A MORAL BEING IN AN AESTHETIC WORLD:

BEING IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF KURT VONNEGUT

BY

JAMES HUBBARD

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of

WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

English

May 2015

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Approved By:

James Hans, Ph.D., Advisor

Barry Maine, Ph.D., Chair

Jefferson Holdridge, Ph.D.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ii

Abstract iii

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Chapter 2: Being Thrown 7

Chapter 3: Being as a Happening of Truth 27

Chapter 4: Projecting the Poetry of Being 47

References 53

Curriculum Vitae 54

ii

Abstract

In this this paper I will address notions of being in four of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels using Martin Heidegger’s aesthetic phenomenology. The four novels that this paper will address are Player Piano, Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse-Five, and

Breakfast of Champions. Player Piano and Sirens of Titan are Vonnegut’s first two novels, and they approach being in terms of what Heidegger referred to as

“throwness.” These initial inquiries into aspects of existence give way to a fully developed notion of being in Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.

These novels are full aware of themselves has happenings of truth containing something of their author’s own being. Through these happenings, Vonnegut is able to poetically project himself in a way that not only reveals his own being, but also serves as a mirror that can reveal the being of those reflected in it.

iii

Chapter 1: Introduction

Kurt Vonnegut’s literary significance is due, at least in part, to the place that he has carved out for himself in popular culture. And I would like to begin this paper by bringing up one of his more notable cultural appearances outside of his own fiction: his cameo appearance in the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School

(1986). For those who are not familiar with the film, it is a comedy in which

Dangerfield plays a wealthy businessman who decides to go get his college degree alongside his son.

Vonnegut appears in the film as himself when Dangerfield’s character hires

Vonnegut to write a paper on his own fiction. Vonnegut’s paper on himself earns

Dangerfield’s character, Thorton Melon, an F. As someone writing on Vonnegut, I am comforted by the thought that even Vonnegut himself might have had no idea what his writing was all about.

Although I may not know what Vonnegut’s fiction is about, in this paper I will analyze four of his novels. The novels that I will look at are Player Piano, Sirens of

Titan, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions. I will use Martin

Heidegger’s aesthetic phenomenology to examine how Vonnegut represents notions of “being” in his novels and how those representations change over the course of his career from his first (Player Piano) to his seventh novel (Breakfast of Champions).

To that end, I would like to quote a second film to introduce the vision of

Vonnegut that I am about to present in this paper. The quote is from Wes

1 Anderson’s 2014 film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Through layers of narrative one character, Mr. Moustafa, says of another, Gustave H.: “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it. But I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.” (The Grand Budapest Hotel).

This is the significance that Kurt Vonnegut has come to possess for me as one of his readers. In his fiction, Vonnegut allows humanity with all its beauty and meaning to persist for his characters despite the insanity and inhumanity that seems to pervade the world. How is it that being, which had lost much of its meaning and coherence to modernity, is able to persist as both a fully moral and aesthetic phenomenon in Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction? It persists simply because

Vonnegut chooses to approach being that way. And in existing this way, Vonnegut opens up himself and the world produced by his existence through his fiction. Over the course of his career, Vonnegut accumulates knowledge of his own being through his fiction, and he shares this knowledge with his readers.

In his first two novels, Player Piano and Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut struggles against the constraints and impositions that accompany existence. Heidegger refers to this position as the “throwness” of being. Because being occurs prior to any willing on behalf of that being, existence is necessarily an imposition on the individual consciousness that the individual cannot shake off. These first two novels struggle against, retreat from, and deconstruct the constraints imposed on beings by existence.

In his later novels, like Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions,

Vonnegut embraces the “throwness” of being, and his fiction becomes aware of itself

2 as a happening of truth, to use Martin Heidegger’s terminology. These novels instead become temples disclosing a part or aspect of Vonnegut own being.

The struggle to apprehend the essential character of being in Vonnegut’s fiction is precipitated by the collapse of normative moral philosophy in the preceding century. Morality prior to Nietzsche had been the means by which humanity justified and oriented itself within existence. It was a self-justifying enterprise both in its capacity to apprehend formal truth about “the good” as well as in its ability to prescribe moral action to all individuals.

The two most significant projects in normative moral philosophy prior to its collapse were the Kantian deontological notion of morality and the Utilitarianism of philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Kant claimed to understand the “good will” which was the source of moral obligation. And the Utilitarians like

John Stuart Mill claimed to understand the nature of “the good” through the consequences of individual actions. But both of these notions of morality collapsed under the weight of post-modernism.

Kant’s deontological morality was undone by Nietzsche’s observation that existence, including morality, amounts to a series of aesthetic choices on behalf of the individual rather than actions based on moral truth. And Utilitarian project suffered a similar structural failure because it failed to sufficiently quantify various goods in comparing courses of action. In the absence of these normative projects, morality as a discipline saw the ground crumble beneath it. This began a decades long retreat into subjectivity that profoundly limited the individual’s ability to make moral utterances. Morality couldn’t be vindicated in theory or in practice.

3 It is in this context that Kurt Vonnegut finds himself groping for a coherent notion of human existence as both a moral and aesthetic phenomenon. He is a profoundly moral man living in a post-moral time, and he embraces a Heideggerian aesthetic that allows him to remake the world according to his own vision of it as a moral and aesthetic phenomenon.

According to Martin Heidegger, “He who truly knows what is, knows what he wills to do in the midst of what is.“ (Hofstadter 65). Kurt Vonnegut begins his career as a man who is searching to know what is so that he can know what he wills in the context of what is. Vonnegut expresses the fundamental shift in the moral character of existence in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five when his serial character Eliot

Rosewater says, “everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers

Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky. ‘But that isn’t enough any more.’”

(Slaughterhouse-Five 412). Vonnegut is referring to the profound humanity of

Dostoevsky’s novel, which ultimately embraces existence for the sake of human relationships.

In the past many literary critics have addressed Kurt Vonnegut and his fiction as a largely deconstructionist project. This is a selection for The Norton Anthology of

American Literature Vol. E characterizing Vonnegut’s work by saying:

“To a generation of young people who felt their country had

forsaken them, he offered examples of common decency and cultural

idealism as basic as a grade-school civics lesson. For a broader

readership who felt conventional fiction was inadequate to express

the way their lives had been disrupted by the era’s radical social

4 changes, he wrote novels structured in more pertinently

contemporary terms, bereft of such unifying devices as conclusive

characterization and chronologically organized plots.” (Baym 372-

373).

While many of his novels deconstruct culture and society, interpreting Vonnegut in this way ignores the larger and more significant constructive project that he develops across his novels. His unconventional plots and themes deconstruct the familiar in order to arrive at a new awareness of things as they are, but they fall short of setting up a unique mode of being.

However, as an author, Vonnegut accumulates his own knowledge and awareness of being, and from Player Piano to Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut strives to articulate his own notion of being as he comes to understand it. He apprehends, understands and articulates his own notion of being as both a moral and aesthetic phenomenon fully in Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.

The final product of this enterprise is a blending of fact and fiction within the figure of Vonnegut himself. He becomes fully a character in his own work while remaining fully the author of it. While many authors have used meta-fiction in order to evacuate their authorial presence from the work (Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita),

Vonnegut uses meta-fictional devices to the opposite end. His meta-fiction makes him an essential and unavoidable element of his own fiction. His work depends on his internal articulation of his own being to himself. He forms himself though his novels and he forms his novels through himself.

5 Vonnegut accumulates his own being within the world of his own work so fully and completely that his work projects his being into the world in much the same way that poet project themselves through their poetry. This projection makes

Vonnegut’s communication of own being his greatest work.

6 Chapter 2: Being Thrown

Player Piano

Before I discuss Vonnegut’s novels, I must first address the nature of being.

According to Martin Heidegger, “‘Being’ is the most universal and the emptiest of concepts. As such it resists every attempt at definition” (Heidegger 2). But at the same time the notion of “being” is one of the most essential notions in terms of the referential meaning of concepts. According to Heidegger, in order to simply engage in discourse, one must necessarily employ some notion of being. But all previous articulations of being fail to apprehend being as such for Heidegger (31). As a result,

Heidegger feels that an answer to the question of being is necessary in order for philosophy to resume some semblance of progress.

