Wrapping Up

Kurt Vonnegut in August 2006, less than a year before his death.

Here's a collection of obituaries and tributes to Vonnegut filed after his death in April 2007. You might want to read over a few prior to Thursday's class, when we'll try to sum up our work this quarter and find some basic lessons and ideas to take away from the nine novels we've read:

• The New York Times

• The Guardian

• The Los Angeles Times

• The San Francisco Chronicle (an obit written many years before KV's death)

• NPR's Morning Edition remembers Vonnegut

• Time Magazine

• The Washington Post

Finally, here's one of Vonnegut's last televised interviews, with PBS' NOW in 2005:

So it goes, and you go as well, from the confines of this class on to (I dare to hope) a life-long relationship with literature. There are two types of people over spring break: those who are glad not to have to look at books for the next several months and those who are excited to finally have the time and freedom to pursue their own reading interests. Despite having read so much Vonnegut over the past fifteen weeks, I'm eager to read more — Bluebeard, Breakfast of Champions, Hocus Pocus — and perhaps you are as well.

You might want to consider the short story collections as well. I did consider using Welcome to the Monkey House for this class, but my feeling was that a) it can be difficult for students to transition from the macro-scale of novels to the micro-scale of stories, and b) those stories are conceived more for popular audiences, so they're not quite as substantive as Vonnegut's other writing. If you're interested in some short attention span delights, however, there are several additional volumes, including Bagombo Snuff Box and the two posthumous editions published in recent years. What might be a better place to go are the volumes of essays, speeches, interviews, etc.: Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons; Palm Sunday; Fates Worse than Death; or a particular favorite: A Man Without a Country.

Also, since it's been such a good resource for us over the course of the semester you might want to take a look at Charles J. Shields wonderful biography, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut — A Life. Be forewarned that while it's a fantastically thorough document of the author's life and times, and provides all sorts of useful background on Vonnegut, his family, his writing process and much more, it doesn't spare you from the full brunt of Vonnegut's personality, which is sometimes less than lovable. I think you're probably ready for that now, however.

Weeks 14–15: Timequake

Kilgore Trout to the rescue! Seriously! You didn't think that Kurt Vonnegut would sign off from novel writing without giving his alter ego and greatest creation one last moment in the limelight, right?

Of course, Timequake almost didn't come to pass. In his prologue, Vonnegut compares his struggle to bring this novel into being to the existential struggle of Santiago against his prize catch in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and explains how the unfinished manuscript that he calls Timequake One — "which did not work, which had no point, which had never wanted to be written in the first place" — was gutted and recycled to create our current text, Timequake Two. He finished the manuscript, "a stew made from [Timequake One's] best parts mixed with thoughts and remembrances during the past seven months," one day after his seventy-fourth birthday.

Part of what makes this novel so fascinating — and a key reason why I chose this for the class instead of books like Breakfast of Champions or Bluebeard — is its unintentional and tragic, yet unavoidable, historical context, thanks to its central plot device. Writing in 1997 about a timequake that would hurtle his characters from February 13, 2001 to February 17, 1991, Vonnegut had no idea that the September 11th attacks would happen and yet, we can't read Timequake without being indelibly haunted by that knowledge, and I think that, for anyone who reads this book from September 12, 2001 forward (as I first did in the spring of 2002), the book's resonance is greatly amplified — by our shared desire to "turn back the clock" to the simpler times before that day, and also in our sympathies for the book's characters, who, having survived the timequake will have to face yet another life-altering challenge a little over half a year later.

In a 1998 interview, Marylynn Uricchio asked whether Timequake would really be Vonnegut's final novel:

Q. Did you say Timequake was your last book so you couldn't change your mind?
A. I'm quite old. I'll be 76 in a few days. Some of this is an actuarial matter. I'm writing short stuff, I'm writing an op ed piece today about the hurricane in South America, but that's all I'm doing now. No more novels. No more books need be written.

He proved true to his word — while Vonnegut would publish several other books in his lifetime, including a slim volume of radio monologues (God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, 1999), a collection of his early unpublished stories (Bagombo Snuff Box, 1999), and a book of essays (A Man Without a Country, 2005) he never did publish another novel, even if he often hinted that he was at work on one entitled, If God Were Alive Today. Several posthumous books have appeared as well, namely three odds-and-sods collections of unpublished stories, essays, speeches, etc.: Armageddon in Retrospect, Look at the Birdie, and While Mortals Sleep.

Later in the same interview, in response to Uricchio's asking, "When your work is talked about 100 years from now, what do you want people to say?," Vonnegut offers an elegant summation of his life's work:

I doubt it will be talked about 100 years from now. I don't know. All I really wanted to do was give people the relief of laughing. Humor can be a relief, like an aspirin tablet. I'd be certainly pleased if 100 years from now people are still laughing.

He has another 82 years to go, but 18 years since that statement — and nearly a decade since his death — I'd say that his reputation is (and will be) secure for a very long time.

Here's our reading schedule for Timequake:

• Thurs. April 14: prologue-ch. 20
• Tues. April 19: ch. 21–ch. 41 
• Thurs. April 21: ch. 42–epilogue

And here are a few supplemental reading links:

• "Vonnegut Stew," Valerie Sayers' New York Times review of the novel: [link]
• "Kurt Vonnegut Says He's Retiring (We'll See)," Paul D. Colford's Los Angeles Times article on Timequake and Vonnegut's career plans after its publication: [link]
• "Breakfast with Kurt Vonnegut," Uricchio's interview from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: [link]

Your Final Projects

Like all good things, our semester with Vonnegut will soon come to an end, but not unlike the "cleaning-up" that Billy Pilgrim and his fellow POWs find themselves doing in Dresden as World War II wraps up, we (well, you) have a little more grim and dirty work ahead of you.

