gesture by a man in a sanitarium, and a bird saying, ”Poo-tee-wheet?”, the routes to these denouements are usually lined with something 101

other than hollow grins. Significantly, the novel which

deals most directly with the awful events of the Dresden

fire bombing, Slaughterhouse-Five, is the mildest in tone,

in its treatment and implications far less Swiftian than

any of the other novels except perhaps Rosewater.

In Mother Night Vonnegut had not yet reached the

serenity of mind that would later allow him to feel free,

or relatively free, of guilt for the Second World War. His

protagonist, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., feels part of the

collectivity of hate that causes all wars, and the fact

that he is an American agent does nothing to assuage this

guilt. After all, the Americans were guilty of atrocities

also. Of the American characters in the novel only Campbell

shows any semblance of compassion. Col. Frank Wirtanen is

an automaton, Bernard O’Hare is filled with hatred for his

imagined enemy; the others—Jones, Krapptauer, the Black

Fuehrer of Harlem—are all grotesques in the classic manner.

Thus, the humor in this novel, aimed at these people, and

at the Europeans Potapov and Resi, who are more favorably

portrayed but who are for the most part at the mercy of the

CIA, tends to be dark. Nearly everyone in the novel, in­

cluding very minor characters such as Adolf Eichmann, Camp­ bell’s guards, and the Jewish woman who turns him in, is a fascist of some shade. Vonnegut’s characterizations of these grotesques are inescapably black. They are figures on a fresco of hate—Jones with his racist theories, Krapp- 102

tauer with his blind Nazism, Mrs. Epstein, who would have

been happy to be a guard in a postwar Jewish-constructed

Auschwitz for Germans. Yet less austere humor is apparent

in the novel also. Campbell, despite his presumed guilt,

has good qualities. He is a champion ping pong>player,

and, with his partner, Heinz Schildknecht, "an expert at

propagandizing Australians and New Zealanders,” once beat

Goebbels and Karl Hederich 21-2, 21-1, 21-0. He has sym­

pathy for Eichmann, considering him spiritually, if not

legally, insane; he is infallibly polite to his friends

and enemies; and he prides himself on the fact that he has

lived entirely on the interest accrued by his German for­

tune and has never touched the principal. Neither is his

chess partner, Kraft-Potapov, a monster. On the contrary,

he turns out to be one of America’s finest painter^,and,

after his capture by the FBI, becomes the Thomas Hart Benton

of Leavenworth. Under oath he declares that Campbell was

”a political idiot, an artist who could not distinguish

between reality and dreams" and thus should not be held

responsible for his crimes. The satirical jibes at the

communists, the CIA and FBI, Creative Playthings, Inc.,

and Bing Crosby’s "White Christmas" are mild indeed, and

help lighten the bleak tone of the novel.

The black quality of Cat’s Cradle comes primarily from

the sense of doom that hangs over the novel, and also from the portrayal of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, who is responsible for 103

that doom. The actual events, and the descriptions of

most of the other characters, even his spiritually stunted

children, are much less depressing than in the previous

novel, and Vonnegut is so busy taking humorous potshots at

such sitting ducks as science, religion, politics, business,

and the U.S. State Department, that the black broth is watered down considerably with drops of yellow bile. In this novel, the protagonist is little more than objective narrator, even though he tells his tale in first person; there are no villains other than Hoenikker and his gang of scientists, and Hoenikker appears only in others* accounts of him. Ice-nine, the doomsday creation, obviously has the potential to end all life on the planet, but it is not certain that it will succeed until very nearly the end of the novel. In addition, the lovely religion of Bokonon­ ism and its calypsos, although repudiated by its creator on the final page of the book, helps to lighten the story, as does the island dialect invented by Vonnegut, who is too busy making jokes in Cat1s Cradle to take the novel very seriously. The reader should also be wary of ascribing too much seriousness to the events therein.

In the other four novels the humor is much more gentle despite the fact that Vonnegut’s view of life is essentially a satiric one. His dissection of automation in Player Piano rarely fails to amuse, especially when the scalpel is wielded by one of the victims of progress, such as Harold, the squawk 104

box hater, or McCloud and Purdy, two Cornell football

players who are profoundly glad they are not ’’workin' for

Harvard.” Vonnegut's satire, on the whole, is more con­

trolled and effective than his other comic techniques,

which lean heavily to bitter irony and gothic portraiture.

He never resorts to diatribe, however, anywhere; it is

always the knife rather than the bludgeon.

