Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. (Vol. 22)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922–
American novelist, short story writer, and playwright.
Vonnegut satirizes American contemporary life through the use of fantasy, black humor, and the absurd. Although many of his books have been best sellers, Vonnegut is probably best known for Slaughterhouse-Five.
(See also CLC, Vols. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 12, Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 1, and Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 2: American Novelists since World War II; Vol. 8: Twentieth Century Science-Fiction Writers.)
Thomas L. Hartshorne
[A] comparison between Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse V offers interesting insights into the shift in attitudes, the change in political culture, and the transition in the general cultural atmosphere [during the decade of the sixties]. The two books are particularly suited for comparison because there are many points of similarity between them. To mention only the most obvious, both deal with World War II, both assert a strongly antiwar position, both are highly critical of other features of modern life, both present the individual protagonist as a victim, both are written in a narrative style which violates normal time sequence, both are cited as examples of black humor, and both are also cited as examples of the literature of the absurd. With all these similarities, the differences between them become especially revealing and instructive. (pp. 19-20)
In Catch-22 the central problem is how the individual may survive in a hostile system, find methods of beating it or changing it. Vonnegut's central concern, not only in Slaughterhouse V, but in most of the rest of his novels, is the relationship between man and his own nature or between man and God. He is trying to come to terms with the dichotomy between man and whatever it is that is responsible for the universe being organized the way it is.
However, if one does read Slaughterhouse V as a political fable, the moral is clear: the...
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[In Jailbird] Vonnegut's manner, as usual, is jokey and faux naïf. He writes about serious matters—labour massacres and judicial murder in America—without the slightest risk of earnestness. Yet underneath the comedy, Vonnegut is still indignant at capitalism and bitter over the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, wondering a little ruefully why the story of their martyrdom has been forgotten…. Vonnegut's voice does not falter; like the master raconteur he is, the story is always entertaining. Jailbird's texture is occasionally bland …, but the jokes are good….
Jailbird is a neat fable for the post-Watergate age. Since Slaughterhouse-5 Vonnegut has tried to use the freedom of fantasy and science fiction to grapple with the social and historical reality of our times. Only the sombre anecdotes, such as the detailed description of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and the much briefer description of the Wyatt Clock contract (fifty women in Brockton, Mass., who died from radiation poisoning …), stick somewhat awkwardly in the throat as the witty laid-back smoothness of Vonnegut's prose goes down.
Eric Homberger, "The People's Friend," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1979; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 4003, December 7, 1979, p. 86.
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David A. Myers
Kurt Vonnegut's latest work, Jailbird, continues the trend of his two preceding works, Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick, away from sci fi entertainment towards satiric antinovels set in the sordid present and saturated with world-weary despair…. [Jailbird] opens with a rambling, autobiographical segment…. [But it becomes] a parodistic fairy tale spiced for grown ups with Dadaistic phantasies and with a moral dictated by black humor.
In Jailbird Vonnegut operates as a satirical surgeon on the festering sores of North America's power-hungry plutocracy. His diagnosis is based on historical studies of the cruelty and injustice done to the workers of the world by American capitalists from 1890 to 1978. He holds his historical diagnosis together chronologically by tracing parallels between three quasi-revolutions of the little man: the great union strikes of the 1890's to obtain justice and tolerable living conditions for the workers; the similar strikes organized in the 1930's depression; and finally the surreal scheme of Mary Kathleen O'Looney to bring about "a peaceful economic revolution" … in the 1970's. All these quasi-revolutions end in martyrdom for the idealistic socialist leaders of the time…. (p. 159)
Jailbird is a scathing reductio ad absurdum of American capitalism's attempt to substitute the worship of Mammon and property as a guiding dream in place...