It's a final essay, but it's not . . .

In a literature class like this, one would expect to be asked to write a scholarly essay making some sort of critical argument that's supported by (con)textual evidence from the quarter's readings (all of which is properly cited in MLA format). Vonnegut's work, however, doesn't necessarily call for the same response as other authors and so instead of a straightforward essay, I'd like you to produce a creative piece that — for all intents and purposes — achieves all of those same goals.  

Let's leave form aside for a second and focus on function instead. Vonnegut's been dead for nearly a decade now, though he was as fiery a social commentator in his final years as he'd ever been . . . even more fierce, perhaps. What I'd like you to do in your final project is to pick up his gauntlet and carry on in his stead. Choose a contemporary issue that's important to you and write a creative piece that aims to capture your best estimation of what Vonnegut's stance on the topic would have been, in his style, and using anecdotes, examples, characters, etc. from the nine novels you've read this quarter as evidence to support that position. You could easily have a field day with election year politics, or choose a very recent topic like Black Lives Matter, the refugee crisis, gay marriage, reproductive rights, or work in a more general direction addressing perennial favorites like civil rights, censorship, the military-industrial complex, etc. Find something that gets you riled up and channel Vonnegut's perspective to analyze and propose solutions to the issue at hand.

How about some examples?

So how do you get the creative and the critical components working together? First, pay attention to some of the hybrid writing the Vonnegut's doing in the latter years of his life. The epilogue to Jailbird is an excellent model for your work, as are Vonnegut's bookend chapters (nos. 1 and 10) of Slaughterhouse-Five, Jonah's more meta-narrational moments in Cat's Cradle and the majority of Timequake. This part fiction/part nonfiction approach will serve you well. Remember that you don't need to tell a fully-formed story with a beginning, middle and end — think of it more in the mode of occasional storytelling, as if you happened to sit down next to a stranger at a bar and struck up a conversation, and don't forget Vonnegut's very helpful writing tip of having one particular person in mind when you're writing (he often wrote to his sister Alice).

The most useful tactic at your disposal, and a very Vonnegut-ian one, is to make extensive use of allegory in your work. Of course, not only is Vonnegut an agnostic humanist who can see the value of faith for others and quote extensively from the bible, but he's also a big believer in one of Christ's favorite literary devices: parable. There's perhaps no better (and more commonly used) example of this in Vonnegut's writing than Kilgore Trout, whose stories serve to make points in a more vivid way than mere explication ever could. Likewise, think of the tangential characters who aren't directly connected to a storyline but serve an important purpose furthering the ideas behind the novels — like Powers Hapgood and Sacco and Vanzetti in Jailbird, or the brief mention of RFK and MLK in Slaughterhouse-Five. Use Vonnegut the way he uses Kilgore Trout, or use Trout the way Vonnegut uses Trout, or use Vonnegut's other characters in the same fashion.

In terms of the argument you're going to make, you'll have to work through precedent — points of view expressed in the works we've read that you feel are applicable to the issue you're addressing. Vonnegut's certainly opinionated and not at all shy about sharing his ideas, so you should have plenty of material to make use of in your piece.

Aside from all of the texts mentioned above, here — to give you a taste of Vonnegut's most pointed writing in a political mode — are a few superlative selections from Vonnegut's last book published during his lifetime, A Man Without a Country (2005), which collected a number of essays he penned for the news magazine, In These Times:

• "State of the Asylum," which includes a dialogue between Vonnegut and Trout
• "Cold Turkey," perhaps the most famous of Vonnegut's ITT pieces
• "Requiem for a Dreamer," the final dialogue between Vonnegut and Trout, who committed suicide soon thereafter (disregard the fact that he died in Timequake, or that according to Jailbird he's a pseudonym for Dr. Robert Fender)
• "American Xmas Card 2004"

Additionally, if you're looking for tips on how to write like Vonnegut, why not take a look at his own advice about writing?


Anything else I should know?

Here are a few important guidelines for your final projects — fail to meet these requirements and, well, you'll fail(!):

• Length: 6-8 double-spaced pages minimum — that's full pages, and not counting your works cited list, so to be safe, make sure your piece goes on to page 7. Another reasonable minimum would be 2000 words. If the spirit moves you and you find yourself writing a longer piece, please don't feel constrained by the 8 pg. limit (that's just a general ballpark length to aim for). On the other hand, if you hand in a paper that's less than 6 full pages, you'll automatically receive an F (so don't do that).

• Formatting — particularly since you're sending your file to me electronically, it would not be wise to play around with margins, get cutesy with font sizes, etc. 12 point Times New Roman is lovely and easy on the eyes, to boot. Barring that, Cambria or a similar serif typeface (serifs, don't ya know, are those little decorative doohickeys at the ends of the letter) will be fine. I'm partial to the restrained elegance Goudy Old Style (but that's just me).

• MLA citations and works cited list — you'll find links to MLA resources here. Don't forget that you need to cite paraphrases and summaries of source texts in addition to direct quotations.

• No block quotes — there is, perhaps, no greater comfort to the unprepared last-minute writer than the block quote — just cram it all in there, making no attempt to trim the text (or disguise the fact that you're cutting and pasting from Wikipedia). In formal essays of lengths longer than what you're being asked to deliver here, I might allow students to use one block quote in their essay, but there's no reason whatsoever for block quotes in a final project like this. Trim quotes to their essentials and/or interweave them throughout your sentences.