Vonnegut’s interest in notions of being is plain in his fiction, as is his uncertainty about the essential character of it. As mentioned earlier, morality was once the means by which beings justified their existence, all the way back to

Aristotle, who conflated essential being and moral activity. But normative morality collapsed at the end of the 19th century as a result of formal and practical criticisms that destroyed the means by which moralities justified themselves, namely the ability to apprehend moral truth and prescribe moral action for all of humanity.

For Heidegger “Being lies in the fact that something is , and in its Being as it is; in Reality; in presence-at-hand; in subsistence; in validity; in Dasein, in the ‘there is’.“ (26). One of the essential characteristics of being or Dasein according to

Heidegger is its “throwness.” By this he means that each being is thrown into existence and the accompanying constraints of existence prior to the existence of

7 the will. Merely existing requires that one submit to the conditions of existence, namely that we exist within time and within the world. But the world that being is thrown into is not bound to conform to the will of the individual being, and therefore, being can be seen as a conflict between the will of the individual and the context of its existence.

Vonnegut addresses this conflict in his first novel, Player Piano (1952). It is a dystopian novel, which sets the protagonist in conflict with the demands imposed on him by society. Like other dystopian novels, it renders the life of the protagonist as unlivable, but the novel accomplishes it in a different way that other dystopian novels. For Vonnegut, society threatens the individual with oppression through indifference rather than force.

There have been many different versions of the dystopian society in literature, but the character of these various dystopias are not all the same. George

Orwell’s novel 1984 is probably the most well-known dystopian novel, and his dystopia is characterized by oppression and violence. Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave

New World creates an entirely different dystopia though pleasure and banality. The character of an author’s dystopia reveals what it is that he or she fears most in society. Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, argues that Orwell felt that hatred would crush society, whereas Huxley feared that love would drown it.

However, Vonnegut’s dystopia is very different from the ones represented in 1984 and Brave New World.

Rather than lives filled with pain or pleasure, Vonnegut’s dystopia is populated by lives that are defined by their pointlessness. The novel’s title provides

8 a clear representation of what exactly has rendered life meaningless in Vonnegut’s dystopian future. The phrase “player piano” and its converse “piano player” are composed of the same two words, and both refer to something defined by its ability to produce music. The obvious difference between the two phrases is that “player piano” lacks the human activity entailed by “piano player.”

This distinction might seem trivial considering the prominent role that machines play in most human activity today, but there is a crucial, aesthetic difference between a musician playing a piano and a machine playing the piano.

The player piano’s music isn’t art. It is a reproduction of art. It is like a photograph of the Mona Lisa. Although it captures the physical characteristics of the artwork, it fails to capture the thing that makes art beautiful: its humanity.

Vonnegut reinforces this distinction within the narrative itself during an interaction between Paul and a young man named Alfy. Alfy has the uncanny ability to know what song is being playing by the piano player on the bar’s television with the sound turned off. To explain this remarkable talent to Paul, Alfy says, “Gets to be a kind of sense – you kind of feel it” (Player Piano 93). The act of performing music communicates far more than the notes alone. It communicates feeling. A piano player feels his music along with his audience in a way that a player piano cannot.

In Player Piano Vonnegut creates a world that has no interest in or need for beauty and meaning in the life of the individual. The society of Player Piano has willingly sacrificed these things in order to end war and poverty. Managers and engineers are responsible for bringing about this change through their single-

9 minded pursuit of efficiency and technological development, as indicated in

Vonnegut’s “Foreword.”

The result of their efforts is a society in which the average person is completely pointless. All the labor that was once done by people has been automated. Only certain people with high I.Q.s and graduate degrees still serve a function in society. The average person can no longer justify their existence through their work. In conversation with Paul Proteus and several other characters,

Reverend James J. Lasher explains the plight of the working man:

“For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the

market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow

men – and boom! it’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate,

can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture’s has been shot to hell. My glass

is empty.” (86)

Robbed of their purpose and meaning, the characters in Player Piano are compelled to either accept the conditions of society or resist them by force. This inevitable conflict will determine the character of society. Vonnegut foreshadows and characterizes this conflict in the very first sentence of the novel saying, “Ilium,

New York, is divided into three parts.” (7). Julius Caesar’s famous account of his military campaign, The Gallic War, begins with “All Gaul is divided into three parts”

(Offit Vol. I, 824). This allusion to Caesar’s famous conquest introduces Ilium as an enemy territory that will be crushed by the overwhelming force of legions. And just like the Gauls, the people of Ilium will mount a desperate, doomed defense of their way of life. This is the first of several references to violent cultural conflicts in

10 Player Piano, which Vonnegut uses to help characterize the existential conflict at the heart of the novel.

Additionally, the city of Ilium, New York gets its name from the ancient city of

Troy, which was also referred to as Ilium. And Troy is best known as the city besieged by the armies of Greece in Homer’s epic poem Iliad. By choosing Ilium as the setting of his novel, Vonnegut evokes another ancient clash between cultures in addition to the Caesar’s campaign in Gaul.

Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid links the destruction of Troy to Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, through its protagonist Aeneas. In the poem, Aeneas, a refugee fleeing the destruction of Troy, wanders the world eventually settling in Latium on the western coast of Italy. The poem seeks to root the founding of Rome in the destruction of Troy by the Greeks. The Greeks were eventually conquered by Rome.

Similarly, Rome conquered Gaul only to be sacked by the Gauls several hundred years later. One culture consumes and destroys others to sustain itself, only to be destroyed by the specter of its own past conquest.

Characterizing the novel’s central conflict in this way establishes it as a part of a series of cultural conflicts within the history of Western Civilization helps to characterize Paul Proteus’ rebellion as the latest incarnation of cultural conquest, in which the authentic individual as Paul Proteus knows it, is doomed to perish.

Despite these references to classical and military history, Vonnegut’s character’s choose to adopt the position of the Native Americans whose destruction at the hands of encroaching European settlers was notoriously one-sided, unlike the

11 great conflicts between powerful rivals in the ancient past, like Greece and Troy and

Rome and Carthage.

Paul Proteus, and his fellow rebels in “The Ghost Shirt Society,” appropriate the Native American Ghost Dance religion as their cultural equivalent, in that they both stood to the last in defiance despite being doomed to defeat from the start. The

Ghost Dance Religion arose in Native American culture as a “last desperate defense of the old values” in defying, for a brief moment, the overwhelming force of

European encroachment (Player Piano 260). Like these desperate cultural warriors,

Proteus and his comrades know that they cannot stem the tide of society. They can only fight to sustain it for as long as possible.

The novel and its protagonist, Paul Proteus, seek to resolve this conflict by forcibly remaking society through rebellion. But like George Orwell’s protagonist,

Winston Smith, society crushes Paul Proteus, rending his further resistance impossible. And just like Smith, Proteus is aware at the outset that his act of resistance a futile one that necessarily will entail his own death hence their name,

The Ghost Shirt Society.

As an investigation of being, Player Piano is Vonnegut’s initial attempt to address the conditions of being. The individual is thrown into a world that defies their will. Merely existing in the world requires that individual submit themselves to the external constraints imposed by the external world. Every individual is thrown into being in so far as it has in each case already been delivered over to existence, and it constantly so remains” (Heidegger 321). The being of the individual is thrown into existence without ever willing to exist, and the individual’s

12 existence in the world makes him or her subject to the various constraints that accompany existence in the world.

Player Piano interrogates being from the position of throwness. It is aware of the conflict between the being of the authentic individual and the constraints on being required by existence in society. Player Piano, cultivates the conflict between the being of the individual and the social context into which the individual is thrown. In the novel society robs the average life of its purpose. Without purpose, life is merely an aimless, doomed wandering. The novel seems to think that human life demands purpose, and Paul Proteus leads the fight to preserve a threatened mode of being: being with purpose.

It uses its status as a narrative of the probable future in order to heighten and exaggerate this conflict, making direct conflict between the individual and society into a necessity. But this necessary conflict is doomed before it begins just as it was for the followers of the Ghost Dance religion when they stood against the encroaching European cultures.

