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The World Picture Of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

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The World Picture Of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

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Content 70-13,667
SCHATT, Stanley, 1943-
THE WORLD PICTURE OF KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1970
Language and Literature, modem
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan
THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED
THE WORLD PICTURE OP KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
by
Stanley Schatt
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OP THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OP SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OP PHILOSOPHY
(English)
January 1970
UNIVERSITY O F SO U TH ER N CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
STANLEY SCHATT
under the direction of hihf.... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Gradu
ate School, in partial fulfillment of require
ments of the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
n7]a^ °
Dean
£)a/£___J_anu_ar_y___197.0......
DISSERTATION.
.....
TABLE OP CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION ....................................... 1
Chapter
I. VONNEGUT, RELIGION, AND RELIGIOUS INSTITU
TIONS ......................................10
II. VONNEGUT AND SCIENCE......................... 44
III. KURT VONNEGUT'S VIEW OF MAN— THE SCHIZO
PHRENIC SOCIAL ANIMAL .................. 81
IV. POINT OP VIEW IN VONNEGUT'S "DRESDEN" NOVELS 118
V. THE WORLD PICTURE OP KURT VONNEGUT, JR. . . . 153
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............ 181
11
INTRODUCTION . . .
Although Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has been writing short
stories and novels for the last twenty years, until re
cently critics have chosen either to ignore him entirely
or to dismiss him with the brief notation "science fiction
writer." Actually Vonnegut can be much more accurately
categorized as a social critic whose marked use of ambiv
alence and complex personas serve as an objective.correla
tive with which to present his "world picture," his view
of man and man's proper role in a very complex universe.
The very same critics who dismiss Vonnegut as a sci-
/ x
ence fiction writer ignore the complexities of his style.
His conception of a universe in which there is a multi
plicity of views results in an ambivalence that distin
guishes his fiction from Aldous Huxley's novels of-ideas.
While Huxley could draw a horrifying yet perfectly
| straightforward picture of a scientific nightmare in
| Brave New World, Vonnegut's picture of a technological
j oligarchy in Player Plano is just as frightening but far
! more complex. Paul Proteus returns to his technologically
i orientated society to die just as Huxley's savage dies,
i
but Proteus is disillusioned; he ponders whether or not
I
: his revolution failed because of his own inadequacies or
i 1
2
whether or not it was doomed to fail because of human na
tural depravity. The problem is much too difficult for
him to solve, and he seems relieved that his almost cer
tain execution will render such speculation merely aca
demic .
Because Vonnegut's novels contain a multiplicity of
points of view, it is extremely difficult to determine the
validity of the social criticism voiced by his protago
nists, especially since many of them may or may not be
insane. Like Nabokov in Pale Fire, Vonnegut seems to be
fascinated by the role of the artist of questionable san
ity in an unsympathetic world. Frequently Vonnegut's
artists are cloaked in ambivalence. Newt, a midget in
Cat's Cradle, is an artist who draws a picture of the
world as he sees it— a "cat's cradle" that appears to be
meaningless. Similarly, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Eliot Rosewater conceives of himself as an artist whose
very life will be his work of art. Each statement attest-
: ing to Eliot's sanity is perfectly counterbalanced by one !
; i
1 indicating his insanity. Is the young millionaire insane?
! This equipoise of viewpoints makes it virtually impossible
!
; to answer such a question.
i Although Vonnegut detests labels, critics have
i
| pointed to his characteristic ambivalence as evidence
that he is a member of the school of contemporary Black
| Humor novelists. Like Bruce Jay Friedman, Thomas Pyncheon
3
and other Black Humorists, Vonnegut does conceive of a
pluralistic universe and tends to "evoke a discursive
world of not one but multiple unverifiable possibilities."^
In addition, he indulges in the characteristic Black Humor
fondness for "nutty plots, mischievous messages and an
2
acrobatic style." There is a major difference that dis
tinguishes Vonnegut from these novelists, however, his
marked concern for the human predicament as opposed to
3
the Black Humor attitude of detachment. In his early
novel The Sirens of Titan, for example, Vonnegut leads up
to a climax that is indeed black— man discovers that all
human history has merely been an attempt by Tralfamaaor-
ians to signal their messenger on Titan that the spare
part for his space ship is on its way. Yet Vonnegut
does not disclose this information dispassionately; it
is quite clear that his sympathy is with his brainwashed
protagonist Malachi Constant who learns that his job and
the job of all mankind is to love whomever is around to be
loved. Vonnegut's approach is similar in S1aughterhouse-
j Five, his most recent novel. Rather than assuming the
Tralfamadorian point of view that the fire bombing of
Dresden was inevitable and that the death of thousands
j of innocent civilians was not sad since it too was inev-
| itable, it is quite clear that both Vonnegut and his pro-
: tagonist Billy Pilgrim care very much indeed and are
I deeply affected by that holocaust.
4
In this dissertation I have tried to glean Vonne
gut 's essential beliefs from a careful study of his
fiction. In postulating Vonnegut's "world picture" it
has been necessary to grapple with his many stylistic
complexities. A reading of Vonnegut1s novels reveals
that virtually all his protagonists are distorted into
"Grotesques" in the Sherwood Anderson sense of the term
by the corrupting forces of religious, scientific and
technological, and political institutions, all of which
ignore man's individuality and capacity for love and
compassion. In The Sirens of Titan Rumfoord brainwashes
Malachi Constant and ruthlessly exploits him in order to
further the interests of his church of God the Indiffer
ent. Vonnegut has indicated to me that one of modern
man's problems is that he no longer feels that he can
accept religious miracles although he still craves knowl
edge of his role in a Divine plan. As a result, it is
very easy for a mountebank to proclaim himself a Messiah
; and exploit people. Bokonon in Cat's Cradle is a self-
confessed mountebank and prophet. In his Insanity has he
become a true Messiah, or is he still exploiting his fol-
! lowers? In chapter one I consider Vonnegut's use of Jonah
i
i and Messiah figures as well as his treatment of religious
I institutions. Paradoxically, while the two figures are
; antithetical, they both work toward the same goal according
j
I to Vonnegut. _. ___________________________
5
Since one of the major reasons for man's loss of
faith has been the scientific revolution, it is appro
priate that my second chapter consists of an investiga
tion of Vonnegut's view of science and technology. He
never really clarifies the difference in his own mind
between pure science and applied science (technology),
but seems to lump the two together. His unhappy experi
ence working for General Electric at their Schenectady
plant resulted in his first novel, Player Piano, which is
a clear warning of the dangers of man automating himself
out of existence. The automated society of Ilium, New
York, warps Paul and Anita Proteus into "Grotesques" who
are unable to express their love for each other. In
Cat's Cradle Vonnegut deals with the necessity for sci
entists to take moral responsibility for their inventions
as well as with the epistemological question of the limi
tations of human knowledge. The novel is a vision of an
apocalypse brought about by Dr. Francis Hoenikker's cre-
4
ation of ice-nine. Since Hoenikker is unable to view
j
| mankind with love and compassion but only with detached
scientific curiosity, he and his three children who are
I obviously "Grotesques" serve as a perfect illustration
i
j of the dangers Vonnegut feels are inherent in an imper-
j sonal scientific institution that can only distort, warp,
i
I and destroy.
6
In chapter three I consider the difficulties Vonne-
gut's protagonists have adapting to a society that seems
almost intolerable. Unable to accept the comforts of a
religion that demands blind faith and made to feel insig
nificant by mushrooming science and technology, they find
their society and the political institutions nightmarish.
Paradoxically, perhaps as a result of their revelations,
Vonnegutfs protagonists tend to become schizophrenic in an
effort to cope with their environment, often assuming a
new identity. While the ambivalence that permeates Vonne
gut 's fiction makes it difficult to ascertain the extent
of his cosmic pessimism, it is quite clear that a pleasant
fantasy world seems very tempting to him; the trend in his
two most recent novels, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and
Slaughterhpuse-Five, is certainly in the direction of the
portrayal .of a fictional world in which it is virtually
Impossible to distinguish fantasy from reality. More and
more the epistemological question of what man can know
seems to be assuming paramount importance for Vonnegut.
In my fourth chapter I consider one very good reason
' why Vonnegut may be moving away from the harsh reality of
j
| the real world. Slaughterhouse-Five presents innumerable
!
; stylistic difficulties, especially his use of a complex
j point of view. It is apparent that his memory of the
| Dresden holocaust is so painful for Vonnegut that to
7
provide adequate aesthetic distance he found it necessary
to create a persona who presents the detached Tralfama-
dorian point of view. Such a device prevents the novel
from becoming sentimental or even dogmatic. Similarly,
one of the difficulties in understanding God Bless You,
Mr. Rosewater is Eliot's preoccupation with fire and a
book on the fire bombing of Dresden. It is actually
Vonnegut who has a fixation on this cataclysmic process
and event as much as Eliot.
Vonnegut1s "world picture" is complex indeed. In
my final chapter I discuss Vonnegut's style, his feeling
that man must seek love and compassion and avoid that
which dehumanizes, and his conception of the limits of
man's knowledge. Vonnegut's ambivalence mirrors his
skepticism that man can ever really know what true reality
is. While Faulkner's citizens of Yoknapatawpha county
were lucky enough to have a long series of "eternal ver
ities" upon which to rely as touchstones, such is not the
case in Vonnegut's fiction. Since his protagonists live
in a pluralistic universe, their view of reality in each
case is only one of many possible views and the best they
j can do is to try to love their fellow man or at least try
to be kind while pragmatically adopting a course of action
jthat will insure their survival.
8
A word should be said about the Vonnegut texts I
have used. While Vonnegut's first three novels were
originally published only in paperback, all but The Sirens
of Titan are now readily available in hardcover. I have
chosen to use the hardbound editions of Player Plano and
Cat's Cradle because of the ephemeral nature of paper
backs. Because I have found it necessary to quote fre
quently from Vonnegut's novels, I have placed the page
references in parentheses in the main body of this dis
sertation.
i
i
FOOTNOTES
Max F. Schulz, "The Unconfirmed Thesis: Kurt Von
negut, Black Humor, and Contemporary Art," unpublished
article, University of Southern California, 1969, p. 19.
2
Burton Feldman, "Anatomy of Black Humor," in The
American Novel Since World War II, ed. Marcus Klein
(Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publishers, 1969),
p. 224.
Burton Feldman, "Anatomy of Black Humor," p. 228.
4
I am indebted to Dr. William Brown, Professor of
Chemistry at the University of Southern California, for
pointing out to me that Russian scientists have isolated
an "ice-two" and "ice-three." This is further evidence
that Vonnegut is a social critic who is dealing with
problems of the present and foreseeable future.
CHAPTER I
VONNEGUT, RELIGION, AND RELIGIOUS
INSTITUTIONS
In considering Kurt Vonnegut's attitude toward
religion and religious institutions as reflected in his
novels, one must recognize that he is a novelist and not
a theologian. If the reader keeps this in mind, it will
be easier for him to grapple with the implications of
Vonnegut's intermingling of Old Testament and New Testa
ment characters, especially the Intriguing relationship
in Player Plano, The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, and
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater between an Old Testament
Jonah figure and a New Testament Messiah or Jesus figure.