• Due date — Friday, April 29th at 6:00PM. Please send your final to me at my gmail address (which is my last name [dot] my full first name at gmail.com) as an attachment. When I get your paper, I'll download it to make sure that it opens without issue and then write you a little note confirming that I've received it. Don't forget that late assignments will be docked accordingly. The absolute latest I can accept a paper is Monday, May 2nd.

Weeks 13–14: Galápagos

Over the course of our last few readings, we've seen a very different Vonnegut — one who's coming to terms with both the process of aging and his own shifting role in American arts and letters, and responding in kind with a strong pair of novels (Jailbird and Deadeye Dick) that are humanistic, character-driven affairs that stay largely within the realm of conventional (though still wild) reality. This pattern will continue in Bluebeard, the last of four books marking a late high-point in Vonnegut's career (sandwiched between two of his worst offerings: Slapstick and Hocus Pocus), however, in Galápagos, the author is more than happy to cast off the fetters of everyday existence and explore a fantastic, science-fiction future.

Nonetheless, Galápagos is very much a novel of its time: the worldwide financial woes that set the stage for the book's narrative speak to real-life stagnation in the early and mid-80s and it's no stretch to read the bacterial disease that makes all women but those on Santa Rosalia infertile as Vonnegut's attempt to address the AIDS crisis. The Galápagos islands, likewise, serve not only as a setting for the novel but as a symbolic tie to Charles Darwin, who formulated his theory of evolution after investigating the novel ways in which the species native to the islands had developed in isolation.  In Jailbird, Vonnegut ruminates on the nature of the island and its occupants while describing scene at the Hotel Royalton's Coffee Shop on Walter's fateful first full day of freedom in NYC:

I thought to myself, "My goodness — these waitresses and cooks are as unjudgmental as the birds and lizards on the Galapagos Islands, off Ecuador."  I was able to make the comparison because I had read about those peaceful islands in prison, in a National Geographic loaned to me by the former lieutenant governor of Wyoming.  The creatures there had had no enemies, natural or unnatural, for thousands of years.  The idea of anybody's wanting to hurt them was inconceivable to them.

So a person coming ashore there could walk right up to an animal and unscrew its head, if he wanted to.  The animal would have no plan for such an occasion.  And all the other animals would simply stand around and watch, unable to draw any lessons for themselves from what was going on.  A person could unscrew the head of every animal on an island if that was his idea of business or fun (123-124 in my first edition hardcover, 174-175 in your paperbacks).

At the same time, while forces beyond human control do their part to shape the novel, it's worth noting that Vonnegut also finds fault within human action and intention — big brains and big ideas cause big problems. While the novel's characters undergo physical transformations as they evolve, their brains change as well, getting smaller, and as far as Vonnegut is concerned (cf. this somewhat bombastic Los Angeles Times article), this is all for the best:

The big trouble, in Kurt Vonnegut's view, is our big brains. 

"Our brains are much too large," Vonnegut said. "We are much too busy. Our brains have proved to be terribly destructive." 

Big brains, Vonnegut said, invent nuclear weapons. Big brains terrify the planet into worrying about when those weapons will be used. Big brains are restless. Big brains demand constant amusement. 

"Our brains are so terrifically oversized, we have to keep inventing things to want, to buy," Vonnegut said with a shudder. "If you think of the 8 million people of greater New York charging out of their houses every day in order to monitor the planet, it is a terrifyingly destructive force. [...] 

"Among other things," he said of this giant computer lodged between humanity's collective ears, "it is capable of creating the Third Reich of Germany, which in fact so demoralized the world that I don't think we'll ever recover." 

The brain: "I think stupidity may save us," Vonnegut said. "I think we are too damned smart."

Finally, take note that the events of the novel take place in 1986, just one year after its completion, and the proximity is intentional on Vonnegut's part — if we don't wise up, he reasons, such fantastic events are not at all out of the realm of possibilities for the human race.

Here's our reading schedule for Galápagos:

• Tues. April 5: book 1, ch. 1–18
• Thurs. April 7: book 1, ch. 19–35
• Tues. April 12: book 1, ch 36–book 2, ch. 14

And here are a few supplemental links:

• "How Humans Got Flippers and Beaks," The New York Times' review of Galápagos: [link]
• "Vonnegut Explores the Big Brain Theory," Los Angeles Times' review of the novel: [link]
• a second LAT review of the book: [link]
• an interview with Hank Nuwer that's largely concerned with Galápagos: [link]
• an NPR essay by Ron Currie, Jr., who names Galápagos one of his "Three Books to Help You Enjoy the Apocalypse": [link]
• "Evolutionary Mythology in the Writings of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.," Gilbert McInnis' 2005 essay, which originally appeared in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: [link]

Weeks 10–12: Deadeye Dick

In our post for Jailbird, I found myself returning to the opening lines of Slaughterhouse-Five's final chapter as an elegant evocation of 1970s cultural malaise that began with a few violent acts in the late 60s. Now, as we begin our time with Vonnegut's 1982 novel, Deadeye Dick, we return to it once more — not to memorialize Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, but rather for the mention of Kurt Vonnegut's father and his gun collection, which factors heavily into the setting of Deadeye Dick.  

As we've discussed in regards to several of the novels we've read this quarter, Vonnegut had issues with both of his parents that made their way into his writing. Still, it's not until we reach Deadeye Dick that we have Vonnegut's most sustained critique of his upbringing and his parents' failings, mixing thinly-veiled autobiography with fictional inventions to create the KV-analogue, Rudy Waltz. This frankness was a long time coming — Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. died in 1957, but it's notable Vonnegut kept the "Jr." suffix through Breakfast of Champions (a novel that represents, appropriately, a death-of-the-self). Conversely, it's fascinating to read the Waltz family against the hypothetical depiction of Vonnegut and his parents in heaven that begins Jailbird (which, though frustrated at times, does start with the touching wish that Vonnegut and his father might be better friends in the afterlife than they were on earth).