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Richard E. Ziegfeld
In the Autumn of 1973, English teacher Bruce Severy ordered Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five for use in one of his classes in Drake, North Dakota. On 7 November, on orders from the Board of Education, Mrs. Sheldon Summers, school custodian, burned 32 copies of the book because the Board members had decided that it was pornographic. After reading a brief article in the New York Times on the incident (16 November 1973), Vonnegut wrote to Charles McCarthy (head of the Drake Board of Education). His letter … presents an unsual approach to censorship, it illuminates a feature of Vonnegut's character that many readers overlook when reading his books: his moral intent. (p. 631)
[The following quote is from Vonnegut's letter:]
If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hard-working men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered chldren know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don't damage children much. They didn't damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.
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Beneath the absurd comedy of [Jailbird] with its chance encounters and unlikely coincidences exists a dark undertone of satiric comment on the loneliness, corruption and impersonality of American society. RAMJAC and Watergate are central symbols of our existing economic and political evils. Vonnegut's heroes are the little people like Mary Kathleen and such political martyrs as Sacco and Vanzetti (reminding one of Dos Passos's U.S.A., a probable influence on Vonnegut). As Mary Kathleen says about our lonely crowds: "They all look so mean to me…. I don't see anybody being kind to anybody anymore." And Starbuck, comparing his own moral deficiencies with individual acts of kindness he has received, says: "I've never been a serious man…. I never risked my life or even my comfort in the service of mankind." Vonnegut's main theme seems to be our need to rehumanize the world with love, concern and responsibility for our fellowman.
Allen Belkind, "English: 'Jailbird'," in World Literature Today (copyright 1981 by the University of Oklahoma Press), Vol. 55, No. 1, Winter, 1981, p. 104.
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Even from the experience of the modern century, which has already witnessed the killing of over one hundred million people in wars and death camps, political philosophers cannot conceive of a system of rule organized and sustained through violence. "No government based exclusively on the means of violence has ever existed," writes Hannah Arendt. It is a startling observation and one carrying the authority of Arendt's rich historical knowledge deepened by philosophical generosity. The assertion gives one pause because the grimness of the historical record seems to challenge Arendt's trust in human governance. To each event that did question her belief, Arendt responded with renewed conviction in the faculty of intelligent action to resolve the contradictions inherent in what she saw as the self-destructive force in the violence of our time.
Arendt's confidence that violence will do itself in is a minority report. The events of the recent past have proved overwhelming to the novelists of this period. (p. 58)
The fiction of Kurt Vonnegut exemplifies this feeling of impotence to handle cataclysmic conditions. Writing out of the same disturbing context from which Arendt speaks, and addressing himself to the identical propensity toward violence in modern life which she examines, Vonnegut arrives at the opposite conviction. His art shows a government in which violence is the essence. He presents institutionalized terror as a...
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[An] imaginary young tiger of a novelist, fresh out of one of the writing programs where Mr. Vonnegut has taught, could turn ["Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage"] into a gorgeous tour-de-force. The key to it would be to make the autobiographical musings more detailed and revealing than Mr. Vonnegut's, and the reflections, confidences and orations not copied from genuine letters and speeches, but invented and better….
In very top form [Mr. Vonnegut] has reminded me of Günter Grass, who is a writer of genius. I don't know whether Mr. Grass started out with more talent, but Mr. Grass has manipulated the talent he has with relentless logic and daring. Mr. Vonnegut, by contrast, is always turning aside (as, again, he confesses) to pop a quick joke, from what seems faint-heartedness, or else will bring himself up short with one of his trivializing signature phrases: "Hi-Ho," "Peace" or "So it goes." Even in "Slaughterhouse-Five," he quickly ducks into the incongruous sci-fi world of Tralfamadore whenever fright at the scenery of World War II overtakes him. A kind of congenital irresolution threatens to bring him down soon—as has happened with so many American writers before him—to a last couple of books which declare openly that he has failed to follow his premises through to a conclusion. (p. 33)
Edward Hoagland, "Kurt Vonnegut Singing in the Bath," in The New York Times Book Review...