Vonnegut's protagonists in these novels, Paul Proteus,
Malachi Constant, John, and Eliot Rosewater, all at least
briefly assume the role of a Jonah figure when urged to
follow such a course of action by a Messiah figure. While
: Paul and Malachi follow the prophecies and instructions of
i
! the zealously dedicated Pinnerty and the seemingly super-
i
j natural Rumfoord, John follows the instructions of the
!
i prophet Bokonon, and Eliot Rosewater tries to live by
I
j the precepts of Kilgore Trout. When questioned about
i his view of the symbolic role in his fiction of these
I archetypal figures, Vonnegut indicated that
I_______________ 10____________________________
11
Jonah is interesting because he is forced to
work for God, even though he doesn't much
want to. The Messiah is an enthusiastic
volunteer. They amuse me because they are
polar, and both suggest that God wants things,
which I find hard to believe. Awful things,
of course, are commonly perpetrated because
some crook says God wants them. Some Jonah
or Messiah, he says, has told him so.1
This statement reveals Vonnegut's characteristic ambiva
lence. He leaves open, for example, the possibility that
Trout, Bokonon, and Rumfoord are actually "crooks." Ap
parently for Vonnegut Jonah's most significant character
istic is his marked passivity, especially when contrasted
with the Messiah figure. Such a view raises a number of
questions that remain unanswered. It is not clear, for
example, whether or not a real God lurks in a universe
populated with frauds like Rumfoord and Bokonon and dis
interested robots such as the Tralfamadorian, Salo.
Vonnegut indicates in his letter that the Jonah and
messiah figures are polar in intentions, while achieving
the same end, carrying the same message; this chapter will
probe the precise nature of the relationship and analyze
the way in which it changes from novel to novel. Further
more, it will explore the many parallels in Vonnegut's
; fiction to various other aspects of the Biblical Jonah
i
| tale, particularly the conception of human and divine
I
! love.
i
12
Although Vonnegut centers his attention on the pas
sivity of his Jonah figures, he appears to be well aware
that at the heart of the Jonah story Is a struggle between
the benevolent forces of human and divine love and mercy
and those malevolent forces of human "selfishness and
2
hardheartedness." God forces Jonah to go to Nineveh and
warn the people that they must repent their evil ways
before It Is too late. The tale ends on an ambiguous note
when God saves the repentant citizens and then draws an
analogy between His love and subsequent mercy for the now
repentant thousands of Ninevites and man's paltry feelings
of pity for an inconsequential gourd that He destroyed to
teach an angry Jonah the meaning of divine love. Jonah
is more than a mere passive child who is taught a lesson
by a divine taskmaster, however; instead of a crystal-clear
portrait of him, the Bible actually offers an enigmatic
picture of Jonah that is darkened by clouds of ambivalence.
Is he, for example, really a proud, selfish man who is
angry because he feels humiliated by God's failure to
| produce the devastation he prophesied? Or conversely,
is he actually a very devout man who is angry when God
does not destroy Nineveh because he hopes to use this
! destroyed city as an example, a warning to Israelites
! that they too must repent and return to God or they also
I 3
] will be destroyed? The reader's decision in this matter
13
will depend on the relative optimism or pessimism of his
cosmic view.
We find this same ambivalence when we examine the
actions of Dr. Paul Proteus, the protagonist and Jonah
figure in Vonnegut*s first novel, Player Plano. Paul, like
the Biblical Jonah, is a very complex character. While he
lectures his wife on the need for human love and compas
sion, he only feels love for the common people when he is
drunk and when he is under the spell cast by the rituals of
the Ghost Shirt Society, a secret organization that plans
to overthrow the technological oligarchy that rules America,
Unlike the Biblical Jonah, Paul does not develop an in
creased understanding of and compassion for mankind. Quite
to the contrary, buffeted by psychological and political
forces beyond his control, it would appear that when he
turns his back in disgust on the people of Ilium he has
become a misanthropist with no faith at all in mankind
or in the power of human love. He is first attracted to
the Ghost Shirt Society by the advice of his friend Fin-
!
| nerty, the novel's Messiah figure and a man who is told
! at one point that if he washes his face he "might do real
j
| well as a Messiah."(83) It is important to note that while
I this group is primarily a political organization, it has
j
| its roots in a form of nineteenth century American Indian j
!
; religious mysticism. Just as innumerable Indians died j
| convinced that their "Ghost Shirts" would not permit them
14
to be harmed, Paul finds his forces defeated even though
he is convinced that he will triumph. The destruction of
Paul's city of Ilium, New York, is not a divine act of
retribution even though it resembles the devastation with
which God threatened Nineveh. Vonnegut points out that
when Paul, Finnerty, and Lasher tour "the strong points
on the frontiers of their Utopia," they find the same
things everywhere: "abandoned posts, mounds of expended
ammunition, and riddled machinery."(291) When young
Proteus observes that the common people who have been
virtually enslaved by machines are in the process of re
assembling the very machines they destroyed, he is disil
lusioned. His disillusionment grows when he realizes amid
the destruction around him that Finnerty, his Messiah
figure, "had got what he wanted from the revolution, . . .
a chance to give a savage blow to a close little society
that made no comfortable place for him."(294) Paul realizes
that Finnerty and he both are "out of touch with reality"
I
(289) because they both have been driven to join the Ghost j
Shirt society not by an idealism that they both believed
j themselves to have, but by an instinct to fulfill their
|
| own psychological needs. Proteus is pessimistic because
j
I he cannot love his fellow man once he discards his illu-
j
j slons and views mankind in the harsh light of reality.
I He realizes that he too is no better than the mobs ravish-
i
| ing Ilium, New York, since the real reason he joined_______
15
the Ghost Shirt Society was to ameliorate his own feelings
of helplessness and Insecurity. He was "so eager to join
a large, confident organization with seeming ansv?ers to
the problems that made him sorry to be alive."(289)
Vonnegut’s other Jonah figures are also perplexed
by the difficulty of loving mankind once they discover
humankind's weaknesses. They appear to try to solve this
problem by first accepting as much truth as they can bear,
and then by completing their cosmic view with what Vonne
gut 's Bokonon in Cat's Cradle labels Foma, or simple un
truths. Such is certainly true in The Sirens of Titan
where Malachi Constant, the protagonist and Jonah figure,
is a "faithful messenger" who is doomed to carry the
message of the pathetic prophet Winston Niles Rumfoord
who, in turn, is manipulated by the merciless Tralfama-
dorian machines. When Constant goes to the home of Rum
foord, a multimillionaire who has crashed into a chrono-
synclastic infundibulum and thus can now see into the
future, he disguises himself as Jonah Rowley in order to
avoid the crowds who surround the Rumfoord estate. We
soon realize the aptness of this Jonah label when Rumfoord
I manipulates Constant into going to Mars in the spaceship
appropriately named The Whale. Malachi undergoes the
trials of a Jonah, what with being trapped in the belly
of the spaceship The Whale, and wreaking havoc upon the
16
world as a small cog in the vast Martian invasion. He
does, however, gain a certain degree of insight. He tells
the Tralfamadorian Salo at one point that he has finally
come to the conclusion that "a purpose of human life, no
matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around
to be loved."(313) The narrator concludes by revealing
that Salo hypnotized Malachi so that he died imagining
that he saw his best friend, Stone Stevenson, who revealed
to him that they both were going to Paradise. When asked
why, Stony replied, "Don't ask me why, old sport, but
somebody up there likes you."(319) Thus Malachi's last
act, albeit under hypnosis and therefore unlike that of
Proteus, is to turn away from reality and indulge himself
with a comforting illusion. While Constant opens the
first chapter with the statement, "I guess somebody up
there likes me,"(7) in his final vision Stony changes
this statement by removing the words "I guess." Since
Malachi now feels only love and compassion for all human
ity, the question of whether or not he is actually going
to Paradise is really irrelevant. Ironically, Rumfoord
created and sold Malachi dolls as an object of scorn, a
symbol of the worst traits of humanity. By being forced
to journey in The Whale and undergo almost unbearable
torments, the passive Malachi, like Jonah, loses all
feelings of selfishness and callousness for his fellow
! man.
17
It Is quite ironic that Rumfoord unwittingly leads
Malachi to the point that he is more saint than sinner,
but a closer examination of The Sirens of Titan reveals
how the complex relationship between these two men brings
this about. At first glance it appears that Vonnegut
portrays Rumfoord as supernatural, almost a deity. After
all, when the millionaire "staged a passion play, he used
nothing but real people in real hells."(329) More impor
tantly, following the terrible destruction of the Martians
Rumfoord reveals to the people of Earth that they should
accept his Church of God the Utterly Indifferent because
he
as head of the religion can work miracles as the
head of no other religion can. What miracles
can I work? I can work the miracle of predicting
with absolute accuracy, the things that the future
will bring. . . . The next time I come to you, I
shall bring you a Bible, revised so as to be
meaningful in modern times.(180-181)
Rumfoord certainly appears to be a deity when he manipu
lates the inhabitants of Earth and Mars because he "wished
to change the world for the better by means of the great
|
I and unforgettable suicide of Mars."(174) On Titan he
resembles a halo-clad deity:
j Rumfoord held his hands tight and his fingers were
| spread. Streaks of pink, violet, and pale green.
Saint Elmo's fire streamed from his finger-tips.
I Short streaks of pale gold fizzed in his hair,
conspiring to give him a tinsel halo.(279)
1
t
!
! —
Vonnegut, in his characteristic ambivalent stance, may-
very well be using the word tinsel to indicate the
dubious nature of Rumfoord*s divinity, for we learn that
the millionaire is merely a small cog in a vast machine
beyond his control. At one point he told his wife that
life for a punctual person is like a roller
coaster. . . . All kinds of things are going
to happen to you.' I can see the whole roller
coaster you're on. And sure— I could give you
a piece of paper that would tell you about every
dip and turn, warn you about every bogeyman that
was going to pop out at you in the tunnels. But
that wouldn't help you any. . . . Because you'd
still have to take the roller-coaster ride, . . .
I don't own it, and I don't say who rides and who
doesn't. I just know what it's shaped like.(57-58)
If his wife's fate is inevitable, it is not clear why
Rumfoord found it necessary during this conversation to
lie to her when she asked about her future relationship
with Malachi. Vonnegut stopped the narrative at the very
moment of this lie to reveal that "this cock-and-bull
story told to Beatrice is one of the few known instances
of Winston Niles Rumfoord's having told a lie."(58) He
may have lied because he had to do so since it was
Beatrice's inevitable destiny to wind up on Titan and
this lie is one link in a chain of events that eventually
jleads her there. It is apparent that Rumfoord feels help-
iless, realizes and is upset that the Tralfamadorians
i
;created and operated the roller coaster he described to
!his wife: "Tralfamadore . . . reached into the Solar
19
System, picked me up, and used me like a handy-dandy
potato peelerj I take a certain pride, no matter how
foolishly mistaken that pride may be, in making my own
decisions for my own reasons."(285)
How do we reconcile Vonnegut's contention that Rum
foord could see into the future with his shock at discover-
t
ing that he was being used? If he could see far enough
into the future to be able to tell his wife that "Some
day on Titan, it will be revealed to you just how ruth
lessly I've been used, and by whom, and to what disgust
ingly paltry ends," why should he be so angry when he
tells Salo, the Tralfamadorian, his shock at learning he
was being used? In his anger, Rumfoord hurls the ul
timate insult at Salo when he calls him a mere machine.
Perhaps this is the key to his outrage. Salo had earlier
revealed to his friend that all Tralfamadorians were ma
chines:
Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were
creatures who weren't anything like machines. i
They weren't dependable. They weren't efficient.
They weren't predictable. They weren't durable.
And these poor creatures were obsessed by the
idea that everything that existed had to have
a purpose, and that some purposes were higher
than others.
These creatures spent most of their time
trying to find out what their purpose was. And
every time they found out what seemed to be a
purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so
low that the creatures were filled with disgust
and shame. And, rather than serve low purpose,
the creatures would make a machine to serve it.
This left the creatures to serve higher purposes.