Should you be interested in more widely exploring Vonnegut's work at some point in the future, it's worth noting that aside from Midland City itself, a number of characters from books we're not reading this term can be found in Deadeye Dick — chief among them Dwayne and Celia Hoover (protagonists of Breakfast of Champions) and Rabo Karabekian (protagonist of Bluebeard).

In a long and lavish review of Deadeye Dick for The New York Times — one marked, appropriately enough, by a retrospective mood  — Benjamin DeMott addresses Vonnegut's detractors and offers a lovely summation of what marvelous gifts he offers to readers of all kinds, along with a prediction of how their (and perhaps your) appreciation for his work might evolve in time:

I know that on some days this very odd writer is good medicine, whatever one's age: on the day when, for instance, you hear that the shelling hasn't stopped, or that the liveliest young mind in your acquaintance can't find work, or that it's been decided, in the newspapers, that the operations mutilating a loved one are no longer regarded as correct procedures. One reason for this is that Vonnegut's inexplicables are admirably plain, homely, abundant, up front; there's no epistemological complication, few philosophical conundrums, just the improbable mess of any probable human week. And the other reason is that there's no cruelty in the man. He is, evidently, playing; take away the ever-present question (namely, How on earth can you explain this?) and his activities might not be easily distinguishable from those of a child setting up and batting down toy soldiers on a rug. But gloating and meanness are excluded from the game, and the observing eyes are sad, humorous, kind.

I predict that many Vonnegutians will grow up and away from their favorite author. I also predict that, a decade or two after they do so, many will grow back. The old rule applies: As soon as you put on weight on this earth, you discover it makes a kind of sense to lose it.

Here's our reading schedule for Deadeye Dick:

• Thurs. March 17: preface–ch. 11
• Tues. March 22: No Class — Spring Break
• Thurs. March 24: No Class — Spring Break
• Tues. March 29: ch. 12–19
• Thurs. March 31: ch. 20–epilogue

And here are a few supplemental links:

• full text of Benjamin DeMott's New York Times review: [link]
• Vonnegut discusses Deadeye Dick with novelist Martin Amis (via the British Library): [link]
• Impress your friends with your knowledge of dreadful 90s one-hit-wonders — the band Deadeye Dick, best known for their 1994 single "New Age Girl," has obviously read Vonnegut: [link]

Weeks 9–10: Jailbird

We jump ahead a full decade from 1969's Slaughterhouse-Five to 1979's Jailbird. Why? Well, as we've discussed several times in class, after the disheartening lean years leading up to Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut had a very difficult time dealing with his success, fan's expectations of him and his desires to remain financially solvent (along with the dissolution of his marriage to Jane Marie Cox and his son Mark's institutionalization). In essence, the author lost touch with himself and his talents, transforming himself into a popular persona à la Mark Twain that was a mere caricature of his former self (to get some sense of this change, along with some of the hypocrisies of this new self, you can read this excerpt from Charles Shields' excellent KV bio from the bottom of pg. 297 to 301). As a result, he followed the critical and popular success of Slaughterhouse-Five with two of his most poorly-received novels: Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday (1973) and Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! (1976).

During this same time, America was undergoing its own identity crisis as the hopeful politics of the 1960s dissolved into hopeless malaise as the 70s unfolded. The abrupt shocks that destroyed this optimism (cf. Vonnegut's inclusion of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King's assassinations in the final chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five), were joined by the long quagmire of the war in Vietnam and fresh wounds inflicted by the Watergate scandal.Taken together, these internal and external dilemmas form the context for Jailbird, wherein Vonnegut, approaching his sixtieth birthday, seeks answers in the lessons and convictions of his past. Walter F. Starbuck, the novel's protagonist, who's just been released from prison after serving time for minor crimes as part of Watergate, finds himself in the exact same situation, and his (and Vonnegut's) retrospective soul-searching will cross paths with a veritable pantheon of secular American saints cut from the same cloth as Eliot Rosewater, including Eugene V. Debs, Powers Hapgood, Sacco and Vanzetti, and others.

In a 2003 interview with David Barsamian in The Progressive, Vonnegut talks about the strange interplay of socialism and Christianity within his ethics, mentioning some of the historic figures who factor positively into Jailbird:

Vonnegut: It’s perfectly ordinary to be a socialist. It’s perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments. There was a time when I could vote for economic justice, and I can’t anymore. I cast my first vote for a socialist candidate—Norman Thomas, a Christian minister. I had to cast it by absentee ballot. I used to have three socialist parties to choose from—the Socialist Labor Party, Socialist Workers Party, and I forgot what the other one was.

Q: You take pride in being from Indiana, in being a Hoosier.

Vonnegut: For being from the state that gave us Eugene Debs.

Q: Eugene Debs of Terre Haute on the Wabash.

Vonnegut: Where Timothy McVeigh was executed. Eugene Debs said (and this is merely a paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount, which is what so much socialist writing is), “As long as there’s a lower class, I’m in it; as long as there’s a criminal element, I’m of it; as long as there is a soul in prison,” which would include Timothy McVeigh, “I am not free.” What is wrong with that? Of course, Jesus got crucified for saying the same thing.

Q: With two million souls in prison today in the United States, Debs would be very busy.

Vonnegut: Debs would’ve committed suicide, feeling there was nothing he could do about it.

Q: There is another Hoosier you write about who is unknown, Powers Hapgood of Indianapolis. Who was he?