Vonnegut’s satirical targets are nearly always those

people, or intitutions, firmly entrenched in positions of power, and have already been identified, because a discus­

sion of his plots is incomplete without them. In the early stages of his career, automation is the chief target, but this quickly gives way to more formidable opponents—science, politics, the military, government, and wealth. The method of attack is nearly always exaggeration, as with Malachi

Constant's father and his technique of playing the stock market by using books of the Bigle, Bokonon’s coldly cal­ culated attempt to bring comfort to the San Lorenzans by supplying them with an entire new religion, or the elaborate plan to deprive Eliot Rosewater of his millions—all of these events are just beyond the realm of probability, but with a bit of coaxing on Vonnegut’s part the reader is will­ ing to believe in their verisimilitude. Vonnegut examines the evils possible in the Titans that walk the earth today and carries the possibilities to their ultimate conclusions.

His imagery, usually used for comic purposes, follows 105

this same pattern, giving it a bizarre flavor. The

metaphors are highly tactile, but they verge on the hyper­

bolic. An evangelist "[spits] his audience on a bright

and loving gaze, and [proceeds] to roast it whole over the

coals of its own iniquity." A prison guard is "a Roman

candle of a man." A space visitor "[begins] to shrink,

to fizz crazily on the foyer floor like a ping-pong ball

in a frying pan." A woman’s black wig [looks] as though

it had been nailed to a farmer’s barn door for years."

A homosexual restaurant owner has "junk jewelry eyes, syn­

thetic star sapphires with winking Christmas-tree lights behind them." Vonnegut’s inanimate imagery often is some­ what bleaker, although it is still possible to describe most of it as comic. He writes of swimming pools looking like "punchbowls in hell," old buildings standing in re­ lation to modern ones "like unmade beds at the feet of the archangel Gabriel," batons that are "cromium dildoes,"

"slack-jawed briefcases," "the gent and gaping doors of . . mailboxes [which] might have been the doors of cells in a jail in a burning city somewhere," and—"The American Dream,

[which has] turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas,

[gone] bang in the noonday sun." This imagistic eccentri­ city is continued and, if anything, expanded in his last novel, with such similes as "chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches, ’’ and "every time he inhaled his lungs 106

rattled like greasy paper bags." These are the kinds

of images one feels he has to read twice when he first

meets them, and the second reading often produces a more

comic response than the first.

More important, however, than the tendency toward

exaggeration in Vonnegut’s humor, is simply his eye for

the ludicrous. His perception of the world about him,

although often an outraged one, is nevertheless gentler

than Swift’s or Twain’s. After the Juvenalian Mother Night,

the Horatian quality of his satire becomes increasingly

more evident, and Slaughterhouse-Five, which is structur­

ally and thematically similar to Gulliver’s Travels, shows

little of the despair Swift felt in describing mankind and

its follies. One has only to compare The Sirens of Titan

to Letters from the Earth, or The Mysterious Stranger, which

have similar subject matter, to see that Vonnegut has a

more hopeful view of life, one which is always aware of the

ridiculous actions of mankind, but which allows for a less

furious castigation of those foibles. In this area, Von­

negut is especially tolerant of the little people in his

books, the fringe members of society, who, although they

are often grotesques, are never treated with the acid he

reserves for more powerful persons. A large list of these

could be compiled from his novels, but it will suffice to look closely at just one, Fred Rosewater. Fred, Eliot’s

cousin, is as feckless a human being as one could find. A 107

shirt-tail relative of a great family, he has none of

the greatness found in other members of it, nor does he

wish for it. He is typical of a class of American society,

the unsuccessful white collar worker, who dislikes his job,

fears his wife and children, desires erotic love but has not the courage to seek it out except in its perverted

form in magazines and newspapers, and who would end his life if he could find the temerity to do it. (Fred actually tries, but is caught in the act.) When he is first seen in the novel he is about his morning’s work:

Poor, lugubrious Fred spent his mornings seek­ ing insurance prospects in the drugstore, which was the coffee house of the rich, and the news store, which was the coffee house of the poor. He was the only many in town who had coffee in both places. Fred bellied up to the new store’s lunch coun­ ter, beamed at a carpenter and two plumbers sitting there. He climbed aboard a stool, and his great behind made the cushion seem no larger than a marsh­ mallow. "Coffee and Danish, Mr. Rosewater?" said the not-very-clean idiot girl behind the counter. "Coffee and Danish sounds real good," Fred agreed heartily. "On a morning like this, by God, coffee and Danish sounds real good."

It is a picture of quiet despair that is presented here.