Sirens of Titan

Because of the unconventional style and form in many of his novels, merely summarizing Vonnegut’s fiction often requires significant acts of interpretation on the part of the critic. And I have found this to be especially so in the case of Sirens of

Titan (1959). In order to analyze this novel and its representation of being as thrown, it is necessary to articulate an interpretation of the novel’s plot as well as some of its philosophical implications.

13 Sirens of Titan uses the same conflict that motivated the events of Player

Piano as a contrasting background for a new experiment in the “throwness” of being taking place in the foreground. In Player Piano, Paul Proteus and his comrades sought to restore the natural relationship between society and the individual.

Similarly, Winston Niles Rumfoord writes, directs, and produces a grand tragedy in order to bring about a truly just society: a society that he hoped would eliminate the inherently unjust nature of individual existence in Sirens of Titan.

Unlike Player Piano, Sirens of Titan considers retreat as a possible course of action in the conflict between the individual and society. Rather than actively resisting constraints imposed on individual being by society, the novel suggests that the individual must look inward for existential harmony. When Winston Niles

Rumfoord banishes Malachi Constant and his family from Earth, they are forced to exist apart from the society of other human beings. Constant, the mother of his child, Beatrice Rumfoord, and their son, Chrono each take a different approach to their independent existence. But ultimately all three of their lives fail to approach the meaning and significance that is available to those within a society.

The novel focuses its attention primarily on two characters, Malachi Constant also known as Unk, and Winston Niles Rumfoord. Malachi Constant’s significance in

Sirens of Titan is largely contained within his name. As Vonnegut notes in the text, the name “Malachi” is a Jewish name that comes from the Hebrew word meaning

“messenger.” And the name “Constant” is an English cognate of the Latin word

“constans,” which is the singular and nominative case for the present participle of the verb “constare” (OED). In its present participle form, “constans” translates to

14 “standing firm.” Vonnegut translates this as “faithful” which is accurate in the sense that one who is faithful stands firm in that faith. The Latin and Hebrew influences seem to clash in Malachi Constant’s name, making it sound contrived. But this clash has significance beyond mere aesthetic preference.

Interestingly, the last book of the Christian Old Testament is The Book of

Malachi, which contains a representation of God as full of wrath while prophesizing

God’s arrival into the world (interpreted by Christians as the birth of Christ). In the text, God demands the fear of his followers, which seems to contradict the New

Testament vision of God as merciful:

“And ye shall know that I have send this commandment unto you,

that my covenant might be with Levi, saith the Lord of hosts.

My covenant was with him of life and peace; and I gave them to him

for the

Fear where with he feared me, and was afraid before my name.”

(Malachi 2:4-5)

However, The Book of Malachi also predicts the coming of God, heralding the birth of Christianity, and the stories contained in the following Gospels of the New

Testament. “and the Lord, who ye seek ,shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, who ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the Lord of hosts” (Malachi 3:1). This prophetic book, in very few words, attempts to span the enormous cultural gap between the Hebrew Old Testament, and the Christian New

Testament.

15 Malachi Constant’s name contains a kind of caesura that echoes the cultural, theological, linguistic, and historical caesura that exists in the Bible between its

Hebrew Old Testament and its Christian New Testament. Vonnegut is observing that prophets and saviors often appear when they are looked for, but they are rarely what they were expected to be.

In addition to the Biblical context of Malachi Constant’s name, Vonnegut also invests him with the archetypal role of messenger. But Vonnegut complicates this role by alluding to a number of different cultural contexts for that archetypal role, which are distinct from one another. Malachi Constant’s name contains several conflicting cultural influences, but each of those cultures has its own understanding of what a “divine messenger” is. Within the context of Judaism, the prophet is the figure that serves as the divine messenger. The prophet carries God’s divine message to the people of Israel.

For Christians, Christ is the divine message itself, heralded by St. John the

Baptist. In the sense that he presented himself to the world, he is both messenger and message itself. He delivers God’s word to humanity, which has been preserved in the Gospels of The New Testament. And finally, the pre-Christian Romans had the god Hermes as their divine messenger. He was divine himself, but he was also the messenger of the other gods, delivering their divine words to humans and gods alike. While all three of these cultures have attribute significance to the role of the divine messenger, they each have a completely different understanding of the nature of that role.

16 It is this tangle of cultural significance that robs Malachi Constant of meaning as a messenger. He has no message to carry no, journey to undertake, and no news to deliver because his role as messenger has no context. Winston Niles Rumfoord makes Malachi Constant into a very important messenger, but like Christ, Malachi

Constant himself is that message. As a result, he never knowingly carries or delivers a meaningful message. He is simply present in the appropriate place at the appropriate time that he might unknowingly act in accordance with Winston Niles

Rumfoord’s designs.

Winston Niles Rumfoord as a character is defined by the unique nature of his existence during the events of Sirens of Titan. Originally born into the aristocratic class at the top of the American social hierarchy, Rumfoord was characterized by his gallantry (Sirens of Titan 327). Vonnegut seems to view Rumfoord as the ideal aristocrat. He is a man who has made the most out of his advantageous position in society in such a way that he deserves the admiration of others. But Rumfoord doesn’t exist in this sense during Sirens of Titan.

Throughout the novel, Winston Niles Rumfoord and his huge dog, Kazak, exist as electromagnetic energy (light) rather than as physical beings. Their physical existence was converted into wave energy by an object called a chrono- synclastic infundibula. The discovery of these phenomena in space had halted space exploration on earth until Rumfoord and his faithful dog decided to steer his own spaceship into the middle of one. But his gallantry doomed him to a tragic fate. His being, once composed of matter, was transformed into a “wave phenomena – apparently pulsing in a distorted spiral with its origin in the sun and its terminal in

17 Betelgeuse” (327). Throughout the novel, Rumfoord periodically materializes on various planetary bodies in the solar system as they pass through the spiral that composes his being.

According to the text, the name chrono-synclastic infundibulum is a funnel- shaped object in space where time is curved rather than straight. The text also characterizes the chrono-synclastic infundibulum as a place where two mutually exclusive opinions can both be true (318). It is a physically and philosophically paradoxical.

Vonnegut’s chono –synclastic infundibulum relies, at least in part on Albert

Einstein’s theory of General Relativity along with its famous equation E=mc^2 which established the mathematical relationship between light, time, matter, and energy. Existing as energy in the form of, Rumfoord is both physical (photon as a particle of light) and an immaterial wave. Also as light energy, Rumfoord is not bound by the normal constraints of physical being. He possesses omniscient knowledge of the future, and exists in multiple places at the same time. His transformation has brought him to an understanding of time as synchronous rather than chronological. He exists outside of time in the same way that light exists outside of time because it is travelling at the universal speed limit (the speed of light).

In addition to scientific influences, Vonnegut’s chrono-synclastic infundibulum seems to also be influenced by some version of the gyres in William

Butler Yeats poetry, specifically as he represents it in his poem “The Second

Coming.” Vonnegut characterizes Rumfoord’s path through space as a “distorted

18 spiral” rather than just as a wave. Light travels in a wave rather than a distorted spiral.

But the distorted spiral does fit Yeats’ gyres, and it also gives cultural significance to Rumfoords transformation, rather than simply physics equation.

Looking at Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” one cannot help but notice the similarity between the Vonnegut’s layering of historical and cultural content onto his two archetypal figures Malachi Constant as the messenger and Winston Niles

Rumfoord as the savior:

The darkness drops again but now I know

That Twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

(Yeats 187)

This stanza from Yeats’ poem seems to be an accurate characterization of

Vonnegut’s character Winston Niles Rumfoord. He also sees himself as distributed throughout time/history beyond the boundaries of an individual existence, but he also sees himself as participant in a series of saviors that have come and gone with time. And he sees himself as the end of that cycle of salvation because he plans to do what all those previous saviors failed to do. He plans to remove iniquity completely from the condition of being.