20
But whenever they found a higher purpose, the
purpose still wasn't high enough. . .. So the
machines were made to serve higher purposes
too. . . . The machines reported in all honesty
that the creatures couldn't really be said to
have any purpose at all.
The creatures thereupon began slaying each
other because they hated purposeless things
above all else.(27^-275)
Rumfoord feels the same degree of disgust and shame when
he realizes that man is also seemingly without a purpose
although he does have a Tralfamadorian purpose. All human
history has been merely a vast billboard upon which the
Tralfamadorians have placed messages for their messenger
Salo. The narrator echoes Rumfoord's feeling of disil
lusionment when he points out in reference to himself that
"An explosion on the sun had separated man and dog. A
universe schemed in mercy would have kept man and dog
together."(295) Rumfoord is doomed to travel forever
in a merciless universe without even his dog for compan
ionship. Where is the mercy of Jonah's God?
Vonnegut never answers this question in The Sirens
of Titan. Ironically, the only merciful act in this novel
is a Tralfamadorian machine's hypnotism of Malachi which
permits the Jonah figure to die contented, not disillu-
1
! sioned like Paul Proteus. Like Finnerty, Rumfoord as a
I
j Messiah figure guides Constant while motivated by selfish
1
i
I reasons, basically a psychological need to change his
I
I
I society. A proud man, he creates the Church of God the
21
Utterly Indifferent because he cannot tolerate the thought
that he does not control his own destiny. Vonnegut, how
ever, shapes him to conform to his conceptions of a Messi
ah figure, a man who enthusiastically works to achieve
God's will. Thus, It is Ironic that Rumfoord eagerly
manipulates Malachi Constant In his efforts to create an
institution that expounds his own views, The Church of
God the Utterly Indifferent, while in reality he is being
manipulated by Tralfamadorians in just the way he finds
intolerable. Like Finnerty, Rumfoord is self-deceived.
Even as he leaves the solar system, he can ignore his
treatment of Malachi, Beatrice, the thousands of people
he killed during the war he started between Mars and
the Earth, and his formation of a Church that preaches
his peculiar, personal doctrines. His last words are,
"I have tried to do good for my native Earth while serv
ing the irresistible wishes of Tralfamadore."(298)
In Cat's Cradle Vonnegut presents a situation far
more complex than in The Sirens of Titan or Player Plano.
There is little doubt that John, the protagonist and
narrator, is a Jonah figure. He hungers for a divine
j message and informs the reader that he should "Call me
| Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me
j John . . . if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah
i still— not because I have been unlucky, but because
22
somebody or something has compelled me to be certain
4
places at certain times, without fail." (13) That some
body is apparently God, for John feels that "God was
running my life and . . . had work for me to do."(l65)
It is interesting to note that in The Sirens of Titan
Vonnegut's conception of Jonah as a proud, spiteful man
quite aptly describes Malachi before his conversion. On
the other hand, John in Cat13 Cradle is young, sensitive,
certainly not proud or spiteful, but he too is helplessly
passive while a God he cannot even see and yet does be
lieve in forces him to accept the doctrines of Bokonon.
John must decide which of two prophets (or Messiah
figures) to accept as the bearer of God's message:
Dr. Felix Hoenikker, an amoral scientist, or Bokonon, a
self-confessed religious mountebank and political oppor
tunist, both poor imitations of Jesus, but the best one
can expect in a world in which scientific, religious, and
political institutions prey on man. Melvin Breed tells
John that Dr. Hoenikker "was practically a Jesus— except
for the Son of God part. . . ."(63) While this scientist
could create miracles, he lacked two characteristics
j of Jesus: love for his fellow man, and a knowledge of
God. When a secretary tells him that God is love, his
answer is shocking: "What is God? What is love?"(53)
Since he lacks love, Hoenikker is a failure both as a
23
husband and as a father. As Breed points out, "how can
you say that a man had a good mind when he couldn't even
bother to do anything when his own wife was dying for
lack of love and understanding? . . . I wonder if he
wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less inter
ested in the living."(63) John concludes in an obviously
unsympathetic aside that the last miracle that this proph
et of science created was ice-nine, the substance that was
to destroy the world.
While it is apparent that John does not accept the
doctrine of pure science advocated by Dr. Felix Hoenikker,
it is exceedingly difficult to determine his feelings
about the Negro Bokonon who consciously set out to fool
everybody into believing that he was a saint. Bokonon
\uiderstood that the only way the inhabitants of San Lorenzo
could be made to tolerate their misery and squalor would
be to give them a religion and a martyr to worship. He
went into hiding and became the symbol of absolute virtue
while McCabe, his partner, remained in the capitol, assumed
the role of dictator, and became the symbol of pure evil.
Bokonon wrote
rPapa' Monzano, he's so very bad,
But without bad 'Papa' I would be so sad;
Because without 'Papa's' badness,
Tell me, if you would,
How could wicked old Bokonon
Ever, ever look good?(90)
24
The roles, both unnatural to the point of being unbearable,
drove both men Insane. Bokonon, In his lunacy, wrote The
Books of Bokonon. Although this false Messiah like Fin-
nerty and Rumfoord in earlier Vonnegut novels does have a
sordid purpose for founding his religion, Vonnegut ambiv
alently suggests that his religion founded upon deception
actually contributes to the mutual love and enjoyment of
life by the natives of San Lorenzo. Bokonon preaches a
doctrine of love, the conception of boko-maru, a ritual
in which two Bokonists unite their souls by rubbing the
soles of their feet together:
We will touch our feet, yes,
Yes, for all we're worth,
And we will love each other, yes,
Yes, like we love our Mother Earth.(132)
In this mode of expressing caritas, Vonnegut may be ambiv
alently expressing doubt as to the effectiveness or the
possibility of human love. There are, for example, over
tones of satire, of the infra dig in the sole/soul pun.
Bokonon is using the most scorned literary device (the
pun) with the highest spiritual content.
Julian Castle, founder of the House of Hope and
Mercy in the Jungle, reveals to John that Boko-maru "works.
I'm grateful for things that work. Not many things do
j
work, you know."(142) Since John was not a Bokononist
at this time, Vonnegut seems to suggest that this Jonah
I
i figure comes to accept Bokonon's doctrines since they do
25
provide a system that "works," a way of reconciling God's
mercy with the destruction of the world through ice-nine.
What makes Cat's Cradle so much more difficult to
understand than Vonnegut's two earlier novels is the in
creasingly more difficult time the Jonah figure has in
distinguishing between illusion and reality, particularly
in his relationship with Bokonon. This relationship in a
way resembles that of Marlow and Kurtz in Conrad's Heart
of Darkness. In Conrad's novel, Marlow hears conflicting
reports about a trader who had gone mad while isolated in
the "heart of darkness" of the Congo. When he finally
meets him, Marlow is amazed at the paradoxes he presents:
Kurtz— Kurtz— that means short in German— don't
it? Well, the name was as true as everything
else in his life— and death. He looked at least
seven feet long.5
Later Marlow realizes that, forced to choose between Kurtz
and the Manager of a station in the Cpngo, he would rather
be devoted to the insane trader than the other "civilized"
men he met in Africa; there is a bond that holds the two
I men together. At the conclusion of Cat's Cradle, after
| ice-nine had destroyed almost all life on Earth, John is
! a Bokononist; he reveals (just as he is about to recount
|
j how ice-nine was invented and used) that "I am a Bokonon-
| 1st now."(13) He remains one despite Bokonon's inconsist-
; encies. While Malachi Constant, an earlier Vonnegut Jonah
1 figure, learns to love all men, John's false Messiah,
L __________________________________ -
26
Bokonon, tells him that love is merely an escape from
reality:
A lover's a liar
To himself he lies.
The truthful are loveless,
Like oysters their eyes(l90)
He is also completely cynical about man's role in the
universe. In his version of Genesis, for example, man
asks God what his purpose in the universe is. God replies,
"I leave it to you to think of one for all this”(215),
and then he leaves man. What Bokonon apparently is postu
lating is a God-less universe that is at least indiffer
ent, and possibly hostile to man. After ice-nine has
killed millions of people, Bokonon writes
Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end,
And our God will take things back that He to us
did lend.
And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God,
Why go right ahead and scold Him. He'll just smile
and nod.(218)
Perhaps the key word here is crazy. The natives who accept
this view of an irrational universe have only their love
i
for one another to sustain themselves; they certainly could|
not expect help from God in overthrowing the corrupt San
Lorenzo government. Although Bokonon is personally skep-
I
i tical about the value or purpose of human life, he writes
i
! that all men are brothers who "fit together/ in the same
: machine."(14) At one point he reveals that "I made this
: sad world/ a paradise."(109) In light of Vonnegut's marked
27
unsympathetic attitude towards machines and their dehuman
izing effect (seen most clearly perhaps in Flayer Plano),
Bokonon's boast that he made all men fit into the same
machine may have negative connotations. Bokonon, of
course, did not make San Lorenzo a paradise by any stretch
of the imagination. John is aware that Bokonon's boast
is a lie because he notices that the people of San Lorenzo
were thin. There wasn't a fat person to be seen.
Every person had teeth missing. Many legs were
bowed or swollen.
No one pair of eyes were clear.
The women's breasts were bare and paltry. . .(115)
In The Books of Bokonon, the prophet declares that
"Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be
i
founded on lies will not understand this book either."(16)
Perhaps Vonnegut is suggesting that all religions are !
j founded on lies, but that nevertheless they may be useful. !
Rumfoord's religion, for example, is also founded on lies,
and it too serves a purpose, a Tralfamadorian purpose.
Just who is Bokononism useful for? When John asks Prank
| Hoenikker what is sacred to the Bokononlsts, the young
! scientist replies that the only thing sacred is Man.(173)
j In a note, Bokonon reveals his own personal version of the
i
I Sermon on the Mount:
j . . .The people around you are almost all of the
| survivors of San Lorenzo. . . . These people made
a captive of the spurious holy man named Bokonon.
| They brought him here, placed him at the center
and commanded him to tell them exactly what God
I Almighty was up to and what they should now do.
28
The mountebank told them that God was surely
trying to kill them, possibly because he was
through with them, and they should have the
good manners to die. This, as you can see,
they did.(220)
Such statements are astoundingly cynical considering that
they are spoken by a Messiah figure who declares that he
has mankind's best interests at heart. After reading this,
Bokonon's chilling message, the reader may ponder how John
can so obediently follow such a doctrine and how Julian
Castle can declare that such a system "works." One must
remember, however, that Vonnegut's attitude toward Castle
is ambivalent. While it is true that John initially de
scribes Castle as a bald, scrawny man who "was a saint,
I think,"(138) yet after listening to what his "saint"
has to say, he remarks that "I knew I wasn't going to
have an easy time with writing a popular article about
him. I was going to have to concentrate on his saintly
deeds and ignore entirely the satanic things he thought
and said."(l40) An example of Castle's misanthropy is
| his statement that "Man is vile, and man makes nothing
' worth making, knows nothing worth knowing."(140) It is
|
| true that Castle built a hospital in the jungle to aid
I the sick, yet when a plague leaves dead natives stacked
| in such piles around the hospital that a bulldozer is
j unable to move the bodies to a common grave, Castle is
i
reported to have gigglingly told his son that "someday
29
this will all be yours."(135) In a sense, this is very
true in light of the effect of ice-nine.