None of the tragic element of his cousin Eliot’s life enters Fred’s, and even when he tries to take his own life he is unsuccessful. In the basement of his home, with a noose thrown over a water pipe, Fred is interrupted in the process of killing himself by Norman Mushari, who has come to tell him that he stands to inherit a great deal of money 108

if Eliot is declared insane. Fred’s reaction to this news is to faint. Vonnegut wisely does not see the potentiality for tragedy in little people—if he did he probably would have been a naturalist—and the pathos that he presents is always mitigated with wry humor.

Even the great and near-great have their quirks. Mal­ achi Constant’s father, the founder of Magnum Opus, spends his life in a hotel room; Winston Niles Rumfoord, the most important man in our solar system, keeps a collection of shells, coral, and other refuse from the beach; Senator

Rosewater is repelled by human hair, especially pubic hair; and the announced foe of Bokononism, Papa Monzano, who has made adherence to the religion punishable by death, is a secret worshipper himself. It goes without saying that the ludicrous aspects of Christianity are flagrantly ridiculed in Bokononism.

The importance of Vonnegut’s humor, and the basic lack of hostility it indicates in his thought, is that it has enabledhim to gain a reading audience, amuse and delight them, but at the same time to make some profound and provo­ cative comments on a variety of important subjects. The unfortunate aspect of it is that it for so long prevented him from being taken seriously. Once the school of black humor was noticed by the critics, Vonnegut was assigned a place in that category, and again written off as superficial

It was not until God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater that it became 109

apparent that he was a comic writer of larger scope, the magnitude of which has yet to be determined, for he is, one hopes, still in mid-career. 110

VONNEGUT’S TECHNIQUE

In attempting to account for Kurt Vonnegut’s sudden and immense popularity with readers, especially college students, one is eventually forced to conclude that his brilliant technique has been largely responsible, this same technique which was dismissed as "flashy" by his early critics. Flashy it is, but no more so than Mark Twain’s or Hart Crane’s, two among the many writers who have suf­ fered from modernity, and although no claim is made for

Vonnegut being of comparable stature, the similarities in their treatment by the more conservative critics are too evident to overlook. Perhaps even more than the fantastic and science-fictional subjects of his novels, the apparent slickness with which he has written them has militated against early critical success, and, ironically, has pro­ duced his popular victory, which in turn has cause critics to overpraise his most poorly written novel.

If it were true that Vonnegut is a slick writer, then his novels should suffer somewhat on second reading. Except for the rather conventional, sometimes clumsy Player Piano, which, of course, is not echt Vonnegut, the books yield greater rewards on a closer reading, when one is not dazzled by the pyrotechnics of the plot. On first reading, The Sirens of Titan is probably the best example of this. It looks like the least of his novels—how can one be bothered to Ill

search for theme when the Earth is being invaded by Mars?

How can he know that Vonnegut is laying a clever trap for

him, carefully guiding his responses to the seemingly en­

tertaining but superficial plot details, in order to make the denouement that much more powerful? The standard

science-fiction writer such as Harry Harrison or Keith

Laumer is just as adept at amusing, at supplying imaginative details, but one waits in vain for some significance to what he is reading. Nor does Vonnegut give stylistic clues to additional meaning as does Ray Bradbury, whose stories often have an incantory quality about them; neither does he engage in the obvious polemic of H.G. Wells. He is very much concerned with plot as plot, perhaps too much for his own critical good, because the thematic content of the books often does not come out clearly until the reader’s attention is free to examine leisurely the implications of the physical events so brilliantly described.

Writers of fantasies have ever been literarily suspect, except perhaps in the eighteenth century, when impossible tales about the New World had been put into their proper perspective, and the form was found appropriate to the conte philosophique. Except for the continued fascination with the utopian novel, however, respectable writers rarely have made forays into the fantastic; the form’s bourgeois origins militated against this. The major European and American novelists of the nineteenth century eschewed the fantastic, 112

except for the gothic tale, which, although arcane and

supernatural, usually had an identifiable middle-class

setting. Nothing resembling Gulliver»s Travels came from

the pens of Balzac, Zola, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Dickens, or

Eliot. Hawthorne’s interest in the unknown is almost

purely gothic, and the two major nineteenth century Ameri­

can novelists who did dabble in the fantastic, Mark Twain

and Herman Melville, suffered accordingly for it. Although

fantasy has fared somewhat better in the twentieth century,

it has done so in its psychological form, such as in the work of Kafka, Hesse, Grass, and David Garnett, or in the utopian fables of Huxley, Orwell, and, lately, Burgess, all

Europeans, as are Vonnegut’s direct literary ancestors,

Karl Capek and Anatole France, both less respectdd by the critics than those writers mentioned above. H.G. Wells is no longer discussed seriously, and J.R. Tolkien is only now becoming regarded as more than a children’s writer. A list of contemporary American fantasistsr.who have achieved some measure of respectability would include, besides Vonnegut, only Ray Bradbury, and perhaps John Collier.