Malachi Constant is a protagonist twice over. He is the protagonist of Kurt

Vonnegut’s novel, as well as the protagonist in an epic, interplanetary tragedy

19 written and directed by Winston Niles Rumfoord. The one and only performance of

Rumfoord’s great space drama includes a Martian invasion of the Earth. However this first war between worlds fails to live up the promise of its epic beginning.

Instead of a desperate battle for Earth’s survival, it becomes a massacre of nearly every last Martian, just as Rumfoord intended. Thanks to Rumfoord, none of the

Martian soldiers had any idea why they were attacking Earth, or how victory might be achieved against the Earth’s superior weapons, including the nuclear missiles that were used against incoming Martian ships.

It wasn’t until after the slaughter was complete that the human beings of

Earth realized that the would-be invaders were actually human beings rather than hostile aliens. The Martian ranks are actually made up of human beings from earth that were kidnapped at Rumfoord’s order and taken to a human colony on Mars where they were transformed into part of the Martian war machine through of combination of mind control and induced amnesia. He armed them with antiquated weapons pilfered from earth and sent them to war in ships built and powered by

Tralfamadorian technology, which Rumfoord acquired from the alien Salo on Titan.

In his fictional text Pocket History of Mars, Winston Niles Rumfoord says of his grand plan:

“Any man who would change the World in a significant way must

have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people’s blood,

and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of

repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed” (Sirens of Titan

431).

20 Rumfoord is certainly a showman willing to shed blood as evidence by the grand suicide of Mars. And the religion that he introduces in the brief repentance that follows is The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent whose chief teachings are “Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of

God” (435).

His goal was to eliminate the injustice of accident that the existence imposes on every individual at the outset of their being. He not only eliminates the problematic distinctions like race, class, and nationality that have plagued society for centuries, but he also eliminates even the most basic advantages of the individual that are randomly portioned out at birth.

And he accomplishes this by requiring that the members of his new religion offset their natural gifts by handicapping themselves. The strong wear heavy weights to offset their strength. The beautiful obscure their beauty with glasses of bad haircuts. And Rumfoord uses Malachi Constant, the embodiment of both felicitous and tragic accident, to symbolically banish fortune from the domain of human existence.

Malachi Constant, the space wanderer, returns to earth in the exact place that

Winston Niles Rumfoord had predicted, and when asked to speak, he unknowingly says the same words that Rumfoord had predicted that he would say: “I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all” (468). By saying these words, Malachi

Constant, articulates his utter confusion at the events of his life. However he is acting as the faithful messenger that heralds the coming of the divine presence of

Winston Niles Rumfoord. By articulating himself in these words as Rumfoord

21 predicted he would, Constant has unwittingly fulfilled Rumfoord’s prophecy, making

Rumfoord more divine that any previous prophet or divine incarnation.

This new religion of Rumfoord’s bears a striking resemblance to John Rawl’s

A Theory of Justice. In this text, Rawls examines the idea of justice in order to build an understanding of how society ought to function according to it. Rawls uses the principles of justice to build a theoretical society where justice consists of fairness with regard to one’s initial position in society (Rawls 11). In other words, “justice as fairness” means that in an ideally just society, everyone ought to have equal access to the opportunities and resources in that society. For Rawls, society must open itself up by affording liberty to all of its citizens because as society becomes more open and liberal, it also becomes more just. This progression toward the ideally just, liberal society parallels America’s own slow progress toward equality with regard to race, gender, and sexual orientation.

The Martian Invasion/Suicide, Malachi Constant’s journey across the solar system, and the rape of Beatrice Rumfoord were all aimed toward creating and sustaining the unprecedented equality afforded by Rumfoord’s new religion.

However there is a flaw in Rumfoord’s perfectly equal society. Rawls himself acknowledges that same flaw in his own theoretical society: “Those who love one another, or who acquire strong attachments to personas and forms of life, at the same time become liable to ruin: their love makes them hostages to misfortune and the injustices of others” (Rawls 502).

In banishing the injustice of accident, Rumfoord and Rawls have banished the very thing that individuates one being from another. It is that difference the

22 produces struggle and strife, but it is also the source of beauty and triumph in life.

Vonnegut is not arguing against society’s progress toward equality, but he is also aware of the eventual trade-off that will occur as society approaches absolute equality. Instead Vonnegut has a complex understanding of progress as relative phenomena. Relative to equality, Rumfoord’s religion has made unprecedented progress, but in the process, he has mutilated being beyond recognition. In creating a world without inequality, Rumfoord banishes circumstances that individuate one being from another.

Malachi Constant describes himself as “a victim of a series of accidents” but really his entire life is composed of accident (Sirens of Titan 468). His early life of luck is entirely a product of circumstances beyond his control. His time on Mars and traveling the solar system is entirely a result of Winston Niles Rumfoord’s will rather than Malachi’s own. It isn’t until he is isolated on Titan that Malachi

Constant’s will is free from external control and constraint. As a merely accidental being, Constant is simply a being manipulated by others rather than authentic being acting in the world according to his own will.

The other constitutive aspect of the conflict between being and circumstance is the will, which is embodied by Winston Niles Rumfoord whose encounter with the chrono-syclastic infundibulum has rendered him semi-divine. Unlike Malachi

Constant and all other human beings, Rumfoord possesses the desire and capacity to remake the world according to his will, and that is exactly what he does.

But his new society is the product of an impossible position that no living being can occupy. When people attempt to remake society according to their own

23 will, they unjustly assume the same position that Rumfoord occupies. The truth is that no one being can fully comprehend the past present and future human events.

The untenability of Rumfoord’s position is underscored by his eventual electromagnetic dissolution brought about by the fluctuations of electromagnetic fields in the cosmos.

Even the Progressive Liberalism of John Rawls, which is aimed at opening society and fostering justice for all, becomes profoundly unjust in execution by presuming to legislate a notion of being for all on behalf of one. This radical isolation allows these three characters the opportunity to define the nature of their own being apart from the imposed constraints of society that have always accompanied the “throwness” of being.

The novel closes with Malachi Constant, Beatrice Rumfoord, and their son,

Chrono, marooned on Saturn’s moon, Titan. While stranded there each of these individuals attempt to exist in a different way. All of them isolate themselves and go about life in the way that best suits them. They are each an experiment in being apart from the world. As the beginning of the novel suggests, they are forced to look within themselves for understanding and justification rather than looking out into the world.

Chrono ran away from life with his mother in Rumfoord’s palace in order to live with the Titanic bluebirds, “the most admirable creatures on Titan” (Sirens of

Titan 521). He would periodically return to his mother on what he claimed to be her birthday in order to defy her any way that he could. And finally, he occasionally would make little shrines from sticks and stones that his father Malachi would

24 occasionally find. Free from the impositions of society, Chrono was free to determine the nature of his own being, and he chose to become the thing that he found most admirable in his world, a Titanic bluebird. He chose to exist in nature as something other than human.

After Chrono left his mother, Beatrice Rumfoord started writing a manuscript that eventually grew to occupy thirty-eight cubic feet inside Rumfoord’s palace.

Vonnegut describes it this way: “It was a refutation of Rumfoord’s notion that the purpose of human life in the Solar System was to get a grounded messenger from

Tralfamadore on his way again” (Sirens of Titan 524). This solitary endeavor has the quality of desperation. It seems as if Beatrice has spent her remaining years on

Titan desperately trying to refute the truth as it has presented itself in her life. The manuscript is so large that it would take a lifetime to read and understand, that is if there were anyone else around on Titan to read and understand it. Literary endeavors require a surrounding culture in order to justify themselves.

Malachi Constant exists in the way that one might expect a human being to exist alone on another planet. He pursues various hobbies in order to fill his time, including reassembling Salo the Trafalmadorian robot, and gathering food. But the validation of Malachi Constant’s existence is not in his self-reliance or his internal being. It is in the restoration of his one meaningful relationship in life, his friendship with Stoney Stevenson on Mars. Although it is an illusion created by the alien Salo which Constant experiences as he is dying from a knife wound, it still provides him with a measure of comfort and happiness that can only be found in the company of a friend.