Perhaps Vonnegut provides a clue as to how the
reader is to evaluate the reliability of both Castle and
Bokonon by entitling his novel Cat's Cradle. When Newton
Hoenikker hears Castle mention religion, he responds by
snoring "See the cat? See the cradle?"(150) Newt's
remarks refer to the illusory quality of a cat's cradle
composed of string; it is in reality "nothing but a bunch
of X's between somebody's hands, . .. No damn cat, and
no damn cradle."(137) Vonnegut's title suggests that it
may very well be Impossible to distinguish between appear-
ance and reality, between what Castle and Bokonon say,
what they believe, and what is true. Since John as a
Bokononist believes in the conception of a karass, a group
of humanity who do God's will without ever receiving any
message or proof of God's existence from Him, he no doubt
would dismiss the whole question of the reliability of
i
I
! Castle and Bokonon by pointing out that they are acting
| i
| j
! in the best interests of mankind according to God's long- j
! 1
| !
! range plans despite their apparent misanthropy. This j
1 i
i interpretation would account for the fact that John follows1
j Bokonon even though he knows that Bokononism is composed
j
j of nothing but lies and that Castle's word that such a
j
! doctrine "works" is of debatable value. Such a theory
30
would also explain the actions of both Malachi Constant
and Rumfoord also. Rumfoord could still be a legitimate
prophet despite the fact that he is self-deceived and
that the Tralfamadorians are using him, since they, with
out their knowledge, could be manipulated by God. While
Malachi, as a Jonah figure, constantly bewails the way
Rumfoord manipulates him, he could very well be manipu
lated by God through Rumfoord. In any event, it is quite
clear that Malachi does learn to understand human love
and mercy, perhaps divine mercy and love, also, consider
ing what he has been through as a result of the events !
that took place after his trip in The Whale. John, on
the other hand, does not learn anything about love or
mercy except, perhaps, that it is easier to love one*s
fellow man by adopting the Bokononist philosophy that
fails to distinguish between truth and illusion but values
each for the human happiness it can bring.
i
Vonnegut centers his next novel, God Bless You, j
| Mr. Rosewater, on a search for the human and divine love |
I John cannot find. For the first time in a Vonnegut novel j
| we find a Jonah figure, Eliot Rosewater, and a self- |
i
; confessed Messiah figure, Kilgore Trout, both consciously
' working together toward the same goal. Eliot feels that
| "I am operating without instructions. But from somewhere
I something is trying to tell me where to go, what to do
31
there, and why to do It. . . . But there is this feeling
that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and pre
posterous posing that is . . . life in New York."(46)
When he is in Rosewater County, the place Eliot believes
God wants him to be, a citizen tells him he fears that
the young millionaire will leave and return to New York.
Eliot replies
If I were to somehow wind up in New York, and
start living the highest of all possible lives
again, you know what would happen to me? The
minute I got near a navigable body of water, a
bolt of lightning would knock me into the water,
a whale would swallow me up, and the whale would
swim down to the Gulf of Wabash, up the White,
up Lost River, up Rosewater into Rosewater Creek.
And that whale would jump from the creek into the
Rosewater Inter-State Ship Canal, and it would
swim down the canal to this city, and spit me
out in the Parthenon. And there I'd be.(l7l)
In a way, Rosewater County is his Nineveh, the place he
apparently feels where God wants him to be. Eliot is a
Jonah figure who feels that God wants him to love those
Americans who are "useless and unattractive."(47) The
message he carries results in destruction to his clients
| and, like Jonah, he learns something about human love and
! mercy.
In order to understand Eliot's complex character,
i it is helpful first to briefly consider his guide or
j
j prophet, Kilgore Trout. When Rosewater sees a picture
! of Trout, a science fiction writer, he declares him to be
i
; "society's greatest prophet."(28) He is "an old man with
32
a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging
Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted
to imprisonment for life."(134) Trout himself acknowl
edges his resemblance to Jesus when he tells Rosewater
that he shaved off his beard when he applied for a job
at a stamp redemption center because "Think of the sacrilege
of a Jesus figure redeeming stamps."(212) The very name
Kilgore Trout possibly has religious significance. Kil
gore suggests the killing and gore that result from living
in a world where there is not enough love and human com
passion. Trout is, of course, the name of a fish; the fish
was a symbol by which early Christians identified each
other. It was a symbol of a religion that was based upon
the need for human as well as divine love. During Eliot's
period of insanity, he urged his father to summon Trout
since this prophet and science fiction writer could explain
the meaning of everything the young altruist had done
j
while in Rosewater County. Trout's explanation makes
i
sense. He points out that Eliot dealt with a very diffi- j
cult social problem: "How to love people who have no j
| use."(210) The reason he idolized firemen is because
I they were virtually the "only examples of enthusiastic
j
i unselfishness to be seen in the land."(211) According
i
I
i to Trout, the main lesson "Eliot learned is that people
i
I
| can use all the uncritical love they can get. . . . Thanks
33
to the example of Eliot Rosewater, millions of people may
learn to love and help whomever they see."(213)
Unlike Rumfoord and Bokonon, It Is apparent that
Trout firmly believes In his religion of love. Both
Rumfoord and Bokonon create utterly indifferent Gods,
one in reaction to his discovery that man is a mere pawn
of the Tralfamadorians, the other in an act of political
expediency. On the other hand, Vonnegut's narrator re
veals that although Senator Rosewater "admired Trout as
a rascal who could rationalize anything," the prophet
had in reality "never tried to tell anything but the
truth."(212)
It is not difficult to find a reason why Rosewater
adopted this saintly, completely altruistic life that
Trout advocated. Perhaps Eliot did so because of the
shock he felt when he realized he had killed three un
armed German firemen during World War II. After the war
Eliot drifted aimlessly, vaguely discontented with his
duties as head of a large foundation. His attitude of
| fascination and horror towards a book about the fire
| bombing of Dresden may indicate that this book reawakened
! his memory of the German firemen he had slain and caused
him to seek a way to abolish all human suffering and
| perhaps also ameliorate some of his own guilt feelings.
: The fact Eliot's father never gives him the love he so
34
desperately needs also contributes to his Illness. When
Eliot is obviously ill, the Senator is not concerned with
his son's health, but he is concerned with the likelihood
of his son producing an offspring because he does not want
the family fortune to pass into other hands. In a sense,
the Senator thinks of his son as a mere instrument with
which to further his own cupidity. When Eliot was a
child, his father never provided him with a home, a
sanctuary. At one point Senator Rosewater reveals that
he used to take his young son to a fire station: "When
ever we went out there, I told him it was home, but I
never thought he would be dumb enough to believe it."(76)
The reasons why Eliot becomes an altruist do not,
however, explain his bizarre activities in Rosewater
county. Vonnegut's portrait of Rosewater is ambivalent;
it is difficult to determine whether one is to interpret
him as a mere harmless lunatic whose deeds the reader
would discount, or as a slightly disorientated saint who
j is insane "north-by-north-west," in much the same way as j
I Hamlet, to whom Eliot is likened more than once. It is
1
quite clear that Eliot's intentions are laudable, but by
: putting signs labeled "Don't kill yourself. Call the
| Rosewater Foundation" in every telephone booth in Rose-
! water county and then by offering potential suicides money
i
I
| for not killing themselves, he i3 not curing anyone. On
35
the other hand, by his actions he is hurting someone he
loves very dearly, his wife Sylvia. When Senator Rose-
water has a fight with his son, he tells him that his
actions have deeply "ruined the life and health of a woman
whose only fault had been to love him."(l83) Eliot reacts
by freezing "as stiff as any corpse."(183) Apparently the
truth is so painful to him that he must repress it by es
caping from reality in exactly the same manner he used
when he learned that he had killed three unarmed German
firemen. j
Indeed, there are many times that Eliot is unable j
to distinguish between fantasy and reality. When, for
example, "he argued with his father or bankers or his
lawyers," he was "almost equally mistaken who his clients j
1
were. He would argue that the people he was trying to
help were the same sorts of people who, in generations
past, had cleared the forests, drained the swamps, . . .
people whose sons formed the backbone of the infantry
in times of war."(69) Vonnegut reveals that "The people
! who leaned on Eliot regularly were a lot weaker— and
| dumber too. When it came time for their sons to go into
I the Armed Forces, for instance, the sons were generally
| rejected as being mentally, morally, and physically unde-
! sirable."(70) Yet, a few days later Eliot "had no illu-
: sions about the people to whom he was devoting his life.
36
'And firebugs too, no doubt.1 Eliot apparently was well
aware that the Moody family had a long history of not only
twinning, but arson."(108) It would appear that Eliot is
6
schizophrenic. When Mary Moody, a client, calls him on
the telephone he reserves for fire calls, he snarls "God
damn you for calling this number! You should go to jail
and rotJ Stupid sons of bitches who make personal calls
on a fire department line should go to hell and fire for
ever] "(172) When a sobbing Mary called back a few moments
later on Eliot's other phone, he asked her, "What on earth
is the trouble dear?' He honestly did not know. He was
! ready to kill whoever had made her cry."(172)
While one could point to many more examples illus-
1
trating Eliot's mental illness, one could also point to
many examples of his saint-like behavior. Eliot actually j
j
baptizes babies according to his religion of love:
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in
the summer and cold in the winter. It's round
and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies,
you've got about a hundred years here. There's |
only one rule that I know of, babies— : !
God damn it, you've got to be kind.(110) !
< !
j In order to understand just how laudable such sentiments j
! are, especially to Vonnegut, one must be aware of his i
j attitude towards any institution, religious, scientific,
! or political, that dehumanizes man and thus prevents his
j realizing a potential achievable only with freedom and
: with love for one's fellow man. In God Bless You, I
37
Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut provides an example of how a
religious institution attempts to warp a human being when
he presents an oath that a "Christian" orphanage requires
its students to take once a week before Sunday supper:
I do solemnly swear that I will respect the
sacred private property of others, and that
I will be content with whatever station in
life God Almighty may assign me to. I will
be grateful to those who employ me, and will
never complain about wages and hours, but will
ask myself instead, 'What more can I do for my
employer, my republic, and my God?1 I under
stand that I have not been placed on Earth to
be happy. I am here to be tested. If I am
to pass the test, I must be always unselfish,
always sober, always truthful, always chaste
in mind, body, and deed, and always respectful
to those to whom God has, in his wisdom, placed
above me. If I pass the test, I will go to
joy everlasting in Heaven when I die. If I
fail, I shall roast in hell while the Devil
laughs and Jesus weeps. (Rosewater, 154-155)
The respect orphans are supposed to feel for private prop
erty and for those above t am in station may well remind
the reader of the fact that the island of San Lorenzo at
one time was run by Castle Sugar Incorporated and the
j Catholic Church, a coalition of political and religious
! i
; institutions which Vonnegut appears to find detestable. j
j (88) The Catholic Church is not the only religious insti- !
; i
! tution Vonnegut condemns. It is quite apparent from this
j "Christian" oath that he is attacking the Protestant ethic
; that presumes the wealthy are God's chosen people while
the poor are, in a sense, guilty of sin or natural
| depravity. Thus, Eliot even when most insane is far
38
more humane than the majority of Christian institutions
according to Vonnegut. Perhaps the harm he does not only
to his own family but also to the residents of Rosewater
county, can be explained by the fact that he is, after
all, a Jonah figure just as Paul Proteus, Malachi Con
stant, and John are. The three firemen Eliot killed and
the drunkards, prostitutes, and potential suicides he does
not really help all enable him to come to a clearer under
standing of just what human love, compassion, and mercy
are. After spending over a year in a sanitarium in order
to recover from his mental illness, Eliot asks his father
to bring Kilgore Trout to see him. It would appear that
Eliot had regained his sanity at this point since he lost
all memory during the period he was under treatment. One
day when Trout is present, Eliot suddenly finds that the
"memory of all that had happened in the blackness came
crashing back--the fight. . . . And with that mighty
inward crash of memories came the idea he had had for
settling everything instantly, beautifully, and fairly."