What it is that makes a man choose fantasy for a liter ary vehicle is beyond the scope of the discussion here; suffice it to say that Vonnegut recognized early in his career that this was the route most congenial to his indi­ vidual imagination; although he deviates from it in some of his shorter pieces, the novels all have a fantastic quality 113

about them. Mother Night and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

contain nothing that is impossible according to our present understanding of the limits of physical phenomena, but they

are just as much fantasies as the other four novels—just as Càndide and Rasselas are. It is worth noting, also, that these two books have fared quite well with the critics, while

The Sirens of Titan has been virtually ignored.

Vonnegut’s use of the fantastic mode always takes the same form. He selects a protagonist and sets him up against a formidable opponent, but an opponent to whom he is in some way allied, the conflict resulting in an epiphany for the protagonist. The path of this conflict can be either from innocence to experience, or just the opposite, or both, but it always results in a heightned awareness for the prin­ cipal character, and occasionally for someone else. This focus on the solitary hero becomes increasingly more pro­ nounced as his work progresses.

Of the six heroes, Paul Proteus, Malachi Constant,

Howard W. Campbell, Jr., John (Jonah), Eliot Rosewater, and

Billy Pilgrim, all begin their histories as a part of that which the author wishes to expose, examine, and condemn.

Proteus is a high-placed engineer in the dystopian society that he eventually seeks to overthrow; Constant is convinced that somebody up there likes him and must be taught that there is nobody up there; Campbell is part of the World War

II machine on both sides; John, a somewhat more disinterested 114

(and uninteresting) character, is a Bokononist and an

admirer of scientific progress, two of the satiric targets

of Cat1s Cradle; Rosewater is a member of the wealthy class

he decides to subvert’ with his philanthropy, Pilgrim is a

part of the American army which he opts out of and which

in turn proceeds to fire bomb him. In a sense, then, all

Vonnegut’s heroes are revolutionaries, some consciously

so, others only by accident. And none of his heroes is successful in fighting his particular city hall. Proteus’ insurrection is put down, Constant-Rumfoord’s invasion of the Earth is defeated, Campbell’s espionage activities produce more benefit for the Germans than for the Allies,

Bokonon’s religion and John’s advocacy of it prove useless against the onslaught of ice-nine, Eliot’s goodness lands him in a sanitarium, and Pilgrim, although rescued somewhat by becoming unstuck in time, fails in his earthly efforts to remind the world of the horrors of war. Each is in a comfortable middle or upper class situation, each is wrenched away from his life-pattern, and each has some sort of awaken­ ing because of his travail.

It is tempting to see a Faust theme in much of this, but for the extreme innocence of most of the heroes. Al­ though Proteus, Eliot, and Campbell are genuinely Faustian in their aspirations, Constant and Pilgrim are "victims of a series of accidents," and John is little more than an intrusive author, despite the fact that Cat’s Cradle is 115

written in first person, one of Vonnegut’s two novels with this point of view—Mother Night is the other. It is in the Mephistophelian characters that the Faust theme is more apparent in his work. The supporting figures in the novels—-Finnerty, the Irish rebel in Player Piano,

Winston Niles Rumfoord in The Sirens of Titan, Col. Frank

Wirtanen, the ’’blue fairy godmother” of Mother Night, Boko­ non in Cat * s Cradle, Kilgore Trout in Rosewater, and Billy’s

Tralfamadorian captors in Slaughterhouse-Five—all perform an epistemological service for the protagonist and help him to change his perspective. Even more intriguing is the effect of their efforts on themselves, for some of the tempters discover a new reality while exhibiting what turns out to be an old one to their pupils, or else they are shown to be unworthy or ineffectual teachers. Finnerty shows

Paul the inhumanity of the social system Proteus works to uphold, but after Proteus leads the revolution against it,

Finnerty is exposed as a congenital malcontent who is in­ capable of learning the lesson his pupil learns. Rumfoord, through his Machiavellian use of Malachi Constant as an agent for enlightening mankind, comes to discover that he has been just as deluded by a spurious teleology as have his pawns, as if Twain’s Philip Traum had suddenly found himself plucked up by a chess player from another dimension and been squeezed as he was crushing the unfortunate inhabi­ tants of Eseldorf. Bokonon, who offers a phony religion to 116

the San Lorenzans, obviously comes to believe in it him­

self before he is disillusioned by the ice-nine epidemic.