Vonnegut: Powers Hapgood was a rich kid. His family owned a successful cannery in Indianapolis. Powers was radicalized. After he graduated from Harvard, he went to work in a coal mine to find out what that was like. He became a labor organizer. He led the pickets against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. I got to know him late in his life when he’d become a local CIO official. There was some sort of dustup on a picket line, enough to bring the cops into play. Hapgood was testifying in court about what was to be done about CIO members who had made trouble. The judge stopped the proceedings at one point and said, “Hapgood, why would a man with your advantages, from a wealthy, respected family, Harvard graduate, lead such a life?” Powers Hapgood replied, “Why, the Sermon on the Mount, sir.” Not bad, huh?

While we're on the topic of Vonnegut's moralists, it's worth noting that good old Kilgore Trout appears in Jailbird as well, however in very different circumstances that we have (or will) see him elsewhere. Try not to get too hung up on the differences — not unlike the radical differences between the Diana Moon Glampers you met in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and her namesake in "Harrison Bergeron," we can, perhaps, chalk this up to authorial carelessness.

Here's our reading schedule for Jailbird:

• Tues. March 8: prologue–ch. 6
• Thurs. March 10: ch. 7–15
• Tues. March 15: ch. 16–epilogue

And here are some supplemental readings:

• John Leonard's New York Times review of Jailbird: [link]
• full text of Vonnegut's 2003 interview with David Barsamian in The Progressive: [link]
• Kirkus Reviews' appraisal of the novel: [link]
• Wikipedia page on the Watergate scandal: [link]

Weeks 7–8: Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969)

While Vonnegut identifies Cat's Cradle as his "flagship" (i.e. his favorite of his own books) it's no understatement to call Slaughterhouse-Five his masterpiece — when raking his own books against one another in 1981's Palm Sunday, those two are the only to receive a mark of A+ (though The Sirens of Titans, Mother Night, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Jailbird all get As). Certainly, it's one of his more formally-inventive novels, and one in which his use of science-fiction tropes and cutting-edge postmodern literary technique meld beautifully to produce a narrative that remains true to the horrors Vonnegut witnessed in Dresden as a POW during WWII.

Always a prolific and dedicated writer — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, for example, came together in a little over a year — Slaughterhouse-Five posed a serious challenge to Vonnegut, who tried (and failed) for the better part of two decades, to find the right way to tell his Dresden story. This exchange from a composite interview (published by The Paris Review as part of their "Art of Fiction" series in 1977) outlines a very important shift in Vonnegut's approach that granted him the freedom to finish the manuscript (an important anecdote that's also contained in the book itself and gives it its subtitle):

INTERVIEWER

Did you intend to write about [Dresden] as soon as you went through the experience?

VONNEGUT

When the city was demolished I had no idea of the scale of the thing . . . Whether this was what Bremen looked like or Hamburg, Coventry . . . I’d never seen Coventry, so I had no scale except for what I’d seen in movies. When I got home (I was a writer since I had been on the Cornell Sun, except that was the extent of my writing) I thought of writing my war story, too. All my friends were home; they’d had wonderful adventures, too. I went down to the newspaper office, the Indianapolis News, and looked to find out what they had about Dresden. There was an item about half an inch long, which said our planes had been over Dresden and two had been lost. And so I figured, well, this really was the most minor sort of detail in World War II. Others had so much more to write about. I remember envying Andy Rooney, who jumped into print at that time; I didn’t know him, but I think he was the first guy to publish his war story after the war; it was called Air Gunner. Hell, I never had any classy adventure like that. But every so often I would meet a European and we would be talking about the war and I would say I was in Dresden; he’d be astonished that I’d been there, and he’d always want to know more. Then a book by David Irving was published about Dresden, saying it was the largest massacre in European history. I said, By God, I saw something after all! I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.

INTERVIEWER

That sort of shifted the whole focus . . .

VONNEGUT

She freed me to write about what infants we really were: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don’t think I had to shave very often. I don’t recall that that was a problem.

Later in the same interview, he speaks about Dresden in comparison to the Holocaust, and attempts (with a combination of survivor's guilt and his trademark black humor) to address the senseless scale of destruction and his place in relation to it:

INTERVIEWER

It was the largest massacre in European history?

VONNEGUT

It was the fastest killing of large numbers of people—one hundred and thirty-five thousand people in a matter of hours. There were slower schemes for killing, of course.

INTERVIEWER

The death camps.

VONNEGUT

Yes—in which millions were eventually killed. Many people see the Dresden massacre as correct and quite minimal revenge for what had been done by the camps. Maybe so. As I say, I never argue that point. I do note in passing that the death penalty was applied to absolutely anybody who happened to be in the undefended city—babies, old people, the zoo animals, and thousands upon thousands of rabid Nazis, of course, and, among others, my best friend Bernard V. O’Hare and me. By all rights, O’Hare and I should have been part of the body count. The more bodies, the more correct the revenge.

INTERVIEWER

The Franklin Library is bringing out a deluxe edition of Slaughterhouse Five, I believe.

VONNEGUT

Yes. I was required to write a new introduction for it.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have any new thoughts?

VONNEGUT

I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defense or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited—not two or five or ten. Just one.

INTERVIEWER

And who was that?

VONNEGUT

Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that.