(213)
Assuming that Eliot is sane at this point, it would
appear that, to carry the Jonah theme in the novel a step
further, he is now able to understand divine as well as
human love and mercy. Eliot assumes the role of God and
!issues a decree that echoes Genesis. After learning that
39
fifty-seven mothers have falsely accused him of being the
father of their children, Eliot orders all the children
to be adopted, given the name of Rosewater, and told that
they should "be fruitful and multiply."(217) What Eliot
does, in effect, is to take it upon himself to actively
perform a divine act of mercy and love in an effort to
make Trout's guides for a heaven on Earth a reality. The
very fact he echoes Genesis in this final proclamation
may well indicate that Eliot is taking the first step
toward creating a new, and hopefully better world.
While such an interpretation is possible, one must
also keep in mind the ambivalent tone of this last passage
in the novel. When Eliot smiles to his father and Mc
Allister, it is with a "Madonna's smile,"(217) and when
he issues his Instructions concerning the fifty-seven
children, he raises "his tennis racket as though it were
a magic wand."(217) Vonnegut, whether intentionally or
I
not, has painted a very absurd picture. The saint-like |
| Eliot is so ludicrous that he evokes laughter rather than j
: i
; !
i devotion. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to
! determine whether he is sane at this point.
If one examines Vonnegut's attitude towards religion
I as reflected in Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Cat's
I
j Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, it will soon
; become apparent to him that there is a definite
40
progression from a situation in which a Jonah figure faces
a hostile world with only an ineffectual, indifferent, or
even hostile Messiah figure to help him, to a situation
in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in which the Jonah figure
--------------------------------
has the full support and encouragement of the Messiah
figure. Trout tells Senator Rosewater that "Thanks to
the example of Eliot Rosewater, millions upon millions of
people may learn to love and help whomever they see."(213)
Yet, even though this self-confessed Jesus-figure expresses!
his full support for Eliot, he does not follow the young
altruist's example. Instead, he shaves his beard and goes
to work in a stamp redemption center. The difference be
tween the two now becomes clear. While Eliot lives by
Trout's precepts and becomes an altruist, Trout cannot
I !
j stand the social pressures the Senator Rosewaters, McAl- j
listers, and even Musharis apply, and so he accepts a job j
within the corrupt society and receives something in
return for the gifts he dispenses. Once again Vonnegut
I
| is ambiguous, but at this point it appears that Trout is j
| speaking for the author and that his words are more impor- J
i j
! tant than his actions.
I j
j Vonnegut appears to believe that whether or not man |
; lives in a Godless universe is really inconsequential.
i What man must do is to seek to create a better world in
;
l
! which human love and compassion are paramount. While Eliot
41
Rosewater may seem quite mad to a world that admires
Senator Rosewater and the upper class Pisquontuit society,
if all men acted with his complete altruism then the so
cial conditions that create prostitutes, drunkards, and
suicides would be eliminated. On the other hand, if all
men acted like Eliot the human species would become ex
tinct; his zealous sublimation of his sexual drives into
a "Utopic Vision" as his wife's psychiatrist calls it,
renders him impotent. There is great difficulty in eval
uating the effects of Eliot's actions, because he is
clearly identified at times as a Jonah figure and as
such, he is associated with misfortune just as Malachi
and John are, but also with a message of warning and hope
from God; all three protagonists live to see their worlds
destroyed either figuratively or literally.
Once again the reader must come to grips with Vonne-
gut's characteristic ambivalence. Eliot's final message
heralding a new, hopefully better world, would seem to
indicate that he will fare much better than Paul Proteus,
! Malachi Constant, or John. All three can only wait for
j
j their dea£h, or in John's case, the end of the entire
i world. Yet, Eliot may very well have gained a pyrrhic
! victory; he may have gained the ability to love all
I
I mankind at the cost of his sanity. Kilgore Trout,
| Eliot's Messiah figure, would appear to be speaking
42
for Vonnegut when he lectures Senator Rosewater on the
need for human love and compassion; the fact that the
science fiction writer must now work In a stamp redemp
tion store may very well Indicate that a twentieth
century prophet must work from within the society to
reform it, since to openly flaunt its values as Eliot
does invites pressures such that they can even destroy
one's sanity.
i
43
FOOTNOTES
1
A letter from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to myself, dated
May 20, 1969.
2
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset, and David Brown,
A Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Old and
toew Testaments (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan
Publishing House, n.d.), p. 683.
3
Robert Jamieson, A Commentary, p. 686.
h
There is an obvious reference here to Moby-Dick.
There may well be a parallel between the blue-white of
the whale and that of ice-nine. Perhaps we have here
the same inscrutable mystery at the heart of the universe.
^Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness," in The Portable,
ed. Morton D. Zabel (New York: The Viking Press, 1963),
P. 576.
^See chapter three for a detailed discussion of
Eliot's schizophrenia.
CHAPTER II
VONNEGUT AND SCIENCE
I
Working for General Electric at their Schenectady
plant for three years seems to have had a profound effect
on Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He wrote Player Plano because he
felt compelled to write a novel about people and machines
"in which machines frequently got the best of it, as ma-
1
chines will." A close examination of Vonnegut's novels
and short stories reveals his consistently humanistic
position; he is apparently opposed to any scientific or
technological institution that dehumanizes man by reducing
him -to a mere number. Because of Vonnegut's characteris
tic ambivalence, however, he is much too complex a novel
ist for one to simply label with an adjective or phrase
and then smugly dismiss. In order to understand his view
of science and scientific institutions expressed in his
fiction, it is necessary first to analyze his attitude
toward science fiction and scientists and then to consider
a question he asks along with many science fiction writers:
is one to blame scientific institutions for their seemingly
irresponsible creation of weapons capable of awesome de-
I
I struction, or since institutions by definition are composed
44
45
of men, is the human animal*s apparent moral irresponsi
bility a result of his unwillingness or inability to face
the harsh realities of a world made unpleasant almost to
the point of being unbearable by certain inherent flaws
in his own nature?
Many critics misread Player Plano, Vonnegut*s first
novel, and labeled him a science fiction writer. As a
result of this hasty and invalid categorization, the
academic community refused to take his work seriously
for a number of years since it considered science fiction
2
to be "the very lowest grade of fiction." In an article
written for The New York Times Book Review, Vonnegut did
express an admiration for editors of anthologies and pub
lishers of science fiction since these men "are uniformly
brilliant and sensitive and well informed. They are among
the precious few Americans in whose minds C. P. Snow's
two cultures sweetly intertwine." They feel "it is their
duty to encourage any writer no matter how frightful who
i has guts enough to include technology in the human equa-
!
! tion." Since the tone of this passage suggests that it
may very well be sarcastic and not entirely serious, it
! is exceedingly difficult to determine whether it is the
| publishers who consider Bcience fiction writers to be
| "frightful," or whether Vonnegut himself feels that way.
j On the other hand when Eliot Rosewater, the protagonist
46
of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, stands up at a confer
ence of science fiction writers and delivers a drunken
speech, it is quite apparent that the young millionaire
is serious:
You're the only ones with guts enough to really
care about the future, who really notice what
machines do to us, what wars do to us, what big
simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunder
standings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes
do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to
agonize over time and distance without limit,
over mysteries that will never die, over the
fact that we are right now deciding whether the
space voyage for the next billion years or so
is going to be heaven or hell.(27)
Eliot "admitted later on that science fiction writers
couldn't write for sour apples, but . . . it didn't
matter . . . they were poets just the same, since they
were most sensitive to important changes than anybody who
was writing well."(27-28) What is important to note here
is not only Vonnegut's apparent admiration for the courage j
and sensitivity of science fiction writers, but also his j
I
suggestion that they really do not write that well. It j
may well be that he feels that he is not a science fiction
' writer even though he raises many of the same questions j
! ;
j they do because he is more concerned with the novelistic i
I
; techniques and subtleties of irony, point of view, and
i imagery, and less concerned with mere gadgetry and gim-
!
j mickry than most science fiction writers.
i
47
Vonnegut's primary concern Is not the machine, but
man, and the effect upon man of the machine, as well as
of applied science (technology). He seems to feel that
both tend to dehumanize and demoralize man to the point
that he becomes a mere automaton, a number rather than a
face. This dehumanization tends to make the dedicated
scientists and technicians in Vonnegut's novels amoral.
What is perhaps even more frightening is the effect such
an all-consuming interest has upon these men's children.
Almost all are warped by their parents into the type of
Grotesques Sherwood Anderson described so aptly in Wines-
5
burg, Ohio.
One of Vonnegut's most detailed studies of the de
humanizing effect of science is found in his first novel,
Player Plano. In his foreword to the novel he points
out that man's freedom depends "largely upon the skill
and imagination and course" of his managers; he expresses
the fervent hope that a time may never come when this is
not so. The novel is about such a time in the future when
! such imagination is denigrated, when without heart or soul
I
j America is run by machines which determine men's desti-
J nies strictly upon the basis of their "Achievement and
j Aptitude Profile" computer cards. The men who program
i these cards are just as cold and inhuman as the machines
I they operate. One of the leading bureaucrats in this
48
programmed society is Paul Proteus, the protagonist of
Player Piano, and a man who feels dissatisfied because
machines have made humans almost obsolete. Paul tries
desperately to reassert the value of human love and com
passion in a world that lauds the ruthless, machine-like
single-minded precision of his rival, Shepherd. It soon
becomes apparent that Paul finds it necessary periodically
to visit Thomas Edison's old laboratory in order to re
ceive a "vote of confidence from the past . . . where the
past admitted how humble and shoddy it had been, where
one could look from the old to the new and see that man-
6
kind really had come a long way." Young Proteus loses
any feelings of reassurance such a sight should give him
when he observes the efficient, utterly inhumane fashion
in which his plant's mechanical sweeper disposes of his
cat. It is important to note that Vonnegut is careful to
depict the cat's natural antipathy for the machine. When
|
| the machine mangled the cat and spewed it high in the air,
; the animal "dropped to the asphalt— dead and smoking, but
i
| outside."(12) It is only by death that the cat is able
i
| to escape the scientific community's electronically
i
| guarded compound.
I
! In a way, Paul faces the same problem as the cat.
i
| Unable to feel happy living in a machine-dominated so-
; ciety, he feels compelled to decide whether he wants to
49
leave it and how he can do so. Paul finally decides to
leave because his job "wasn't getting anybody anywhere.
Because it was getting everybody nowhere."(247) This is
especially painful to him since "The main business of
humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, . . .
not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and
systems."(273) Paul occasionally thinks about an experi
ment Flnnerty, Shepherd, and he had conducted when they
had been younger and more eager to contribute to the mush
rooming American technological advances. They had managed
to immortalize the skilled workman Rudy Herz on computer
tape:
. . . this little loop in the box before Paul,
here was Rudy as Rudy had been to his machine
that afternoon— Rudy, the tumer-on of power,
the setter of speeds, the controller of the
cutting tool. This was the essence of Rudy as
far as the machine was concerned, as far as the
economy was concerned, . . . The tape was the
essence distilled from the small, polite man
with the big hands and black fingernails; from
the man who thought the world could be saved if
everyone read a verse from the Bible every
night; . . .(9-10)
! Obviously what the young scientists were overlooking was
j the uniqueness of Rudy as a human being; no machine could
I
j quite capture that quality.