Col. Frank Wirtanen, the American intelligence agent who

sets Howard W. Campbell moving on his quest for the truth

by instructing him to tell lies over the radio, is last

seen leading a Thoreauvian existence ”in or around the only

dwelling on Coggin’s Pond, six miles due west of Hinkley-

ville, Maine.” He writes to Campbell in prison, in an

effort to clear him:

The discipline of a lifetime now collapses like the fable walls of Jericho. Who is Joshua, and that is the tune his trumpets play? I wish I knew. The mu3ic Ithat has worked such havoc against such old walls is not loud. It-is faith, diffuse, and peculiar.

His real name, we find out, is Harold J. Sparrow. "Poo- tee-wheet?" Eliot Rosewater’s guru, Kilgore Trout, whose novel 2BRO2B has convinced Eliot that he is a Hamlet figure, is reduced to working in a TV stamp redemption store. Per­ haps the worst fate of all is that to be suffered by the

Tralfamadorians who teach Billy Pilgrim the secret of exist­ ing in several time zones at once, for they know the exact date and time when the universe is to be destroyed, and are powerless to stop it.

Nevertheless, whatever the outcome of the guides, those they lead reach new states of awareness, sometimes in the conventional terms of the entwicklungsroman, sometimes in just the opposite. Perhaps coincidentally, the protagonists 117

of the first three novels go from innocence to experience

and those of the last three go from a sophisticated, woAily

view of things to a simpler, more primitive understanding

of their lives; one .might say that Proteus, Constant, and

Campbell turn from lambs into tigers, while John, Rosewater,

and Pilgrim change from tigers into lambs. (What this in­

dicates about Vonnegut himself can only be surmised, but it

seems a natural comcomitant to maturity.) The protagonists

of Vonnegut’s novels, with the exception of John, are his

greatest achievement, fully delineated, dynamic as opposed

to static, contemporary yet timeless. Their experiences

bear the chief burden of transmitting the author’s thought.

While the heroes of the novels are carefully drawn,

their antagonists and most of the minor characters tend

toward stereotype. Except for the successful portrait of

Winston Niles Rumfoord in Sirens, the enemy forces are

pale indeed, and for that matter, a case can be made for

Rumfoord being the actual protagonist of the novel. He is

very much Iago to Malachi’s Othello. Rumfoord is fully

drawn, except for physical description, something of which

Vonnegut does very little of except for purposes of cari­

cature, and he is much more interesting as a character than

Malachi. Most of the other supporting characters, however,

are quickly sketched (albeit often brilliantly) and what

one retains of them is often a brief glimpse—Senator Rose­

water’s aversion to hair, Proteus’s wife Anita’s repetition 118

of the phrase, "I love you, Paul," Papa Monzano’s per­ forming boko-maru on his death bed. Part of the reason for this is simply that Vonnegut’s novels are not long enough to allow for, or sustain, lengthy character deline­ ation, except for the protagonist, nor is he interested in that facet of writing. After Player Piano he makes every attempt to tell his story as quickly and economi­ cally as possible, and in doing so, although he sacrifices a certain amount of depth, he achieves succinctness and concentrated power.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, his most accomplished novel, illustrates clearly the contentions made above.

Eliot is Vonnegut’s finest piece of characterization, the book his most successful use of the pastiche technique.

Although described briefly elsewhere in this study, it is necessary here to take a more detailed look at Vonnegut’s method of writing this brilliant comic novel.

The epigraph attributed to Eliot begins the book in a manner unlike most epigraphs, for it not only established something about the hero but tips off the reader that he can expect any serious subjects in the book to be described in humorous terms, even bad puns. In the four chapters which follow before Eliot is formally introduced, much more is learned about him, all with the purpose of offering j'ust enough information to pique one’s curiosity but leave it continually unsatisfied. Our guide through this first 119

section of the novel is Norman Mushari, the rapacious young lawyer who is preparing the dossier on Eliot with the purpose of discrediting him. We learn about Eliot what Norman learns, through correspondence and research, and at the same time, of course, Vonnegut comments on

Mushari. Details about the Foundation come to light first, because Mushari is working for it and raiding its confi­ dential files. They contain a letter from Eliot describing the history of the family up to and including his own death.