Slaughterhouse-Five was made into a film in 1972 — an ambitious and faithful adaptation that pleased the author immensely: "I love [director] George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel Slaughterhouse-Five to the silver screen ... I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book." Here's an extended trailer:

Here's our reading schedule for the next three classes:

• Thursday, February 25: ch. 1–4
• Tuesday, March 1: ch. 5–6
• Thursday, March 3: ch. 7–10

Additionally, here are a few supplemental links for your enjoyment:

• The aforementioned (and highly-recommended) Paris Review "Art of Fiction" interview: [link]
• The New York Times' review of Slaughterhouse-Five: [link]
• Harlan Ellison's 1969 review of the book in The Los Angeles Times: [link]
• a 2007 NPR tribute to Vonnegut featuring the author reading an excerpt from Slaughterhouse-Five: [link]
• a 2003 NPR interview with Vonnegut about Slaughterhouse-Five: [link]
• Vonnegut's May 1945 letter to his family in Indianapolis from a Red Cross camp in France: [link]
• A 1949 letter of rejection from The Atlantic Monthly, to whom Vonnegut had sent two stories, along with an account of his experiences in Dresden: [link]
• Wikipedia entry on the Dresden bombing: [link]
• Vonnegut speaks in Chicago on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima:

Weeks 6–7: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine (1965)

Though Vonnegut's writing career began in earnest in 1950 (with the publication of "Report on the Barnhouse Effect") he wouldn't gain public renown or financial comfort until the mid-to-late 1960s, and if not for an invitation to teach at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop in the fall of 1965 (not long after the publication of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater), he might've given up on writing entirely. Nonetheless, the 60s represent the high water mark for Vonnegut's writing — specifically the trifecta of Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Slaughterhouse-Five — and after the widespread success of that final book, he'd spend much of the 1970s in a tailspin, struggling with questions of his public persona, artifice and substance. It wasn't until a massive aesthetic reinvention, starting with Jailbird and continuing through Deadeye Dick, Galapagos and Bluebeard that he'd regain the fine fictional form of this earlier period.

Though the titular Eliot Rosewater is our protagonist, Vonnegut tells us in the novel's opening sentence that "[a] sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees." Specifically, he's talking about $87,472,033.61 (a lot of money then and now). Eliot is the primary trustee of the Rosewater Foundation — a philanthropic organization set up by his father, an Indiana senator, as a tax shelter — to whom the money belongs. At the heart of the novel is the question of qualities such as charity, fellowship, selflessness and generosity (as embodied by Eliot) and the place they occupy in a capitalist society. These concerns are perhaps even more important now than they were in the mid-60s, when Vonnegut's quaint sociological notions about humankind's duties to one another captured the imagination of young readers.

As Vonnegut slowly but surely worked his way towards being able to write Slaughterhouse-Five, we learn that Eliot, like Vonnegut, is scarred by his experiences during WWII and a major part of how he comes to terms with that is by valorizing the role firefighters play in society. Vonnegut himself had been a volunteer firefighter in the hamlet of Alplaus while he worked at GE, and his own admiration for them is mirrored in the novel, where he observes that they are:

almost the only examples of enthusiastic 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. There we have people treasuring people as people.

Two prints by artist Tim Doyle of one of Vonnegut's most famous quotations (taken from this novel).

 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater also serves as our first introduction to Kilgore Trout, one of Vonnegut's most-cherished creations. As depicted in the Arena documentary we watched on the first day of class, Trout is a prolific science fiction writer — author of more than 117 novels and 2000 short stories — albeit not one who has gained either critical or financial recognition: his work is usually published as filler in pornographic magazines. Eliot Rosewater is a diehard fan of his work, however, and through his influence, so is Billy Pilgrim, protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five. He'll also appear in that novel, as well as Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird, and Timequake, and Galapagos is narrated by the ghost of Trout's son, Leon Trotsky Trout. In 1975, Trout even published a novel in the real world, Venus on the Half-Shell (shown at right), though contrary to popular belief, the book wasn't written by Vonnegut, but rather a little-known science fiction author, Philip José Farmer. While Vonnegut had given Farmer permission to use Trout's name, he'd soon grow to regret that decision as casual fans and dedicated readers alike couldn't tell the difference between the two authors.

Like Trout, Eliot Rosewater would also become one of Vonnegut's favorite recurring characters, showing up again in our next novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as well as the later books Breakfast of Champions and Hocus Pocus (which won't be part of our reading list this quarter).

Here's our reading schedule for the book:

• Tues. February 16: chapters 1–5
• Thurs. February 18: chapters 6–9
• Tues. February 23: chapters 10–14

And here are a few supplemental links:

• "Do Human Beings Matter?," Martin Levin's New York Times review of the book: [link]
• A lovely essay in The New Inquiry on "Vonnegut's Firefighters," including his thoughts on the first responders who perished on 9/11: [link]
• The title of Vonnegut's 1999 collection of NPR vignettes, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, consciously parodies this book: [link]
• In the late-70s, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was adapted into (I kid you not) a Broadway musical. Here's video of its opening act:

Weeks 4–5: Cat's Cradle

After jumping forward almost a decade between Player Piano and Mother Night our next book comes just two years later. Cat's Cradle was the first novel to bring Kurt Vonnegut to the attention of wider audiences (even though it would take several years to achieve that popularity). Graham Greene would hail the book as "one of the three best novels of the year by one of the most able living writers," and Vonnegut himself, in a 2000 interview with the Harvard Crimson, named the book as his "flagship."