25 Although an individual can sustain his own being in the absence of society, isolation cannot reproduce the substance and meaning that an individual can enjoy in the context of society. Society is an amplifier of human experience. Although it might contain greater suffering than one might experience in isolation, it also provides access to greater joy simply because there are other people around to share that joy. Ultimately society binds individuals together, allowing them to share collectively in the emotional experiences that characterize that society. The sympathetic character of existence in society is what amplifies human experience.

26 Chapter 3: Being as a Happening of Truth

Slaughterhouse-Five

In this chapter I will examine Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of

Champions, which are his sixth and seventh novels respectively. These two novels have a much greater awareness of themselves as works of art, and in order to understand how they function as works of art, I would like to examine Martin

Heidegger’s philosophy where he argues that, “Art then is the becoming and happening of truth” (Hofstadter 69). Every thinker is a poet in that he or she is the author of the truth that happens in their own being. And the act of artistic production is an encapsulation and communication of that truth in a piece of art.

In order to characterize his understanding of how art exists as a happening of truth, Heidegger uses a temple as a metaphor to explain his aesthetic philosophy.

According to Heidegger, each work of art is a happening of truth in so far as it discloses some part of the being that created it. He says:

“The temple, in its standing there first gives to things their look and

to men their outlook on themselves. This view remains open as long

as the work is a work, as long as the god has not fled from it… It is in a

work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself.”

(42)

Where Sirens of Titan and Player Piano struggled against the “throwness” of being,

Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions choose to embrace limitations imposed on being by being, and they embrace themselves as works of art. They

27 have an awareness of themselves as created works and as happenings of truth that indirectly disclose the being that created them.

Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut’s sixth and most famous novel. In it, he addresses the experience in his past that shattered his personal being, the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany during World War II. In this novel Vonnegut moves beyond mere experiments in being instead attempting to construct his own sense of being alongside with his readers.

While most of Vonnegut’s fiction is deeply entrenched in his own experience, this is especially true in the case of Slaughterhouse-Five. In this novel Vonnegut uses his fiction to engage the most traumatic experience of his life, witnessing the fire- bombing of Dresden during World War II as a prisoner of war. It is a meta-fictional novel in which Vonnegut acts as both author and narrator, recounting in part his own experiences along side those of his fictional protagonist, Billy Pilgrim.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, circumstance and his sensibility conspire to make

Vonnegut’s existence untenable. He must either accept life as full of death in order to preserve its beauty or he must retreat into fantasy and indifference where

“everything is beautiful and nothing hurts” (Slaughterhouse-Five 426). While the novel resolves this question with respect to Vonnegut himself, it doesn’t afford the same resolution to the reader. Instead, the novel asks the reader to answer for themselves.

Looking at the full title for this novel, one can plainly see that Slaughterhouse-

Five is a novel about Vonnegut himself rather than his characters. This is the full title page of the novel looks like this:

28

“Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade A Duty Dance with Death By Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. A Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living In Easy Circumstances On Cape Cod [And Smoking Too Much] Who, As An American Infantry Scout Hors De Combat, As a Prisoner of War, Witness The Fire-Bombing Of Dresden, Germany, “The Florence of the Elbe,” A Long Time Ago, And Survived To Tell The Tale. This Is A Novel Somewhat In The Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner Of Tales Of The Planet Tralfamadore, Where The Flying Saucers Come From, Peace.” (Slaughterhouse-Five 341) The subtitle of the novel, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death, sets out Vonnegut’s relationship with the events contained in the novel. It is an inherent injustice like the Children’s Crusade, but that status doesn’t free Vonnegut from his obligation to contend with it. Vonnegut seems to view both his own experiences in World War II and war generally in this way. War necessarily subjects the innocent to the experience of death, bringing about the death of innocence through experience in a manner that evokes William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and

Experience. However, the ultimate outcome, the death of innocence, doesn’t release the individual from his or her obligation to contend with death. Billy Pilgrim’s life

29 and perspective are Vonnegut’s attempt to escape the “duty dance with death” that his life experience demands from him.

In addition to the novel’s subtitle, Vonnegut includes a relatively lengthy description attached to his name. This description begins with his origins as a

German descendant living in American and then it transitions to the facts of

Vonnegut’s life in the present. His life on Cape Cod is an easy one where he smokes too many Pall Mall cigarettes (his personal favorite). From this present, the description retreats into Vonnegut’s past as World War II veteran that fought for the

United States and was captured by Germany.

From these past and present facts, the Vonnegut’s self-description departs from reality and enters the fictional world of Slaughterhouse-Five. This new domain of fiction and fantasy arises out of Vonnegut’s experience, and gives birth to the fantastic and schizophrenic qualities that characterize Billy Pilgrim’s life unstuck in time. This description that Vonnegut offers of himself illustrates the relationship between author and text perfectly. Slaughterhouse-Five is a fantasy that has arisen from the author’s reality as a part of his search to make peace with himself and his past.

This title page tacitly embraces certain philosophical notions about the nature of being from the work of thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich

Nietzsche. Both of these writers understand existence as an act of aesthetic interpretation. Schopenhauer understood existence as being composed of will and representation (Schopenhauer 3). The internal will of the individual orients itself within the external world composed of representations provided by the senses.

30 Nietzsche took Schopenhauer’s ideas a step further by arguing that existence is composed of the act of interpreting the representations produced by the senses.

For him, existence is an aesthetic phenomena defined by the act of interpretation.

Understanding life in this way eliminates the barrier separating reality and fiction because real experience is simply an ongoing process of narrative production that an individual undertakes in order to contain and store their experience.

But life as a purely aesthetic phenomenon is somehow poorer in the eyes of writers like Vonnegut. He longs from a mode of existence, which can restore existence as both a moral phenomenon as well as an aesthetic one.

However, beauty, as a category of human experience, has the capacity to obliterate the moral content of the experiences that they contain. To phrase this problem in Vonnegut’s own terms: if everything is beautiful, then nothing can hurt.

For example, readers have found Sophocles’ great tragedy Oedipus Rex to be beautiful for centuries despite the incest and self-mutilation that it depicts.

Aesthetic representation has the capacity to create distance between the viewer and the thing represented in such a way that the terrible can become beautiful.

If existence is an aesthetic phenomena, then morality must also be an aesthetic phenomena, but viewing morality in this way robs it of its ability to evaluate human action. This is the central problem of Kurt Vonnegut’s

Slaughterhouse-Five. How might a man be moral in a world composed of aesthetic interpretation?

31 The novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, lives a life that has been entirely evacuated of its moral character through a unique understanding of time. He acquires this understanding of time through his encounter with the people of the planet Tralfamadore. This experience can be interpreted as a device created in

Billy’s mind or as an actual event in his life. The origin of his notion of time isn’t nearly as important to the novel as the effect that it has on Billy’s response to reality

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that 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. All moments,

past, present, and future always have existed, always will exist. The

Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we

can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance.”

(Slaughterhouse-Five 362)

This attitude toward time effectively eliminates the moral significance of even the worst human tragedies. Whether literal or figurative, this perspective of time yields an “alien” category of experience that is fundamentally different than normal human experience. Billy’s moral disinterest is articulated by the novel’s catch-phrase “so it goes,” which is uttered in response to death. The statement has the character of acknowledging a fact rather than one that conveys sympathy and grief, which ought to accompany the loss of life.

It may seem odd that a conception of time can have such a dramatic effect on the nature of moral action because time and morality seem to be distinct rather than

32 dependent dimensions of human experience. But looking at Aristotle’s Metaphysics, one can see the point at which morality depends on time.

Moral action in Slaughterhouse-Five relies on an Aristotelian notion of action, in which all activity is the realization of some active or passive potency (Aristotle IX

1046a). A transition between potency and activity occurs through an act of will or habit. This transition between potency and activity is an act. And acts must occur in time in order to accommodate the transition between the active and potential states.

Just as the individual cannot act outside of time, theories of action must occur within time.