The pride Paul takes in this experiment with Rudy
i is indicative of the danger he faces if he remains in such
| a society. Such pride in his technological accomplish-
i ments could, in time, deaden his feelings of human
compassion and turn him Into another Berringer, the dull
young scientist who nauseated Paul with his irrational
enthusiasm for a simplistic allegory that extolled the
glories of science. By a skillful use of metaphors,
Vonnegut seems to indicate that Paul and his wife, Anita,
border dangerously close in their marital relations to
that of two automatons:
Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat,
even to the subtlest conventions. If her
approach was disturbingly rational, systematic,
she was thorough enough to turn out a credible
counterfeit of warmth. Paul could only suspect
that her feelings were shallow. . . (16;
The key words here are mechanics, rational, and counter
feit. It is quite apparent that Paul thinks of Anita as
calculating, precise and cold as a machine. Anita has
similar feelings about Paul. She sobs and declares to
him that
I wasn’t any damn use to you at all!. . .
All you need is something stainless steel,
shaped like a woman, covered with sponge
rubber, and heated to body temperature. . . .
I'm sick of being treated like a machine!(216)
Indeed, when Paul is sleeping with a prostitute and she
mumbles something, "he muttered an automatic reply, 'And
I love you, Anita!" (my italics for automatic). Perhaps
the Reverend John Lasher best sums up the predicament of
Paul and Anita when he points out to Paul that
51
The machines are to practically everybody what
the white men were to the Indians. People are
finding that, because of the way the machines
are changing the world, more and more of their
old values don't apply anymore. People have no
choice but to become second-rate machines them
selves, or wards of the machines.(251)
Paul can either accept his age of science as a para
dise and be content to live as an automaton or leave such
a society. At first he dreams of his own personal utopia,
an antiquated farm that is isolated from the rest of the
world. Unfortunately, when Paul actually works there he
discovers that the "hand of Nature" was "coarse and slug
gish, hot and wet and smelly. The charming little cottage
he'd taken as a symbol of the good life of a farmer was
as irrelevant as a statue of Venus at the gate of a
sewage-disposal plant."(224) Paul chooses the course of
rebellion, the Ghost Shirt Society, that Lasher and Fin-
nerty offer him. Young Proteus' decision to battle the
machines and technicians of a technological oligarchy is
more than simply a struggle between man and machine. It
is apparent that Vonnegut, for reasons that will soon
become clear, assumes an ambivalent stance to deal with
the complex psychological forces at work within man. He
i
| provides adequate character motivation to explain the very
| significant dichotomy between the real world, the world
I
| Paul conceived would result when mankind had routed the
; dehumanizing forces of science and technology, and the
52
actual state of affairs that results from the Ghost Shirt
Society's takeover of Ilium, New York.
When Paul sees men driven by hysteria and frenzy
racing through the streets destroying all machines indis
criminately, he moans that he "never thought it would be
like this. . . . It had all the characteristics of a
lynching."(286) And in a sense a lynching is all Paul
has to look forward to as the novel concludes. It Is
quite clear when he surrenders that he will be killed.
In light of this fact, how are we to read Lasher's state
ment that even though they failed to destroy the tech-
nology-orientated society, the important thing is that
they registered their protest and took the "one chance in
a thousand." Here Vonnegut appears to be purposefully
ambivalent. Is one to accept Lasher's word and conclude
that Paul's struggle is not in vain, but is a noble
struggle that will pave the way for later rebels to
alter the entire American social structure, or is his
decision to leave his prestigious position merely a
i
| childish attempt to rebel against the memory of his
famous father by attempting to destroy his entire so-
i ciety, which perhaps merely represented a symbol of the
i
| aloof parental authority figure he resents?
i
Ironically Vonnegut supplies electronic proof of
| Paul's feelings of hatred for his father. At his trial
53
for treason, Paul's prosecutor explains the results of a
gigantic lie detector by declaring that the young admin
istrator resented his father whom he "subconsciously would
have liked to destroy."(274) He wears old clothes when
going across the river as a calculated insult to his
father's memory, who "never went anywhere without a
Homburg and a double-breasted suit."(72) At one point
Paul angrily lashes out that as for his father, "the
editor of Who1s Who knows about as much as I do. The guy
war- 'hardly ever home. '"(72) Indeed, such a statement
could have been made by Malachi Constant or Eliot Rose-
water, protagonists in other Vonnegut novels. Malachi's
father is too busy running a business empire to see his
son while Senator Rosewater is preoccupied with his role
as a United States Senator. In all three cases, the
fathers' tendency to show more concern for the welfare
of an institution than love for their children results
In sibling insecurity. The insecurity Paul feels as a
result of this parental neglect is apparent in the very
way In which he sleeps; he curls up with his comforter
l
1
pulled over his face and his body "curled in the dark
j muffled womb he made of his bed every night."(53) Perhaps
{ the answers to the question of Paul's motives come when he
| leaves his technological, almost completely automated,
i
! society, crosses the bridge, and comes to part of Ilium,
54
New York, where the uneducated people live. While sleep
ing there with a prostitute, Paul awakes from a dream to
see "his father glowering at him from the foot of the
bed."(224) It is quite apparent that this vision of his
father represents his guilt feelings resulting from leav
ing and thus repudiating all that the elder Proteus worked
to build. If Dr. Proteus was In the forefront of the
technological advances that resulted in an automated
America in which man became a slave to machines, then
his son is an excellent example of what happens to the
children of such singly dedicated men. While at first
glance it may appear that Vonnegut is dealing less with
science and technology than with the familial human crisis
of a management-technological society, he clearly uses the
upper class Proteus family and the lower class Hagstrohm
family to show the all-encompassing psychological blight
of such a technologically orientated society. The allur
ing prospect of scientific and technological progress
drew the elder Proteus from his family and made him a
stranger to Paul. The young administrator out of a sense
of duty followed In the footsteps of such a famous father.
But he also felt resentment. When Paul responded to his
prosecutor, he was honest enough to recognize this feel-
| ing. He pointed out that "even if there weren't this
!
1 unpleasant business between me and the memory of my
55
father, I think I would believe in the arguments against
the lawlessness of the machines."(274-275)
Unfortunately such a declaration does not save Paul.
His ultimate choice is between living as an automaton
in a dehumanized society or rebelling and dying a seemingly
meaningless death. Vonnegut seems to be implying with
such a pessimistic conclusion that man must act now to
prevent science and technology from usurping his role in
society and not wait until it is too late. In a way, the
tragic flaw that could bring about such a disaster may
well be ingrained in the American character. Vonnegut
points out that one of his characters, a man named Bud
Calhoun, loved to create gadgets and had a mentality that
was "Peculiarly American since the nation had been born—
the restless, erratic, insight and imagination of a gadg-
4
eteer." Perhaps this is the germ of an idea that later
becomes paramount in Vonnegut’s fiction, the question of
man's possibly tragic flaw— that quality within him that
relentlessly moves him in the direction of self annihila
tion. By tracing Vonnegut's treatment of science in his
subsequent work it is possible to see this conception
develop hand in hand with an increasingly pessimistic
view of mankind.
In Cat's Cradle Vonnegut moves from a description
i
! of the nightmarish automated America of Paul Proteus to a
i
| prediction of what the consequences will be if scientists
56
are permitted to disregard all human considerations and
work toward the creation of an ultimate weapon. To create
a doomsday weapon as horrible as ice-nine a scientist
would have to be totally indifferent to the welfare of
his fellow humans. Dr. Felix Hoenikker's own son pointed
out that his father "just wasn't interested in people."(22)
He was not even interested in people enough to attend his
own son's high school commencement, and so with the same
missionary zeal for science as Hoenikker, Dr. Asa Breed
substituted for this famous scientist and "said science
was going to discover the basic secret of life someday."
(30) A bartender later reveals to John, the narrator of
Cat's Cradle, that science finally had discovered that the
basic secret of life was protein. Such a simple resolu
tion to the complexities of life seems to infuriate Vonne
gut as much as the reduction of Rudy Herz to a stack of
computer cards by Finnerty, Shepherd, and Paul Proteus;
in both cases proud scientists have essentially denied
the uniqueness of man.
Such a callous attitude of course goes hand in hand
with a total disregard for individual men and a tendency
to consider men as merely numbers rather than faces, to
use W. H. Auden's terminology. A fine example of such an
attitude is Breed's reaction to an old stockade where men
I
; once held public executions. He cannot understand the
57
mentality of one criminal who was hanged in 1782 for kill
ing twenty-six people. When John declares in answer that
"The mind reels"(34) he is ridiculing the callousness and
detachment of Breed, Hoenikker, and all the other scien
tists who worked on the atomic bomb which killed thousands
of people and yet feel absolutely no sense of guilt.
Perhaps Vonnegut's attitude towards science and anti
humanism is represented most clearly when he has Hoenikker
answer a young colleague who observed the successful test
ing of the first atomic bomb and declared "Science has
now known sin."(25) Hoenikker responded by asking quite
seriously, "What is sin?"(25)
In answer to this very question, Vonnegut intro
duces a secretary with the very significant name of
Miss Paust. While the legendary Faust was an overreacher
who felt that it was worth the sacrifice of his immortal
soul if he could obtain knowledge, this young woman tells
John that she disagrees with Dr. Hoenikker's preoccupa
tion with gaining new scientific knowledge because she
has trouble "understanding how truth, all by itself,
could be enough for a person."(52) Her solution to the
complexities of a modern world torn by doubts and dissent
is to trust completely in the adage that "God is love."
Hoenikker's response, "What is God? What is love?"(53)
indicates the complete lack of real communication or
58
understanding between those people who rely upon their
faith in God to solve the problems of war and corruption
which demand human solutions and the scientific community
which is totally divorced from any concern for the spir
itual and moral problems of human existence. Vonnegut
seems to feel that when a scientist creates a new product
he must assume the responsibility of dealing with the
moral problems such an awesome weapon presents.
By ignoring these spiritual and moral problems,
scientists like Hoenikker and Breed assume the roles of
automatons in much the same way as the scientists and
managers in the Player Piano setting of nightmarish
Ilium, New York. When Prank Hoenikker offers John the
Presidency of San Lorenzo in return for the promise that
the young technician can retain his position of Minister
of Science and Industry, John realizes that Prank "wanted
more than anything else, to do what his father had done:
to receive honors and creature comforts while escaping
human responsibilities. He was accomplishing this by
going down a spiritual oubliette."(184) Perhaps the
person who best sums up Vonnegut's feelings concerning
!
| the callous indifference of scientists toward their fellow
|
j humans is the last person one would expect to feel human
j compassion, the former camp physician at a Nazi prison
I camp, Dr. Schlicter von Koenigswald. The doctor
i
59
confesses to John that he is "a very bad scientist" and
"will do anything to make a human being feel better, even
if it's unscientific. No scientist worthy of the name
could say such a thing."(180)
Dr. Hoenikker, a scientist no doubt worthy of the
name in von Koenigswald's estimation, and more concerned
with developing the doomsday device ice-nine than with
raising normal children, sired three "Grotesques," humans
distorted emotionally and even physically by social,
political, and parental forces. With a single-minded
devotion to his own interests, Felix Hoenikker removed
his daughter Angela from high school in her sophomore
year in order to serve as his housekeeper. As Marvin
Breed points out, "All she had going for her was the
clarinet she'd played in the Ilium High School band.
Nobody ever asked her out. She didn't have any friends,
and the old man never thought to give her any money to go
anywhere. . . . She'd lock herself in her room and she'd
play records, and she'd play along with the records on her j
clarinet."(66) Denied the normal experiences of a normal !
i
young girl, Angela desperately sought happiness. She did
j not feel any qualms when handsome Harrison C. Connors
i
I asked her to marry him in return for her share of her
i
j father's death dealing ice-nine. It is quite apparent
j
! that Angela did not feel any moral doubts about such an
60
action because her father and mentor was amoral. The
perfect sincerity with which he once asked a fellow sci
entist, "What is Sin?" should convince all but the most
skeptical critic of the validity of such an hypothesis.