I've already discussed Vonnegut's disdain for his work being labeled as science fiction (note the prominently placed label on the book cover to the right), and as was the case with Player Piano, this is by no means a tired exercise in that genre, but rather a book that's firmly rooted in the realm of science, which it uses as a satirical weapon against contemporary society. Likewise, it was largely inspired by the author's time as a GE public relations agent in Schenectady, NY (which again returns as the fictional city of Ilium), where scientists were hired to do "pure research" — i.e. to work on whatever pet projects might interest them — and Vonnegut's job was to interview them in search of human interest stories. One scientist in particular, Nobel Prize-winner Irving Langmuir, who worked alongside Bernard Vonnegut on a groundbreaking cloud-seeding project and would serve as the foundation of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, who sets the novel's action in motion. In fact, ice-nine, the dangerous substance at the heart of the novel, was a fabulation of Langmuir's, devised to entertain visiting science fiction author H.G. Wells in the early 30s.  Charles Shields gives us the details:

Cat's Cradle appeared in 1963, after a long gestation, but the idea for it had occurred to Kurt as far back as his days at General Electric. A story often repeated at the Schenectady plant concerned H. G. Wells's visit in the 1930s. The head scientist, Irving Langmuir, had proposed an idea to Wells for a story about a form of water that solidified at room temperature. Wells, the most famous science fiction writer of the day, expressed interest, but his novels, at their core, were parables about humanity — a scientific conundrum didn’t interest him. 

Kurt, on the other hand, was intrigued by Langmuir's suggestion. Taking the concept a step further, he asked: what if water, the most common liquid on the planet, could be weaponized, the way that matter torn apart by nuclear fission had created the atomic bomb? At a party of mostly General Electric scientists and their wives one evening, Vonnegut described his idea to a crystallographer, explaining that humanity, in his story, would be threatened by water becoming stable like ice at room temperature. The scientist nodded and went over to a chair. He sat there, ignoring the talk and laughter, just thinking. Finally, as things were winding down, he returned and said, "No. There could be no such ice." 

Vonnegut might have put the idea aside except that his brother Bernard's cloud seeding experiments at General Electric convinced him that weather modification raised ethical issues more important than how water actually crystallizes. In 1952, the Cape Cod Standard-Times had interviewed Kurt about his next novel after Player Piano. "'Actually,' Mr. Vonnegut said in a worried tone, 'the atmosphere can be fouled up by anybody with an oil burner pointing at the right kind of cloud.' The situation is so explosive that he believes restrictive legislation is needed everywhere right now.'"

Again, much like Player Piano, we see faith as a driving force in Cat's Cradle, here taking the form of Bokononism, through which Vonnegut is able to trace the role of religion in society and the balance between church and state. However, while Vonnegut was an avowed atheist / humanist / freethinker, his views towards religion — as well as towards other folk social groups (cf. the various lodges [the Moose, the Parmesans, etc.] as well as the Meadows teams and the Ghosts Shirt Society in Player Piano; the concept of nationalism and particularly Nazi ideology in Mother Night) were quite sympathetic, honed by his (incomplete) graduate studies in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. While his first thesis (on the correlation between Cubist painting and Native American uprisings) was turned down Vonnegut eventually convinced (or publicly shamed) the University to accept Cat's Cradle in lieu of a formal thesis and granted him his degree. In particular, the interplay between faith and technology (especially the apocalyptic power of technology in the atomic era) — along with its influence on questions of predestination and free will — are worth keeping an eye on here.

Here's the reading schedule for the novel:

• Thurs. February 4: Ch. 1, "The Day the World Ended," to Ch. 37, "A Modern Major General"
• Tues. February 9: Ch. 38, "Barracuda Capital of the World" to Ch. 101, "Like My Predecessors, I Outlaw Bokononism"
• Thurs. February 11: Ch. 102, "Enemies of Freedom" to Ch. 127, "The End"

And here are a few supplemental links for this week:

• Wikipedia page on Bokononism (includes a glossary): [link]
• The Books of Bokonon: [link]
• author and screenwriter Terry Southern reviews Cat's Cradle in The New York Times: [link] 
• Benjamin Kunkel's 2008 appreciation of the novel in The Guardian: [link]
• Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (Opinions) (1974), Vonnegut's first volume of collected nonfiction pieces, takes its name from three Bokononist key terms: [link]

Weeks 3–4: Mother Night

Vonnegut's third novel, Mother Night, first published in 1961, is an orphaned work of sorts. As Doris Lessing notes in her 1973 New York Times review of the book, noting that it's "the Vonnegut book that has not been reviewed anywhere, ever, because it was sold first into paperback for a handy sum: he needed the money for his large family. And paperbacks don't get reviewed, so it has been ordained." Beyond that, as The Nation points out, "The book is anomalous in Vonnegut's oeuvre, his only novel not to feature elements of the fantastic, and in that sense and others — its sober tone, its attempt to depict mature love — his most adult."

Charles Shields gives us the basic setup for the novel: 

The protagonist is Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American imprisoned in Tel Aviv, accused of having aided the Nazis. Vonnegut imagined him as someone like William Joyce, the Irishman nicknamed "Lord Haw Haw" who broadcast during the war from Berlin. Kurt had listened to him while stationed in England, wondering what could motivate a turncoat. The other inspiration was the phony Red Cross worker in Dresden who tried to recruit POWs for combat on the Russian front by promising better food and clothing. Perhaps, Vonnegut imagined, he wasn't a German actor with an impeccable English accent, but an American engaged in a complicated double cross.

The book is framed as Campbell's autobiography, for which Vonnegut has served as editor. A latter edition, which contains a separate introductory note penned in 1966, offers some new insights to frame the book's contents: "This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Recall these lines when we get to Slaughterhouse-Five, where they'll be echoed in his discussion of the long and arduous process of coming to terms with his experiences in WWII (n.b. Campbell makes an appearance as well). Still, it would take Vonnegut another eight years to reach that point. In Mother Night, we see his first book-length effort to work through his personal history and the nation's as well.

