S. Kirk Bane on the Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut

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S. Kirk Bane on the Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut

Leonard Mustazza, ed.. The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. xxxiii + 346 pp. $59.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-313-28634-6. Reviewed by S. Kirk Bane Published on H-PCAACA (June, 1995) Leonard Mustazza, Director of Academic Af‐ the book. Vonnegut students will applaud the pub‐ fairs and Professor of English and American Stud‐ lication of this excellent volume. ies at Pennsylvania State University-Ogontz Cam‐ Copyright (c) 1995 by H-Net and PCAACA, all pus, and author of Forever Pursuing Genesis: The rights reserved. This work may be copied for non- Myth of Eden in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, has proﬁt educational use if proper credit is given to done a commendable job compiling and editing the author and the list. For other permission, the various critical reactions to the renowned please contact [email protected]. novelist's works. This study, part of a Critical Re‐ sponses in Arts and Letters Series, contains forty reviews by such critics as Doris Lessing, Stanley Schatt Terry Southern, Jerome Klinkowitz, Granville Hicks, Robert Merrill, Kathryn Hume, Lawrence R. Broer, and Jay McInerney. The vol‐ ume includes reviews of Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Slapstick, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Galapagos, Bluebeard, and Hocus Pocus. The text is divided into two parts: The Road to Critical Success, 1952-1969 and The Critical Main‐ stream, 1970-1993. Mustazza has written a fne in‐ troduction to complement his collection of re‐ views; a helpful Selected Bibliography rounds out H-Net Reviews If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at https://networks.h-net.org/h-pcaaca Citation: S. Kirk Bane. Review of Mustazza, Leonard, ed. The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut. H- PCAACA, H-Net Reviews. June, 1995. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=73 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2.

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A Discourse of Redemption in Three of Kurt Vonnegut's Novels
Tutton Parker 1 What’s in the Potato Barn: A Discourse of Redemption in Three of Kurt Vonnegut’s Novels A Thesis Submitted to The Faculty of the College of Arts and Science in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts and English By Rebecca Tutton Parker April 2018 Tutton Parker 2 Liberty University College of Arts and Sciences Master of Arts in English Student Name: Rebecca Tutton Parker Thesis Chair Date First Reader Date Second Reader Date Tutton Parker 3 Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction………………………………………………………………………...4 Chapter Two: Redemption in Slaughterhouse-Five and Bluebeard…………………………..…23 Chapter Three: Rabo Karabekian’s Path to Redemption in Breakfast of Champions…………...42 Chapter Four: How Rabo Karabekian Brings Redemption to Kurt Vonnegut…………………..54 Chapter Five: Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..72 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………..75 Tutton Parker 4 Chapter One: Introduction The Bluebeard folktale has been recorded since the seventeenth century with historical roots even further back in history. What is most commonly referred to as Bluebeard, however, started as a Mother Goose tale transcribed by Charles Perrault in 1697. The story is about a man with a blue beard who had many wives and told them not to go into a certain room of his castle (Hermansson ix). Inevitably when each wife was given the golden key to the room and a chance alone in the house, she would always open the door and find the dead bodies of past wives. She would then meet her own death at the hands of her husband. According to Casie Hermansson, the tale was very popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which spurred many literary figures to adapt it, including James Boswell, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Thomas Carlyle (x).
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