While many moral philosophers have argued for very different theories of moral action, Vonnegut’s manipulation of morality by distorting time seems to be strong evidence that moral action does indeed depend on its context within lived experience. Vonnegut includes a second experiment in temporal morality when

Billy Pilgrim watches a movie about World War II in reverse. Instead of film about death and war, the reversal of time transforms it into the opposite of war. A miraculous magnetism reassembles and stores bombs in planes, rebuilds collapsed buildings, and removes lead from the bodies of soldiers. By the end of the movie making this miraculous force makes “everything and everybody as good as new,” effectively undoes the tragedy of World War II simply by playing events back in reverse (Slaughterhouse-Five 394). Making time simultaneous makes morality meaningless, and reversing time reverses the moral significance of action.

Billy Pilgrim and his perception of time are articulated by the epitaph depicted in an illustration of the text drawn by Vonnegut himself. It is an illustration

33 of a simple rounded tombstone with the words “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” (Slaughterhouse-Five 426)

But Vonnegut and Billy share an experience in Dresden that would seem disprove the Billy ‘s epitaph. As prisoners of war, they sheltered in the safety of slaughterhouse number five during the bombing, and afterward, they were given the horrific task of recovering the dead buried in the ruins of buildings. Vonnegut describes the experiences this way: “There were hundreds of corpse mines operating by and by. They didn’t smell bad at first, were wax museums. But then the bodies rotted and liquefied, and the stink was like roses and mustard gas.”

(Slaughterhouse-Five 489).

Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut’s response to the question posed by a bird in the last sentence of the novel, and Billy answers the same question by coming unstuck in time. The bird asks the same question of the reader when it asks

“Poo-tee-weet?” (Slaughterhouse-Five 490). It wordlessly inquires if Billy, Vonnegut, and the reader are willing to accept the external world as it has presented itself, full of beauty and terror.

Vonnegut inhales mustard gas and roses offered by his life, and that smell becomes a part of him such that his breath is composed of beauty and death for the rest of his life presumably. Billy decides to think about all the times in those people’s lives when they were charred corpses. The novel asks the reader to decide for themselves, whether they can face the shoulder tragedy for the beauty of meaning. Life is beautiful for Vonnegut precisely because it has worth beyond mere aesthetic preference.

34

There is another phrase held in contrast to this one that is also depicted in one of Vonnegut’s illustrations. It is an illustration of a heart shaped locket set between Montana Wildhack’s breasts. Montana Wildhack is the pornography star that Billy shared his exhibit with on Tralfamadore.

“God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I

cannot change, courage

to change the things

I can, and wisdom

always to tell the

difference.” (Slaughterhouse-Five 487)

The text of this pray appears in one of Vonnegut’s illustrations in the text. It is inscribe on a locket resting between two breasts, which seem to belong to Montana

Wildhack, Billy’s pornstar companion on Tralfamadore. While illustration may not respect the tone of the prayer or reflect Vonnegut’s theological beliefs, I think that

Vonnegut embraces it in the novel. The illustration contains all the things that life ought to be into one image. The sacred struggle for serenity is nestle within a representation of desire and beauty.

This prayer represents the ideal to which Vonnegut himself aspires. While it is true that life can saddle the individual with more tragedy than he or she can bear, especially if the individual feels compelled to suffer alongside of their fellow human beings as Vonnegut seems compelled to. Fractured but not broken by the tragedy

35 that he has experienced, Vonnegut has captured a glimpse of his shattered self in

Slaughterhouse-Five, and its protagonist.

In addition, Vonnegut also provides a glimpse of himself intact through his discernable authorial presence in the novel. The first chapter of the novel takes

Kurt Vonnegut as its protagonist and narrator. And throughout the novel Vonnegut’s life periodically erupts into Billy Pilgrim’s fictional narrative. The most memorable of these eruptions comes when Vonnegut (as character) says “There they go, there they go.” Meaning that he had just shit out his own brains thanks to the bounty of food that accompanied their arrival at the prisoner of war camp.

Despite his brief appearances in the novel, it is Vonnegut’s voice and perspective that dictates the direction of the novel rather than any one of his characters. This is because Slaughterhouse-Five is the story of Vonnegut’s struggle to breath air that is necessary for life, but contaminated by death. In the first chapter of the novel, Vonnegut reveals himself as he is in order to contrast it with what Billy Pilgrim will become. Vonnegut says of himself:

“I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard

gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and elegantly into the

telephone, I ask the telephone operator to connect me with this friend

or that one, from whom I have not heard in years.” (Slaughterhouse-

Five 347)

Vonnegut has internalized the smell and the memory of Dresden in such a way that he periodically spews it out with his very breath to those who may be able to tolerate it for a while. But his breath contains both beauty and death.

36 For Vonnegut, the experience of beauty is a privilege purchased by the awareness of death. He sets up existence as a choice between two realities, the willing madness of Billy Pilgrim, or life contaminated by death. But as I will explain later, Vonnegut’s construction of this choice fails to acknowledge the infinite possibility of being as described in Martin Heidegger’s aesthetic phenomenology.

Breakfast of Champions

The final novel that I will address in this thesis is Kurt Vonnegut’s seventh novel, Breakfast of Champions (1973). The novel begins with a “Preface” which is signed with the name Philboyd Studge. This pseudonym, which Vonnegut adopts, seems out of place both in the preface and in the rest of the novel. Everything about the narrator seems to shout that it is Kurt Vonnegut narrating his own novel, but the signature on the “Preface” seems to refute this assertion.

The narrator shares personal history, his sensibility, and his characters with

Kurt Vonnegut. In my opinion, Kurt Vonnegut is the narrator of his novel Breakfast of Champions, not a character named Philboyd Studge. Instead of naming a character in his novel, Vonnegut is naming himself as a character from someone else’s story.

The story that Vonnegut is alluding to is “Filboid Studge” (1911) by Saki

(Offit “Notes” Vol. 2, 847). It is a short story about a distasteful breakfast cereal, which is successful despite its poor quality. The reason behind this unexpected

37 success is a sense of duty. As Saki’s narrator observes: “people will do things from a sense of duty which they would never attempt as a pleasure.” Vonnegut is using this allusive pseudonym as a tool to characterize himself. He feels compelled by duty do what he does despite the distasteful consequences that follow. The nature of this duty or even compulsion on Vonnegut’s part is made clear in the “Preface” itself.

According to Martin Heiddeger, “He who truly knows what is, knows what he will to do in the midst of what is.” (Hofstadter 65). In his fiction, Vonnegut has always been a keen observer of “what is,” but it isn’t until the “Preface” of Breakfast of Champions that Vonnegut finally articulates to his reader what he wills in the midst of what is. He reveals his will while discussing the difference between

Armistice Day and Veteran’s Day. He says:

“Armistice Day has become Veterans Day. Armistice Day was sacred.

Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will

keep. I don’t want to throw away sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.” (Breakfast of Champions 505)

He chooses to keep Armistice Day because it has more meaning for him personally. Armistice Day, celebrates a day in the past on which millions of men agreed to stop killing each other. Veteran’s Day is just another Federal holiday were we celebrate nameless and faceless soldiers from no war in particular. In choosing

Armistice Day over Veteran’s day, Vonnegut is deciding for himself what is sacred

38 and what is not. He also chooses to hold Romeo and Juliet and music as sacred. In these three choices, Vonnegut is willing that human life, love, and art have value. It is evidence that he finally knows what he wills in the midst of what is.

The narrative of the novel’s itself follows events in the lives of two men,

Kilgore Trout, and Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover is a successful and respected man who is attempting to conceal his madness and suffering from the world.

Kilgore Trout is an unknown bitter science fiction writer who supports himself selling storm windows. Trout willingly withdraws from a world that he finds repulsive. He only attempts to contend with reality through his writing. Dwayne

Hoover is forcibly pushed out of reality by a chemical imbalance in his brain, but in the process, Dwayne desperately tries to conceal and cope with his madness in order to maintain his place in the world.

Each of these two protagonists is an interpretation of Vonnegut by

Vonnegut, and each reveals something of Vonnegut himself, but their simultaneous existence conceals him through revealing him. They are involved in a striving of their own. Trout is striving to communicate his being to others through his fiction.

And Hoover is striving to regain/maintain his sanity by speaking to the original author of the delusion that has become the face of his madness (Trout). Both are struggles, in which Vonnegut was involved.