This gold mine of information prompts Mushari to ask Eliot's wife for more letters, and she sends him over fifty of them, which, along with a private detective's report, furnish the required exposition that fills the next three chapters.

Two other important characters are also dealt with in this indirect fashion, Eliot’s father, who is exposed as a Gold- water type through his speech to the Senate (quoted in its entirety), and Sylvia, Eliot’s wife, whose husband-caused sickness is described in a report from her psychiatrist.

There is nothing stylistically new here, but Vonnegut is giving the reader the necessary distance from the protagonist that will enable him (the reader) to judge the hero accurately when the time comes. The details learned about Eliot would, on the face of things, make him out to be insane—his wander­ ings, drunken speeches, irrational philanthropy—but the tone of the narrative makes it clear that we are to reserve judgment on him until later, especially since Mushari is so 120

obviously the villain of the story. The parallel to Hamlet

is important here; Vonnegut is clearly asking the reader to

remember that another prince once had the same problems as

Eliot, who identifies so closely with Hamlet that he writes

a letter signed with that name to his wife, whom he addresses

as Ophelia.

Once Eliot is first directly seen, sleeping peacefully

in his office, Vonnegut switches to conventional exposition, third person omniscient point of view, and for the next twenty pages the novel proceeds in traditional style; how­

ever, once the essential scenes showing Eliot in action and the conference between Mushari and Sylvai and the Senator have been accomplished, Vonnegut begins again to alter his technique to include non-narrative material. First we see a letter and part of a novel by Charles Garvey Ulm, a poet whom Eliot has befriended. The novel turns out to be rank pornography, and illustrates Eliot’s occasional failures at well-intended philanthropy. The next chapter contains parts of Eliot’s own novel, ’’very unfinished,” the thesis of which is that immortal souls do not wish to stay in heaven because it is so dull, but instead return to Earth (after covering the heavenly portals with graffiti) and inhabit new bodies—Richard the Lionhearted, for instance, is now said to be living "in the flesh of Coach Letzinger, a pitiful exhibitionist and freelance garbage man in Rosewater, Indiana."

The novel is interrupted by two telephone calls, one by a 121

supplicant and one by the Senator, which complete the chapter.

Chapter eight begins with the story of Eliot's cousin

Fred, whose branch of the family is described through a family chronicle, A History of the Rosewaters of Rhode

Island, by Merrihue Rosewater. Here, and in the next chapter, Vonnegut is creating a Lear-Gloucester parallel between Eliot and Fred, a parallel which is heightened by the use of quotations from the tabloid American Investi­ gator, which Fred habitually reads. His fruitless, mundane life is contrasted here structurally to Eliot’s through this juxtaposition of tabloid advertisements to the sections from a novel. While Fred, his life narrowly circumscribed, yearns to place a similar advertisement of a salacious nature in the paper, Eliot joyfully scribbles graffiti— earlier quoted by Sylvia—on the walls of rest rooms and telephone booths. Eliot and Fred are further contrasted at the end of this chapter when Fred browses through what he thinks is a sexy science-fiction novel, but which is actually a work by the saintly Kilgore Trout, Eliot’s mentor, who may in truth be Jesus Christ reincarnated. Where Fred sees salaciousness, Eliot finds truth.

In the remaining one-third of the novel Vonnegut con­ tinues to use ostensibly non-narrative materials for pur­ poses of characterization and theme. Stewart Buntline, a 122

resident of Pisquontuit loosely connected with Fred Rose­ water, is introduced for further contrast to Eliot. He also is a millionaire, but has abdicated his duties to the masses, spending his time drinking and sleeping, and read­ ing pamphlets sent to him by the head of Eliot’s law firm.

The pamphlets are extreme right-wing propaganda glorifying the free enterprise system and denouncing anything remotely socialistic, and they are quoted in the novel. Here Vonne­ gut is describing the opposition philosophy with "primary source material," letting them expose themselves in the same manner that he glorified Eliot by exhibiting his humani­ tarian feelings in the novel excerpts. The Buntline’s maid,

Selena, is used to further castigate the way of life of the idle rich. She has been forced to take an oath written by

Stewart’s grandfather, which is an hilarious commentary on the mentality of the favored class. The oath, repeated each week before Sunday dinner, reads:

I do solemnly swear that I will respect the sacred private property of others, and that I will be content with whatever station in life God Almighty may assign me to. I will be grate­ ful to those who employ me, and I will never complain about wages and hours, but will ask myself instead, "What more can I do for my em­ ployer, my republic, and my God?" I understand that I have not been placed on Earth to be happy. I am here to be tested. If I am to pass the test, I must be always unselfish, always sober, always truthful, always chaste in mind, body, and deed, and always respectful to those whom God has, in His Wisdom, placed above me. If I pass the test, I will go to joy everlasting in 123

Heaven when I die. If I fail, I shall roast in hell while the Devil laughs and Jesus weeps.