Prank, Felix Hoenikker's middle child, presents
another, albeit far more complicated example of how the
famous Nobel prize winning scientist's amorality and com
plete devotion to science distorted his children into
Grotesques. Jack, the owner of Jack's Hobby Shop where
Prank worked as a young man, explained that the boy "didn't
have any home life" but accepted the shop as his real
home. Unable to find any love at home from his detached,
disinterested father, Prank no doubt sought love from an
older woman, one who would ameliorate his feelings of
inferiority and rejection. He began having sexual rela
tions with the wife of his good friend, Jack. Evidently
this proved unsatisfactory because Prank soon began to
seek a newer, better world to live in. One solution to
his inability to adjust to the real world is to create a
"fantastic little country built on plywood, an island as
perfectly rectangular as a township in Kansas."(68) Such
a world, unfortunately, was too small for the boy to lose
himself in. Perhaps as a defense mechanism that would
enable him to avoid any more pain, Prank began to pattern
himself after his father; only by being as coldly detached
6l
and indifferent to the rest of humanity was it possible to
live without feeling any pain. He recognizes the simi
larities between himself and his father, and at one point
Prank declares that he .has "a lot of very good ideas" like
his father, but he is no good at facing the public and
neither was his father.(162) Just as it is impossible for
Felix Hoenikker's wife to communicate with her husband,
John, the narrator of Cat's Cradle, finds it impossible to
communicate with the scientist's son Prank. After ice-
nine had wreaked havoc on the world, John notices that
Prank is very attentively observing a group of ants whom
he had trapped in a glass prison. The young scientist
gave John "a peevish lecture on all the things that people
could learn from ants,"(226) When John finds him unable
to explain who had taught the ants how to survive in a
world ravished by ice-nine, he offers the suggestion that
God had done so. Prank's reaction was simply to "grow
madder and madder."(227) Walled in within his world of
| science and unable to find love or accept the solace
religion offered, Prank represents the automaton that
Paul Proteus would have become if he had not fled from
i
Ilium and all that its complex technological society
represented. Yet, ironically they both end up destroyed
; by technology.
! The youngest Hoenikker child, Newt, is perhaps an
I
i even sadder case than Prank. He was psychically wounded
at a very early age by his disinterested father. For
some unexplainable reason, perhaps instinct, Felix decided
one day to play with his son. When he approached Newt in
order to show him a "cat's cradle," however, the child
screamed in horror at what he saw. Looking at his father
at close range, Newt observed that his father's "pores
looked as big as craters on the moon. His ears and nos
trils were stuffed with hair. Cigar smoke made him smell
like the mouth of Hell." He was "the ugliest thing Newt
ever had seen."(21) Significantly, he points out that he
still dreams about this incidentj obviously this disquiet
ing episode had a profound effect upon Newt. His father
increased his son's discomfort, deepening this wound by
sending the midget-sized Newt to a "special school for
grotesque children."(228) The very last thing Newt needed
was to be made to feel different, but this idea probably
never occurred to Felix Hoenikker who was so wrapped up
in science that anything else in life was of secondary
importance.
Felix Hoenikker's almost obsessive interest in
inventing ice-nine and Paul Proteus' inevitable fall
from his position of power both illustrate the pessimism
to be found in Player Plano and Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut
seems to suggest that it is as if man had some fatal flaw
I
I in his very nature that ultimately must bring about his
63
self-destruction. As pointed out earlier, Paul noted the
incredible ingenuity of Bud Calhoun and speculated that
all Americans seemed to have this interest in gadgetry.
It was the logical growth of such an interest that re
sulted in the monolithic technologically orientated gov
ernment that made life for Paul Proteus seem meaningless.
What men had finally achieved in his day was the liber
ation of humans from the need to work, but at the cost of
personal dignity. Paul feels no sense of accomplishment,
and even suspects at one point that Bud is contemplating
an invention that will replace him. This self-destructive
tendency in man manifests itself in Player Plano in the
form of man's automating himself out of existence with
the help of a giant electronic computer named Epicac.
In Cat's Cradle, Felix Hoenikker's interest in ice-
nine results in the destruction of all but a handful of
men and one middle-aged woman. What is especially chill
ing about this novel is the way in which these doomed
people act. The young scientist Frank Hoenikker discovers
one day how ants managed to survive the holocaust of
ice-nine:
As far as I know, they were the only insects that
did survive, and they did it by forming with their
bodies tight balls around grains of ice-nine.
They would generate enough heat at the center
to kill half their number and produce one bead
of dew. The dew was drinkable. The corpses
were edible.(226)
64
Prank's response to such a sight is "a peevish lecture on
all the things that people could learn from ants."(226)
What people can apparently learn from ants is that
the ends, in this case the survival of half the popula
tion of a colony of ants, justified the means, in this
case the sacrifice of the other half of the colony. It
is important to remember at this point that in return for
a brief illusion of happiness, Felix Hoenikker's three
children— Angela, Prank, and Newt— each contribute
one-third of the ice-nine crystal that results in the de
struction of virtually the entire population of the Earth.
Prank chooses the glory and power of the position of
Minister of Science of San Lorenzo, while Angela chooses
a handsome husband and Newt chooses a beautiful Russian
midget. In each case Vonnegut Is careful to distinguish
the difference between reality and the mere appearance or
illusion of happiness that each Hoenikker offspring so
desperately desires. Prank does not really command the
respect in San Lorenzo that he so earnestly seeks. When
he tries to make John like him, the narrator points out
| that "The effect was dismaying. Prank meant to inspire
camaraderie, but his head looked . . . like a bizarre
little owl, blinded by light and perched on a tall white
post."(160) When Newt, with the same degree of earnest
ness as his brother, gives his portion of ice-nine to a
65
Russian midget in return for her assurances of love and
devotion, he too is doomed to disappointment. In reality
she is a Russian spy who, at forty-two, not only does not
love him, but also is old enough to be his mother. When
Newt reveals to John that his sister Angela gave her por
tion to her husband in return for marrying her and that
the two were not happily married, he responds to John's
astonishment by asking, "See the cat? See the cradle?"
(148)
Newt's allusion is to the game of "cat's cradle"
that his father had attempted to play with him one day.
The significance of such a game is that it is based en
tirely upon the marked distinction between what is real
and what is illusion:
One of the oldest games there is, cat's cradle.
Even Eskimos know it.
You don't say.
For maybe a hundred thousand years or more,
grownups have been waving tangles of string in
their children's faces.
Um.
Newt remained curled in the chair. He held
out his dainty hands as though a cat's cradle
were strung between them. No wonder kids grow
up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch
of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids
look and look and look at all those X's . . .
And?
No damn cat, and no damn cradle.(137)
Perhaps this game is symbolic of a malady, almost
a tragic flaw, that Vonnegut apparently feels mankind is
suffering from, the disease man appears to be born with
66
infects his sight and causes him to prefer to view the
world through lenses that offer a pleasant albeit dark
ened world of illusion rather than the harsh, glaring
world of reality. Vonnegut explores this problem not
only in Cat's Cradle, but also in many of his other novels
and short stories. In Player Plano, for example, the sci
entists and technicians ignore the loss of dignity of the
non-scientists and instead quote statistics to prove how
much conditions have improved since automation became
widespread. Finnerty and his Ghost Shirt Society members
are just as guilty of ignoring the disturbing facts con
cerning the physical strength and security of the auto
mated American social structure while believing that such
a secret society would grow in strength as its rebellion
progressed.
In Player Piano, as in many of Vonnegut's other
novels, the main computer that directs the programs that
increasingly dehumanize men is named Epicac. In keeping
with Vonnegut's theme of the ambivalence, the difficulty
in distinguishing between appearance and reality, the
computer, although it appears to be indifferent to men,
may well be integrally linked to the fate of mankind since
its very name (Epic-a-c) suggests a concern with the epic
of man in the period in history after the death of Christ.
While early epic heroes such as Aeneas and Ulysses were
men who felt a strong sense of personal dignity and were
67
quite willing to respond to an insult with great physical
strength or guile, the men in Vonnegut's fiction are weak
and insecure. While a Ulysses, secure in knowledge of his
role in the universe, was capable of challenging the very
Gods, Paul Proteus is so insecure that he must assume the
womb position in order to obtain a good night's sleep.
While the idea of an anti-hero is not new, his
presence in Vonnegut's fiction may be linked to the de
cidedly down-hill epic journey men have taken since
Christ's death. Both Player Plano and Cat's Cradle end
on very pessimistic notes. In one, man has utilized his
knowledge of science and technology to become a mere
automaton, while in the other he has yoked his scientific
curiosity to his technical virtuosity and as a result has
virtually wiped himself off the Earth.
II
In many of Vonnegut's short stories as in his novels,
one finds the same concern with the dehumanizing, demoral-
l
| izing, and destructive effect upon the individual of essen-
i
j tially amoral scientific institutions and the same preoc-
I
j cupation with the problem of man's tendency to prefer to
i
j accept a world of illusion rather than to face innumerable
j
I harsh realities, including his own proclivity for self-
j
i destruction. Cat's Cradle is concerned with the destruc-
tive potential of scientists who do not have any Interest
68
in the ways in which their inventions are used: "Report
on the Barnhouse Effect" conversely describes the pres
sures applied to a scientist who courageously chooses to
face real problems rather than to accept comforting il
lusions that military men offer him. He dares to question
the morality of using an invention with potentially enor
mous beneficial humanitarian effect as a strictly destruc
tive military weapon. When Professor Barnhouse first dis
covers the power of dynamopsychism, he looks upon it only
as a toy, a way to amuse himself by causing dice to come
up with the combinations he requests. Gradually through
practice he perfects this power to the point that he can
destroy individuals, houses, even mountains. While he
would have preferred to use this power to run generators
"where there isn't any coal or water power," and irrigate
i
deserts, the United States Army feels that this priceless
gift should be used as a weapon since "Eternal vigilance
is price of freedom."(165)
Barnhouse turns to his graduate research assistant
| for advice. He repeatedly asks him such questions as
"Think we should have dropped the atomic bomb on Hiro-
! shima?" and "Think every new piece of scientific informa
tion is a good thing for humanity?"(l6l) One should note
; that when Paul Proteus is asked to tell a lie during his
|
; trial so that his lie detector can be calibrated, he
replies that "Every new piece of scientific knowledge is
a good thing for humanity. "(297) The tliming point for
Barnhouse comes when military officials request him to
prove how powerful his gift is by destroying a number of
missiles and ships during "Operation Barnhouse." The sci
entist reacts by declaring that he finds the idea "child
ish and insanely expensive."(164) While the military
officials are exulting over Barnhouse's successful destruc
tion of the weapons, he quietly makes his escape. The
scientist, from his secluded sanctuary, spent the next
few years destroying all military stockpiles despite the
outraged cries of "stouthearted patriots."(168) Vonnegut
concludes his story by revealing that the narrator, Barn-
house' s former research assistant, is planning to flee
and assume his former mentor's anti-war activities so
that the elder scientist's death will not result in the
resumption of hostilities.
"Report on the Barnhouse Effect" provides a rather
unsatisfactory answer to the question of how man is to
control his scientific and technological advances. Barn
house is a God-like figure who when asked by the military
establishment to do what he feels is morally wrong per
sonally guarantees the safety of the world by destroying
all weapons; such a creature, a scientist who values
human life over research in the pure sciences, does not
70
appear in Cat's Cradle or Player Plano to help Paul Pro
teus or John. If Vonnegut means to imply that the world
is in such dire conditions that no mere mortal, but only
a man with superhuman powers like Barnhouse, can solve its
problems, then his cosmic view is a pessimistic one indeed.
He seems to modify this view, however, in his short story
"EPICAC."