The characters finally meet and come to blows in The Mildred Barry

Memorial Center for the Arts, which bears an interesting resemblance to the temple of Heidegger’s aesthetic phenomenology. It is a building that sets forth a being. It does this both literally and metaphorically. Mildred Barry is the deceased wife of a

39 rich man, and the building is named in her honor, and in the sense that the festival sets forth the being of Art through its festivities.

The commemorative title can also be read as a memorial to “art” in the name of Mildred Barry. But in either case, the building is a space consecrated to art, in which art is set-up and set-forth, but it is also a place where Trout and Hoover’s strivings are revealed as part of the author’s own striving for control and expression of his own being. As a result the author is an essential character in the lives of his own literary creations.

He is able to make Trout intelligible to the world by bestowing him with the

Nobel Prize using his omnipotent authorial authority. He allows Dwayne to embrace the madness that tragedy has brought on him. And Vonnegut is able to accept that the world might drive him mad by imposing suffering on him and that the world might ignore his attempts to make himself known through his art. As the author, he can address these bleak realities on behalf of his characters, but he cannot do the same for himself. However, Vonnegut’s characters have made his own being known to him through their fictional struggles, just as Vonnegut did for

Kilgore Trout.

The relationship between Vonnegut and his characters is that of creator and created. What separates the two is knowledge: knowledge of themselves as characters in a story told by someone else. Vonnegut gifts this knowledge to Kilgore

Trout at the end of the novel in return for their gift of awareness that they have given them. It is an awareness of himself as the author of his own being. In the

40 same way that he constructs narratives for his characters, he constructs a narrative of his own life to tell himself.

This notion of being is articulated in the novel by the artist and guest of honor at the Arts festival, Rabo Karabekian. It is part of his defense of his expensive, but opaque painting entitled The Temptation of Saint Anthony. This painting is the most prominent work in the Festival of Arts that serves as the arena for Dwayne Hoover’s violent madness and Kilgore Trout’s vindication.

Karabekian’s painting is composed of a white field and one strip of color, is incomprehensible for many, but his explanation vindicates both the painting and existence itself. He says:

“’I now give you my word of honor’ he went on, ‘that the picture

your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with

nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is

the immaterial core of every animal- the ‘I am’ to which all messages

are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us – in a mouse, in a deer, in a

cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what

preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint

Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach

were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two

such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe

sacred in any of us. Everything else about is dead machinery’”

(Breakfast of Champions 675).

41 In this quote, Vonnegut articulates a notion of being that is remarkably similar to

Martin Heidegger’s notion of Dasein (literally “there-being”). Vonnegut uses the word awareness to denote an entity which understands both its own being and the being of other entities in the world. Hiedegger says:

“That wherein [Worin] Dasein understands itself beforehand in the

mode of assigning itself is that for which [das Waraufhin] it has let

entities be encounters beforehand. The ‘wherein’ of an act of

understanding which assigns or refers itself, is that for which one lets

entities be encountered in the kind of Being that belongs to

involvements; and this ‘where’ in is the phenomenon of the world.”

(Heideggar 119).

In understanding one’s own existence as participating in the notion of being, the individual gains an awareness that is beyond itself. The essential character of being for Heidegger is its understanding of itself as a participant in the category of being. In other words, being has an awareness of itself as a being. This awareness of itself as being, allows a being to assign the being to other entities outside of itself.

Therefore, one’s understanding of themselves as a being allows them to understand other individuals as fellow participants in the category of being. Part of Martin

Heidegger’s notion of being is an awareness on behalf of the self both of its own being and the being of others. It is this notion of being that allows Vonnegut know what he wills in the midst of what is.

While Heidegger’s phenomenological notion of being doesn’t demand that being contain a morality, Vonnegut chooses to assign moral content to both place

42 moral value to his own being and the being of others It rescues him from the radical isolation and moral relativism imposed on being by its status as act aesthetic interpretation while preserving the possibilities and freedom afforded by interpretive existence.

Knowledge of the human condition is a gift for Vonnegut, given to him by his literary creations, and he chooses to symbolically return the favor in Breakfast of

Champions by giving Trout a symbol containing the same knowledge that Trout and his fellow characters have given Vonnegut, knowledge of his existential condition.

Trout explicitly articulates this profound truth in the novel as a response to a phrase written on a bathroom wall asking, “What is the purpose of life?” (Breakfast of

Champions 552). Kilgore Trout’s poetic response reads:

“To be

The eyes

And ears

And conscience

Of the Creator of the Universe,

You fool.”(Breakfast of Champions 552-553)

The first line of the poem establishes that being as an essential part of life. The second and third lines establish our ability to apprehend the external world through the senses. This access to the external world transforms life into dialogue between the internal life of the individual and the lives of the external world beyond him or her. In the interplay between individual and world mediated by sensation, life

43 becomes an aesthetic experience full of beauty and terror, love and hate, elicited by the world, apprehended by the senses, and felt by the individual.

The fourth line of the poem states that all beings evaluate the world as it presents itself through the senses and that these judgments have a moral character.

Referring to the Creator of the Universe in the fifth line of the poem is not a reference to the Christian God. Rather it refers to the individual because he or she creates their own universe within their being simply by existing. Additionally, when the artist creates a work, they create a new world that contains its own being. And the final line of the poem serves to solidify the Creator as a being other than the

Christian God. This is simply because that particular Creator is all knowing and he rarely makes jokes. Instead it refers to the foolish condition of the individual, who is responsible for creating and sustaining their own universe, but fails to realize that they are capable of doing either.

The poem makes a rather Nietzschian statement about the nature of existence that is both sarcastically false and tragically true at the same time. But each line contains its own separate assertion that characterizes the poem’s larger statement in a unique way. The poem taken as a whole implies a notion of religious belief that entitles believers to see and judge the world as God’s representative on earth. But the individual statements of each line combine to form a very different and entirely secular notion of the purpose of life.

While all art communicates the being of the artist that created it, it is usually separate from the being of the work itself. However, the meta-fictional quality of

Vonnegut’s text makes the being of the artist an essential and continuing part of the

44 artwork itself. Its awareness of itself as a created work of art is part of the essential being of the work itself, rather than something that one infers from the created nature of the artwork. Works of art contain their own being. While this being is derived from the being of the author, the two beings are separate enough for

Vonnegut, as the author, to converse with characters that he has brought into being

“’Mr. Trout, I love you.’ I said gently. ‘I have broken your mind to

pieces. I want to make it whole. I want you to feel a wholeness and

inner harmony such as I have never allowed you to feel before. I want

you to raise your eyes, to look at what I have in my hand.’

I had nothing in my hand, but such was my power over Trout

that he would see in it whatever I wished him to see. I might have

shown him a Helen of Troy for instance, only six inches tall.

‘Mr. Trout – Kilgor –‘ I said, ‘ I hold in my hand a symbol of

wholeness and harmony and nourishment. It is Oriental in its

simplicity, but we are Americans, Kilgore, and not Chinamen. We

Americans require symbols which are richely colored and three-

dimentsional and juicy. Most of all, we hunger for symbols which have

not been poisoned by the great sins our nation has commited such as

slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial

greed and cunning.’” (Breakfast of Champions 731-732)

This rather unusual and incredible interaction levels the disparity in existential awareness between author and character. It transforms Vonnegut the author into a character, and Kilgore Trout, the character, into his own author. While it is an

45 obvious allusion to the Fall of man in Genesis in a number of ways, it is also unique in a several ways.

Rather than taking knowledge from the creator as Adam and Eve stole from

God, Vonnegut, as the creator of this literary world, chooses to give knowledge to his creation. Knowledge of his existential condition lifts Kilgore Trout up rather than laying him low as God did to Adam and Eve. This mutual dependence between

Vonnegut and his fiction is more fully developed in Breakfast of Champions than in

Slaughterhouse-Five. This is the quality that has made Vonnegut’s fiction so powerful to so many readers for so long, and I will be addressing its development over the course of his career in the fourth chapter of this paper.