Vonnegut continues to comment on the Buntlines with

Selena’s letters to the head of the orphanage in which

she was raised, and her conclusion that money in the hands

of the ignorant rich is "pearls before swine" makes the

novel’s subtitle as well as its title ironic. Finally,

the Pisquontuit section is completed with a look at the

manuscript of A History of the Rosewaters of Rhode Island,

which Fred reads to himself before attempting suicide. With

the embarrassing entrance of Norman Mushari, this section

of the novel comes to a close. It would be logical to

assume that Vonnegut, having displayed his virtuosity with

technique now would rely on traditional narrative to finish

out the story, but the final forty pages, describing Eliot’s

breakdown and incarceration are also filled with such items

as a poem by Eliot, one by Roland Barry, a gas station oper­

ator who commemorates Eliot’s departure with an occasional

piece, an excerpt from Kilgore Trout’s Pan-Galactic Three-

Day Pass, describing the death of the Milky Way, an excerpt

from an actual book, The Bombing of Germany, by Hans Rumpf,

on the Dresden holocaust, and an ironic quotation from The

American Investigator about Eliot himself, titled THE SANEST

MAN IN AMERICA? The purpose of these materials which come so late in the novel is surprisingly expository. They ad­ vance the reader’s understanding of the nature of Eliot’s 124

sacrifice, and the final one, from the tabloid, not only

supplies the events which have taken place since his

mental blackout, but summarizes the conflict of the novel

Eliot looked inside [the tabloid] while the others engaged each other in optimistic palaver about the way the hearing would go next day. Eliot found another picture of himself in the center spread. It was a blurry one of him play­ ing tennis on the nut house court. On the facing page, the gallantly sore-headed little family of Fred Rosewater seemed to glare at him as he played. They lookfed like share­ croppers. Fred had lost a lot of weight, too. There was a picture of Norman Mushari, their lawyer. Mushari, now in business for himself, had acquired a fancy vest and massive gold watch chain. He was quoted as follows: "My clients want nothing but their natural and legal birthright for themselves and their descendents. The bloated Indiana plutocrats have spent millions and mobilized powerful friends from coast to coast in order to deny their cousins their day in court. The 'hearing has been delayed seven times for the flimsiest of reasons, and, meanwhile, within the walls of a lunatic asylum, Eliot Rosewater plays ' and plays, and his hench­ men deny loudly that he is insane. "If my clients lose this case, they will lose their modest house and average furnishings, their used car, their child’s small sailboat, Fred Rose­ water’s insurance policies, their life savings, and thousands borrowed from a loyal friend. These brave, wholesome, average Americans have bet every­ thing they have on the American system of justice, which will not, must not, cannot let them down."

The point to all this is not that Vonnegut is an in­ novator in the use of this pastiche technique—Capek has an entire chapter written in this manner in War With the

Newts, which Vonnegut surely must have read, since one of his characters in Cat’s Cradle is the four-feet-high Newt- 125

but that he makes such extensive use of it as to consti­

tute an individual style. Beginning with his very first novel, it becomes more and more his modus operandi, until

in Rosewater it almost becomes the book itself. Yet it cannot be said that the style is the theme of Rosewater.

The non-narrative materials are used mainly to establish characterization and to help make clear the themes. Von­ negut makes little use of this technique in his short stories, which are generally inferior to his novels, and one of the disappointing aspects of Slaughterhouse-Five is that he virtually abandons his experiments in favor of more conventional plotting. Of course, the content of

Slaughterhouse-Five is such that it would not seem to lend itself to this technique. Whether he will return in his next novel to further refine what he has begun can only be, at this time, a matter for conjecture.

Finally, mention must be made of Vonnegut’s imagery, which most often means the simile. Because*there is no system to be found in his use of it other than the repeti­ tion of an image for effect, and because the similes cluster together in his books while large sections contain none at all—the first half of Slaughterhouse-Five, for instance, contains a great many, while the second half is almost com­ pletely bare—it would seem that he uses them in no coherent pattern but only when the mood arises. One is tempted to state that he uses them because he feels he ought to. They 126

are often interesting, and have a comic effect which is

described elsewhere, but they are indigenous to his the­

matic content only in that they are mostly absurd. This

absurdity, however, often makes the images striking in

their effects.