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Kurt Vonnegut is the Danny Kaye of American Letters, a world-famous jester whose sweet and zany style has never been sealed by the academy as the high art of a Chaplin or a Keaton, who continues over the years to swoop up devotees without shaking off disdainers. Palm Sunday is not likely to send deserters scrambling from either side….
Palm Sunday is "an autobiographical collage," a literary bag lady—not your run-of-the-street bag lady but a Mary Kathleen O'Looney. In Jailbird, O'Looney turns out to be president of RAMJAC, an international conglomerate that owns everything in the world. According to the copyright, RAMJAC owns Palm Sunday, too. Imagine that. And so on.
Vonnegut's last collage, the 1975 Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, wasn't autobiographical. Neither is this one, if readers are looking for Crack-Ups, or Capotean confessions of madder music and stronger wine, or even a chronology of the and-then-I-wrote-and-wed sort….
On Palm Sunday's circus-full of rigging, its author flies through airy nothingness with ease; he's done the routine for years. He opens with cheek. His tongue is in it: "This is a very great book by an American genius."… At any rate, Vonnegut has swept his desk clean. Shaken out are four essays, ten public speeches, two funeral orations of his own and one of his great-grandfather's, two letters of his own and one...
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"Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage" [is] a race down to the wire between the good stuff and the bad stuff, in which the good stuff wins by a nose.
One of the drawbacks to a collection of this sort is that it requires the use of material in which certain gags are repeated. This gets to be such a habit in "Palm Sunday" that Mr. Vonnegut starts repeating himself even when he doesn't have to….
The other drawback to "Palm Sunday" is Mr. Vonnegut's charm. The main ingredient of this charm is a facility for saying it before you can, for calling "Palm Sunday" a "blivet" before you can call it a piece of junk, of giving it a C on the report card of his life's work before you can give it a C-,… or of saying he feels guilty about having profited from the bombing of Dresden before you can accuse him of being two-faced for having published … a letter he told the recipient no one else would see.
This part of his charm is innocence achieved by pre-emptive guilt. The other parts are an elaborate ability to say, "Aw shucks," and an almost infinite capacity to appear less holy than thou. Sometimes the charm wears a little thick. You want to say, If you feel guilty about Dresden, why don't you give some of your money to it? Also, like many agnostics, Mr. Vonnegut talks too much about God.
But the good things outweigh the bad in "Palm Sunday."… The best things are the questions and...
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What we have in Jailbird is an extremely closely woven narrative built up of ironic juxtapositions and incongruities stated and counterpointed as in an elaborate symphony. The development of character in terms of psychological realism is not important to Vonnegut (though a Dickensian presentation of idiosyncracy is) and in fact some of his characters' names are close anagrams of one another—Leland Clewes/Cleveland Lawes; Arpad Lean/Delmar Peale—as though to suggest that their personalities are accidental and that in essence they are the same—strange machines making weird noises and doing odd things to one another, whose actions in the world always turn out contrary to what they intend…. Human beings, in Vonnegut's novels, are pawns of forces they cannot comprehend and of which they are only vaguely aware. In Sirens of Titan, for example, the whole of human history is explicable as the procurement for an alien space traveller of a spare part for his stranded vehicle so that he may proceed to the other end of the universe with his message which, translated, means "greetings." (pp. 148-49)
Neither is Vonnegut interested in fine writing. His style is a sort of high class telegraphese conveying vast amounts of information very rapidly and is ideally suited for the presentation of disparate narrative strands which shuttle back and forth as the plot proceeds to be tied at the novel's end into a surprising but satisfying...
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Kurt Vonnegut—public clown, master of disguises, wizard of the ironic approach, self-parodist, sender-up of his self-sending-up—gives the reader of Palm Sunday plenty of warning. Writing, he says, is playing practical jokes on readers: "If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes."…
["Somebody thought" is] the sort of response Palm Sunday engagingly invites to its offered collage of bits and pieces. But the presence of irony is a great mongerer of scepticism, especially when it's signalled so loudly….