46 Chapter 4:

Being is a happening of truth for Martin Heidegger. But the truth in being is elusive, as Vonnegut displays in his early fiction. Uncertain of essential character of being, he is forced to rely increasingly on the character of his own being in order to advance his own inquiry into being as such. The result of this process is an increasingly discernable authorial presence in each of Vonnegut’s novels. This process culminates in the meta-fictional novels, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.

In Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut transforms the events of his own life into fiction, and in Breakfast of Champions he goes even further. There he transfigures himself into a character while remaining aware of himself as the author of the story in which he is appearing. He is fully character and fully author simultaneously. This position demonstrates the true nature of existence for Vonnegut and Heidegger.

Each being is the author and only reader of our life’s story. Each being is the creator of the world, and the being for which it was created. Vonnegut as both author and character in the “Epilogue” of Breakfast of Champions represents the truth happening in every being.

He accomplishes this by introducing himself as an essential feature of his own fiction, and there are a number of ways in which Vonnegut accomplishes this self-introduction into his own work. The first is in Vonnegut’s repeated use of place and character names across his works, independent of any narrative continuity. This repetition without continuity makes Vonnegut as the author the only possible explanation for their repetition. Vonnegut often uses his characters synchronously.

47 Diana Moon Glampers, Eliot Rosewater, and Kilgore Trout are just some of the character names that appear in more than one of Vonnegut’s texts without any explicit connection between them.

Diana Moon Glampers appears in Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison

Bergeron” and his novel God Bless you Mr. Rosewater. In “Harrison Bergeron” Diana

Moon Glampers is the Handicapper General responsible for eliminating accidental advantage in humanity. She is also the one that fatally shoots Harrison Bergeron in the midst asserting his the individual superiority of his existence. However, in God

Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Diana Moon Glampers is a lonely old woman that incessantly calls the Rosewater Foundation for reassurance from Eliot Rosewater.

She even calls him for comfort during a lightning storm. “Harrison Bergeron” is set in the year 2084, and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater is set in the middle of the 20th century. These are two separate characters living in two separate centuries in two very different positions.

Eliot Rosewater, the title character of Vonnegut’s God Bless You Mr.

Rosewater, also appears in a number other texts, including Slaughterhouse-Five,

Breakfast of Champions. Much like Diana Moon Glampers, the various incarnations of Eliot Rosewater lack explicit unity. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Eliot Rosewater shares a hospital room with Billy Pilgrim, and he introduces Billy to the fiction of

Kilgore Trout, another one of Vonnegut’s serial characters. In God Bless You Mr.

Rosewater, Eliot is the heir to the ill-gotten Rosewater fortune. In Breakfast of

Champions, Eliot Rosewater is the magnanimous donor who secures Kilgore Trout’s invitation to the Arts Festival in Indiana.

48 While there is no explicit relationship between the various incarnations of

Eliot Rosewater, there is also nothing that logically excludes their continuity across texts. And there is also a thematic unity surrounding Eliot Rosewater. In addition to similar dispositions and attitudes, each version of Eliot Rosewater is a passionate fan of Kilgore Trout’s novels.

The final multi-textual character I will address is Kilgore Trout. He appears several of Vonnegut’s novels, including Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of

Champions. Across novels, Trout possesses an even more distinct thematic unity than Eliot Rosewater along, but there is also a similar discontinuity in his character as Diana Moon Glampers. Trout always appears as an under-appreciated science fiction writer toiling in anonymity, addressing and communicating with the world through fiction.

In Breakfast of Champions, Trout is a storm window salesman who must go into pornographic bookstores in order to buy one of his own novels. In

Slaughterhouse-Five, Trout is a “circulation man” for the Ilium Gazette, who bullies flatters and cheats little kids” (Slaughterhouse-Five 456). Until his author and creator vindicates him at the end of Breakfast of Champions, Trout’s words fall on deaf ears.

The significance of these recurring characters is that they create a necessary, consistent, and undeniable authorial presence across Vonnegut fiction. Many aesthetically driven texts seek to exorcise the presence of their authors in order to free themselves from the interpretational limitations imposed on them by the author’s personal biography. Vonnegut instead injects himself into his fiction,

49 creating a specifically authorial continuity by reusing character names in his various texts.

He transitions from two novels about future incarnations of society to

Slaughterhouse-Five, which is a novel about Vonnegut’s own experiences during

World War II, and Breakfast of Champions which is in many ways a novel about

Vonnegut’s own fiction. Rather than evacuating his authorial presence in relation to his growing aesthetic interest, Vonnegut chooses to pour more of himself into his fiction. He chooses to disclose his being completely and directly in his art, which facilitates his ultimate emergence as a both character and author of his own fiction in the Epilogue of Breakfast of Champions.

Heidegger uses the metaphor of a temple in order to characterize being as a happening of truth. If one considers Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions using

Heidegger’s metaphor, one would enter the temple set up and set forth by Breakfast of Champions only to find the deity himself hard at work within, sculpting an idol of himself for the world to see. The idol itself does not contain the value of Vonnegut’s novel as a work of art. In revealing Vonnegut as both author and character that makes him a metaphysical necessity within his own work. He engages being as an entirely aesthetic act in which he is able to will a world into being, but he makes sure that his reader knows the being behind that willing.

Vonnegut projects himself through his works so thoroughly that he achieves his unusual position between author and character. This sort of self-projection is something that Martin Heidegger ascribed to the poet. Although Vonnegut uses poetry in his novels, he is not a poet because of his poems according to Heidegger.

50 For him, all art participates in poetry because “language alone brings what is, as something is, into the open for the first time.“ (Hofstadter 71). In so far as an artwork sets forth its own being, it participates in poetry for Heidegger. However, even though all art participates in poetry, Heidegger still places poetry in a privileged position above other art forms. He says, “the linguistic work, the poem, in the narrower sense has a privileged position in the domain of the arts.” (71).

The reason that Heidegger places poetry above all the other arts is because he sees it as the purest mode of projective saying. All the other art forms project themselves in poetic terms even though they may not be poetry. In other words, a painting cannot project itself or make itself known without the aid of language.

Simple worlds like blue or red are required in order for the mind to apprehend the being of contained within the painting. For Heidegger, all artists are indirectly poets. What is it that makes Vonnegut and the poetry of his fiction special? Why is he a poet in a different way than the painter? The difference is that a painting does not uses language alone to communicate its aesthetic content. The painting articulates itself in shapes, colors, and textures that still rely on language in order to make themselves intelligible.

Projective saying is poetry: the saying of the world and earth, the saying of the arena of their conflict and thus of the place of all nearness and remoteness of the gods. Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of what is.“ (Hofstadter 71). The projective character of his fiction makes him and his being so accessible to his readers. Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction is therefore a poetic saying of the truth happening within his own being. He remade the world through his being, and his projection of

51 that being gives all of his reader’s access to that same world, that humane world where life and its beauty retain their moral meaning.

Vonnegut’s poetic projection of himself through his works renders him accessible to future generations to a larger degree than most novelists. The fullness and clarity of his projected being goes beyond the typical boundaries of fiction. His fiction achieves the pure projection that Heidegger attributed to poetry. In the same way that Dante was able to resurrect Virgil in The Divine Comedy, so too have other authors been able to justly incorporate Vonnegut into their own work.

Niel Gaiman to write the Foreword to Vonnegut’s short story “God Bless You

Dr. Kervorkian.” The “Foreword” was written several years after Vonnegut’s death.

In it Gaiman ventures into the afterlife and encounters Vonnegut mowing his lawn in heaven. When Gaiman enquires about the purpose of life, Vonnegut essentially ignores his question only for Gaiman to provide Vonnegut’s answer for him. Gaiman says, “’A purpose of life, no who is controlling, is to love whoever is around to be loved’?

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘Tell them I said that.’” (Gaiman 9-10).

This is the power of Kurt Vonnegut and his fiction. He doesn’t have to tell his readers what it means to be. He doesn’t tell his readers how to be. He shows them how they can “be” by telling them how he “is” so that they might come to know themselves and their own being.

52

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54 .

Curriculum Vitae

• James Robert Hubbard Jr.,

o From Cincinnati, Ohio

o Graduated from Archbishop Moeller High School

o B.A. in English from the University of Notre Dame

o M.A. Student at Wake Forest University.

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