Vonnegut’s animate imagery, which is more frequent than his figurative descriptions of inanimate objects,

seems to aim for the quick, startling response; in this

respect it is similar to his characterization as a whole.

He rarely describes a character in much detail, being

content for the most part to present one vivid image, usually without psychological overtones, and then complete the description in expository prose, although sometimes the initial image is all that he provides. For instance, the Shah of Brahtpur is described as looking like "a price­ less brooch in its giftbox," and later as "tiny and elegant as a snuffbox," essentially the same image. One of Camp­ bell’s guards is "a Roman candle of a man," while some

German women in the novel are "as pretty as catfish wrapped in mattress-ticking." Ironically, as Vonnegut moves away from science-fiction, his similes become more eccentric, more like the standard science-fiction simile in its use of manufactured objects for comparison. In the fifth and sixth novels we meet people who look like plumber’s helpers, coca-cola bottles, and nose putty, who have legs like Edwardian grand pianos, chests and shoulders like boxes of kitchen 127

matches, voices like cellos, and teeth like piano keys.

These images are indeed striking, but they tend to call

attention to themselves and to exist outside the basic

characterization rather than adding to it. The descrip­

tion of Billy Pilgrim illustrates this point:

Last came Billy Pilgrim, empty-handed, bleakly ready for death. Billy was preposterous—six feet three inches tall, with a chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches. He had mo helmet, no overcoat, no weapon, and no boots. On his feet were cheap, low-cut civilian shoes which he had bought for his father’s funeral. Billy had lost a heel, which made him bob up-and-down, up-and- down. The involuntary dancing, up and down, up and down, made his hip joints sore. Billy was wearing a thin field jacket, a shirt and trousers of scratchy wool, and long under­ wear that was soaked with sweat. He was the only one of the four who had a beard. It was a random, bristly beard, and some of the bristles were white, even though Billy was only twenty-one years old. He was also going bald. Wind and cold and violent exercise had turned his face crimson. Hfe didn’t look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

The expository description of Billy is certainly adequate

here; one wonders if the similes, interesting as they are,

add much to it.

The inanimate imagery in the novels is similar, but

perhaps more effective because of the nature of its use.

Its absurd quality is totally in keeping with the world

Vonnegut sees around him, yet does not seem to circumscribe the objects pictured, as his animate imagery tends to cut

off further discussion about the characters. In short, it 128

seems more appropriate. The hostile but comic physical

world of the novels contains such objects as clocks which

sound like wooden ships straining in the wind; helicopters

looking like great ramshackle birds; buildings like unmade

beds; farm land as dark and rich as chocolate cake; fat,

slackjawed briefcases; beds smelling like mushroom cellars;

bottles being carried like dinner bells; lawns looking like

wet salads; and the heavens themselves being filled with

stars that, since they are moving, look like luminous

spaghetti. Never, however, are these images expanded into conceits, nor are they used in some thematic pattern other than the general one cited above. Vonnegut seems unaware of the leitmotiv, or else, does not choose to use it. The effect of his imagery is more like that of an artist paint­ ing a pastel landscape and dotting it with various places containing bright, gaudy colors.

Occasionally Vonnegut becomes so enamored of an image that he repeats it. This tendency is apparent not only in a single novel, such as in Slaughterhouse-Five when he refers to "sleepers nestled like spoons" no less than five times, but in the continued use of a favorite figure in several books and stories. In three different novels, for instance, a character's heart goes off "like a burglar alarm."

In view of Vonnegut’s considerable ability to work with figurative language, it is unlikely that this tendency indi­ cates poverty of invention; more likely it is an idiosyncracy 129

on the author’s part—as in his overuse of the phrase,

”So it goes,” in Slaughterhouse-Five.

To summarize Vonnegut’s style, it can be said without

too much fear of contradiction, and with the qualification

about his images made above, that it is one of the strongest

aspects of his writing. If not necessarily innovative, he

is, above all, fresh. With the exception of Player Piano,

each of his novels is undeniably written in his own personal

idiom. He very quickly freed himself from the derivative,

neo-Hemingway prose evident in the first book, and by the

time the second novel was published seven; years later, the

words and syntax belonged to no one else but Kurt Vonnegut,

Jr. At present he seems about to modify his style further,

if the last novel is a representative work, but at this

point it is impossible to say in what direction it will go.

It is possible, however, to state that the crackling, witty,

economical prose that he has fashioned over the past twenty years of writing represents one of the most appealing and readable idioms to appear in America since the second world war.