Vonnegut busily undoes his own book, calling it a blivit ("two pounds of shit in a one pound bag"), mocking it as he mocks the excesses of American authors' immodesties ("This is a very great book by an American genius. I have worked so hard on this masterpiece for the past six years…. It is a marvelous new literary form …"). He slings dauntingly low blows at himself as the only true beneficiary of Dresden's bombing….
Vonnegut, in fact, spends a lot of his time blackly glooming: about his failed first marriage, about becoming "an old poop" …, about the proneness of his women-folk to religious superstition, about illiberalism and violence in America and the world. Going in for jokes, Vonnegut alleges, would do a lot of good to all those...
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The Virginia Quarterly Review
In this patchwork of literary remnants [Palm Sunday],… Vonnegut reasserts his simple, perennial theme: most human behavior is innocent. Slaughterhouse Five exposed the banality of evil underlying the bombing of Dresden by the United States; Jailbird argued that both HUAC and Watergate stem from the same fumbling stupidity. Unfortunately, Vonnegut once again deliberately blurs facts and genres to turn his sound argument for civil liberties into one more strained appeal for beatific laughter. Rather than analyze the genuine roots of the social loneliness and civil repression he so deplores, Vonnegut acquiesces to the madness and depravity of everyday reality—he is content to confess, smile, and merely endure.
"Notes on Current Books: 'Palm Sunday'," in The Virginia Quarterly Review (copyright, 1981, by The Virginia Quarterly Review, The University of Virginia), Vol. 57, No. 3 (Summer, 1981), p. 98.
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In 1975 Kurt Vonnegut published a collection of reviews, articles and speeches under the annoying title of Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Now, six years later, he has done much the same in Palm Sunday. He calls the book a collage…. The result is far more effective than the earlier book. Indeed were it not for the 'connective tissue' Palm Sunday would be dangerously inconclusive and slight…. [Some] of the pieces included here are clearly no more than padding. There can be no other reason for reprinting his short story 'The Big Space Fuck' or subjecting us to a truly appalling libretto for a musical version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—which the producers quite rightly turned down. It is Vonnegut's musings and speculations on and around the circumstances that prompted this or that address or introduction to a book that prove in the end to be far and away the most rewarding elements of Palm Sunday. They do, as he intended, form a partial autobiography—a 'sort of life'—which reveals the author to us in a genial and unself-conscious way and raises hope that this will prove to be a trial run for a fuller, longer account of his life. (p. 84)
[Beneath] the mannerisms lies an amenable personality whose opinions are not without merit and relevance. Vonnegut's bêtes noires are worthy and well known and include such targets as multinationals, pollution, organized religion, war and inhumanity....
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Like his fellow humorist Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut attains his main strength as a writer in his grasp of persona. Wear the right mask, he knows, and you can say anything. Critics are disarmed by this approach, not knowing which voice is that of the "real' Vonnegut and which only an illusion…. Thus, the typical Vonnegut book is endearing, puzzling, and infuriating, as is Palm Sunday, a book which should make Vonnecultists of the four or five Americans who still are not. Try, but it's hard to dislike Palm Sunday. (pp. 57-8)
Not one, but three Kurt Vonneguts inhabit the pages of Palm Sunday. In the quasi-scientific language he seems to love, they are KV-1, KV-2, and KV-3, or the Risque Buffoon, the Freedom Fighter, and the Mandarin Simplifier.
KV-1, Risque Buffoon, cracks jokes both dismal and hilarious, advises graduating classes to get plenty of bran in their diets, and wonders about Queen Victoria's reaction to the drawing of his anus featured as part of the official KV signature. This would have been crude back in study hall, of course, but KV-2, Freedom Fighter, is whisked in quicker than you can say Bill of Rights to explain away such bourgeois aversions. Taboos against mentioning and drawing no-no body parts are really devices for keeping the workers in their places and squelching dissent.
If that sounds oversimplified, blame it on the presence throughout Palm Sunday...
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