Here's our reading schedule for Mother Night:

• Tues. January 26: introduction, editor's note, chapters 1–19
• Thurs. January 28: chapters 20–29
• Tues. February 2: chapters 30–45

And here are a few supplemental resources:

• "The Guest Word" — Doris Lessing's NYT review of Mother Night: [link]
• a brief essay on the novel at Alphabet Rain: [link]
• Wikipedia entry on Lord Haw-Haw: [link]
• the trailer for a 1996 film adaptation of the book: [link]

Weeks 1–2: Player Piano

Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, was first published by Charles Scribners and Sons in 1952, only two years after he first started placing stories in "slicks" — popular weekly magazines that catered to large audiences and provided writers with ample and lucrative opportunities to see their stories in print. This early financial success provided the motivation Vonnegut needed to quit his public relations job at General Electric in Schenectady, NY and move to Cape Cod to pursue writing full-time, however the periodical market dried up not long thereafter. Here's Vonnegut's own description of that time period, from the preface to Bagombo Snuff Box:

There was a crazy seller’s market for short stories in 1950. There were four weekly magazines that published three or more things in every issue. Six monthlies did the same.

I got me an agent. If I sent him a story that didn’t quite work, wouldn’t quite satisfy a reader, he would tell me how to fix it. Agents and editors back then could tell a writer how to fine-tune a story as though they were pit mechanics and the story were a race car. With help like that, I sold one, and then two, and then three stories, and banked more money than a year’s salary at GE.

I quit GE and started my first novel, Player Piano. It is a lampoon on GE. I bit the hand that used to feed me. The book predicted what has indeed come to pass, a day when machines, because they are so dependable and efficient and tireless, and getting cheaper all the time, are taking the halfway decent jobs from human beings. [...]

But three years after I left Schenectady, advertisers started withdrawing their money from magazines. [...] One monthly that had brought several of my stories, Cosmopolitan, now survives as a harrowingly explicit sex manual.

Vonnegut in 1952.

Player Piano revisits themes that should be familiar after today's readings, namely, as the cover copy reads, "America in the Coming Age of Electronics," and just as importantly, the place of humans within this technocratic society, and aside from general nuclear anxieties, much of Vonnegut's interest in rapidly-advancing technology was born of his experience at GE, as filtered through a mild sibling rivalry with his pragmatic brother, Bernard, a star scientist for the organization who, among other achievements, discovered a process for cloud seeding. The humanist vs. scientist dynamic was an active one in the Vonnegut family — for example, influenced by Bernard's analytic nature, Vonnegut's father would force him to major in chemistry at Cornell, turning down a dream job in journalism. Likewise, there's an interesting analogue in Vonnegut's longtime association with the science-fiction genre — something he disdained as an attempt to marginalize his writing and diminish the sharpness of his social commentary.  Writing on the topic in The New York Times in 1965, he observes:

Years ago I was working in Schenectady for General Electric, completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines, so I wrote a novel about people and machines, and machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will. (It was called Player Piano, and it's coming out in hard covers again next spring.) And I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer.

I didn't know that. I supposed that I was writing a novel about life, about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now. I have been a sore-headed occupant of a file-drawer labeled ''science- fiction'' ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a tall white fixture in a comfort station. 

The way a person gets into this drawer, apparently, is to notice technology. The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city.

If you're wondering what Utopia 14 is, by the way, it was Bantam's 1954 attempt to cash in on the popularity of science fiction pulp novels, rebranding Player Piano to appeal to that market (note the futuristic city/machine/spaceship thingy[?], the alien-like creatures, the unforgiving landscape, the enigmatic hero). Vonnegut was justifiably angered by this, however the book wasn't republished under its original title until 1966, after the success of Cat's Cradle.

General Electric would also greatly influence Cat's Cradle, in which Dr. Felix Hoenikker was based on Nobel Prize-winner Irving Langmuir (one of Bernard's colleagues), and while GE is proud to acknowledge that (scroll down), they aren't as eager to own up to the more critical depiction in Player Piano.

Here's our reading schedule for the week:

• Thurs. January 14: chapters 1–7
• Tues. January 19: chapters 8–24
• Thurs. January 21: chapters 25–35

and here are a few supplemental links:

• Granville Hicks' New York Times review of Player Piano: [link]
• "The Invention of Kurt Vonnegut" — a discussion of the author's time at GE: [link]
• Vonnegut on science fiction, GE and Player Piano (from a 1973 Playboy interview): [link]
• Vonnegut on Player Piano, "technology and cheesy little religions" (from a 1973 interview with Robert Scholes): [link]
• Wikipedia entry on ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose computer, developed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 (and most likely a real-world analogue for EPICAC): [link]

Getting Started

In anticipation for our next class I'd like you to acquaint yourself with a few resources in our right-hand sidebar: the Vonnegut's Rules for Writing page and the Characteristics of Postmodern Literature page. We'll also make good use of our time today by watching the start of So It Goes, a 1983 episode of the British documentary series Arena focusing on Vonnegut. Please feel free to watch the remaining segments we won't have time for in class when you have the time.

(note: the last two videos in the playlist aren't part of the documentary)

Welcome to Our Class

We'll spend ten weeks exploring the life and works of Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) — one of postwar America's most unique literary talents — from his early years writing for sci-fi and popular magazine audiences through his postmodern masterpieces, to a late career marked by hybrid humanistic forms. Our readings will include classic novels (Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother Night, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Cat's Cradle) along with lesser-known treasures (Jailbird, Galapagos, Deadeye Dick).

Most of the information you'll need for this course is contained in the toolbar to the right, including our reading schedule, book list, class policies and some useful information on postmodern literature, constructing effective arguments and a crash course in MLA style. You'll also want to join our Facebook group as soon as possible — announcements and supplemental materials will be shared through there as well, and it will hopefully be a nexus of fruitful discourse outside of class.