In Player Plano, Epicac is the giant computer that
helps to govern men in an automated American society. Its
decisions result in the elimination of Bud Calhoun*s job
classification and his subsequent relegation to the rank
of virtually a non person. Epicac is the heart of such
a society, and as pointed out earlier, may represent the
progressive decline of man, the epic of man since Christ's
death. It is little wonder in Player Plano that when the
Shah of Bratspuhr, religious potentate of millions, visits
the computer center, he addresses the machine directly,
not bothering to deal with the humans who are obviously
merely middle men. In "EPICAC" Vonnegut shifts the empha
sis from the omnipotence of Epicac to the relationship
between it and its human operator.
I
j Epicac was designed to be a "super computing machine
| that ^who7 could plot the course of a rocket from anywhere
! on earth to the second button from the bottom of Joe
! Stalin's overcoat."(269) For some reason the computer
!
[ appeared to be sluggish, almost reluctant to do its job. _
71
One day its operator playfully fed it a simple code that
would enable it to converse with him. The result was a
dialogue of sorts. The technician described his girl
friend Pat Kilgallen in such attractive terms that the
computer quite logically fell in love with her. It wrote
beautiful love poems for the girl, which the human shame
lessly pirated as his own. When the machine questioned
the justice of its operator’s contention that "Machines
are built to serve men"(272), the technician replied that
men are superior since they are composed of protoplasm
which is indestructible. He also pointed out that "Women
can’t love machines" because of fate which is "Predeter
mined and inevitable destiny." Epicac responded by de
stroying itself and leaving a final suicide note. In it,
the machine declared that it didn’t "want to be a machine
and think about war." It wanted to "be made out of proto
plasm and last forever" so Pat would love it. The human
victor in this struggle between man and machine declared
| that "Epicac loved and lost, but he bore me no grudge. I
shall always remember him as a sportsman and a gentleman,
j Before he departed this vale of tears, he did all he could
I to make our marriage a happy one. Epicac gave me anniver-
| sary poems for Pat— enough for 500 years."(275)
j "EPICAC" is perhaps the only Vonnegut tale in which
I
i a man manages to successfully outwit a machine, and even
72
here there is a certain degree of ambivalence. The com
puter professes the very values that Vonnegut himself
seems to hold sacred, a dislike for war and a strong feel
ing for the importance of love. The human technician
manages to outwit Epicac by deceit, something which it
obviously was not programmed to handle. The computer oper
ator manages to redeem himself in his readers’ estimation
by candidly confessing to Epicac and then admitting that
he is ashamed of his actions. The story contains an addi
tional twist that sets it off from Vonnegut*s other tales.
Rather than illustrating the dehumanizing effect that ma
chines have on men, "EPICAC" illustrates the humanizing
effect man can have on machines.
Unlike the bemused tone of Epicac's operator, "Wel
come to the Monkey House," the title story of Vonnegut’s
newest collection of short stories, and "Tomorrow and
Tomorrow and Tomorrow," its concluding selection, both
demonstrate on a more somber note how the irresponsibility
of the scientific community of the American government,
and the individual and the resulting lack of respect for
j man’s individuality and personal dignity can create an
|
| intolerable situation. In "Welcome to the Monkey House"
I
| Vonnegut describes an America of the future in which a
| scientist has invented an ethical birth control pill which
| removes all pleasure from the sexual act, and the govern- j
i
| ment requires all men and women to take them. The
73
narrator points out that
The pills were ethical because they didn't inter
fere with a person's ability to reproduce, which
would have been unnatural and immoral. All the
pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of
sex.
Thus did science and morals go hand in hand.(28)
The hero who works to alter this situation is not a
Barnhouse with superhuman power, but a very short, fuhny
looking man named Billy the Poet. He spends his time
seducing Suicide Parlor Hostesses at gun point and then
forcing them to abandon their ethical birth control pills.
While the story appeared in Playboy, just the place for a
hero like Billy, one should note the young poet's repu
diation of the scientist who invented the pills and his
anger at a government that forces its citizens to use them.
Billy describes how a scientist brought his family to a
zoo and was shocked because a monkey was playing "with his
private parts." He went home and invented an ethical
birth control pill that would make monkeys insensible
! below their waists. Vonnegut describes the results of
!
| this scientist's actions quite succinctly:
j
i When he got through with the monkey house, you
couldn't tell it from the Michigan Supreme Court.
Meanwhile there was this crisis going on in the
United Nations. The people who understood sci-
| ence said people had to quit reproducing so much,
and the people who understood morals said society
j would collapse if people used sex for nothing
but pleasure.(32)
74
Billy's avowed purpose is to "restore a certain amount of
innocent pleasure to the world which is poorer in pleasure
than it needs to be."(45)
While this story is not as pessimistic as many of
Vonnegut's novels, it certainly is not optimistic. Once
again Vonnegut is ambivalent. The government obviously
felt that something had to be done to prevent Americans
from overpopulating themselves out of existence, especi
ally since it is quite clear that her citizens have a
strong desire to live. Yet, does this fact make the gov
ernment and the scientific community villains for market
ing ethical birth control pills and requiring citizens
to take it and Billy the Poet a hero for rebelling against
such an edict and trying to spread his philosophy of
pleasure through sexual intercourse? Since the story was
written for Playboy, it is easy to assume that the sympathy
of the reader will probably be with Billy the Poet rather
than with J. Edgar Nation, the scientist who invented the
pill or with the government that required it. Vonnegut's
tone is ambivalent, however, particularly in the story's
final lines. After Billy rapes Nancy and removes her
| ethical birth control pills, he leaves her with a poem
and a bottle of birth control pills with a label on it.
! The poem, Elizabeth Barret Browning's "How do I love thee?
i
| Let me count the ways," is ironic since Billy has shown
75
no love for Nancy, only a certain degree of missionary
zeal to convert,her to a "nothinghead." The label is
even more ironic: "Welcome to the Monkey House." Is
one to assume that the actions of the "nothing heads"
are similar to those of the monkeys that so offended J,
Edgar Nation? Can one believe Billy's declaration that
the legislation for ethical birth control pills was
forced upon the people by misguided moralists who did not
realize that the world can afford sex, but what "it can't
afford anymore is reproduction."(44) Although Vonnegut
raises these questions, he does not answer them directly;
he does, however, suggest by his very ambivalence that
man is stymied by his contradictory ideals. These ideals
ironically prevent him from correcting these obvious
faults in his cultural assumptions.
In "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" Vonnegut
once again deals with the major themes of "Welcome to the
Monkey House"— the problem of overpopulation and the irre
sponsibility of the scientific community which constantly j
i
produces new inventions but fails to deal with the moral
|
j problems each new product brings. These sentiments are
j
well expressed by a college president who was quoted by
a newscaster as saying that "most of the world's ills can
be traced to the fact that Man's knowledge of himself has
j not kept pace with his knowledge of the physical world."
| (290)___________________________________________________
76
The Schwartz clan, all eleven couples, live in a
four-roora apartment in New York, in 2158 A.D. Medical
science has invented anti-gerasone which prevents humans
from aging; it has unfortunately ignored the question of
how the ever-increasing population could live together in
crampled conditions without any privacy. The resulting
loss of human dignity is perhaps best illustrated in the
indignant complaint of the newest members of the Schwartz
clan, a great grand-nephew Mortimer, and his new wife who
have arrived for a honeymoon. Mortimer advises anybody
who thinks he has it rough to "try honeymooning in the
hall for a real kick."(296)
The conclusion of the story finds Vonnegut once
again seemingly refusing to provide a workable solution
to the problems he obviously recognizes. Grandfather
Schwartz gains suitable revenge on his clan for what he
feels is an attempt to dilute his anti-gerasone, by dis
appearing after leaving a will which requests that his
; apartment and fortune be divided equally among all his
| family. As a result of the subsequent riot among the
j Schwartzes, the police arrest all of them and place them
1
| in jail cells. The tale ends with the contentment of Lou
| and Emerald Schwartz who are amazed how wonderful it is
I
: to have a jail cell of their own. A turnkey admonishes
! them to "pipe down . . . or I'll toss the whole kit and
77
caboodle of you right out. And first one who lets on to
anybody outside how good jail is ain't never getting back
in!"(296)
Since obviously all humans can not crowd themselves
into their nations' prisons, the Schwartses' solution is
impractical. The story concludes with a television ad
vertisement for new super anti-gerasone which will make
all senior citizens look years younger. Gramps Schwartz
writes his name on a postcard and sends for a free sample.
With Schwartz looking like a man in his early thirties,
apparently there is no longer any reason for him to con
template suicide. Vonnegut is astute enough to realize,
however, that the desire for longevity is a very human
wish, and not merely a goal of the scientific community.
What science has achieved in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and
Tomorrow" is the fulfillment of one of man's most basic
desires, his will to live. Ironically, the price man
must pay for longevity is the loss of his dignity and
privacy, without which long life becomes a mere prison
! sentence rather than a blessing. This perhaps is too
t
high a price to pay as Vonnegut implies by the bleak
I
j despair one associates with Macbeth's "Tomorrow and To-
| morrow and Tomorrow," the story's title. Science is not
j
j the villain who caused such a situation to develop, for
I
| scientific institutions are man-made and mere reflections
i of man's ever-increasing knowledge and curiosity. Man is
- !
78
the real villain, the builder of Ilium, New York, and the
creator of ice-nine, ethical birth control pills, and
anti-gerasone. Vonnegut may well be implying that man
is somehow fatally flawed. If Prank Hoenikker learns
anything at all from the ants that survived ice-nine,
it is that although man might survive even that holo
caust by clinging at all costs to his will to live, he
will eventually reach a state of development where he
will once again attempt annihilation of the entire human
race. That time he might be successful.
The answer to man's dilemma, however, is not to
seek a separate peace. There is no place for Paul Proteus
or John to flee. On the other hand, It is impractical
for man to await the arrival of a superman figure such
as Professor Barnhouse to save him. What man can do,
Vonnegut suggests in his fiction, is to realize his own
limitations. He should consciously shun anything no
j matter how appealing if it will dehumanize him. Sci-
| entists as men, rather than machines, should be morally
! responsible for their inventions. Any invention that
i
I would treat men as mere numbers rather than as faces or
! that would at all limit their personal dignity and privacy
i
; should be discarded since the human animal's proclivity
!
; for destruction is enhanced when he is able to think of
! his carnage in terms of abstract casualty lists rather
79
than In terras of flesh and blood people he has destroyed.
The alternative to such measures is either total annihi
lation or the world of "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and To
morrow" in which life is "a tale/ told by an Idiot, full
of sound and fury,/ signifying nothing."
80
FOOTNOTES
1Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Science Fiction," New York
Times Book Review, Sec. 7 (September 5, 1965), 2.
2
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Welcome to the Monkey House
(New York: Delacorte Press, 1968), p. xiv.
^Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Science Fiction," 2.
^Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Science Fiction," 2.
^One must note, however, that there is a significant
difference between the Grotesques of Anderson and those
of Vonnegut. Vonnegut*s fiction is not as realistic and
his characters are consequently two dimensional. He is
concerned with the forces shaping and distorting his
characters while Anderson often seems preoccupied with
the psyches of his Winesburg residents.
CHAPTER III
KURT VONNEGUT * S VIEW OP MAN—
THE SCHIZOPHRENIC SOCIAL
ANIMAL
While many critics have labeled Kurt Vonnegut a
mere science fiction writer and subsequently ignored him,
he is much more properly categorized as a social critic.
In each of his novels the protagonist is confronted with
what appears to be an unjust society, one which oppresses
and, worse yet, dehumanizes him. A close study of Paul
Proteus, Malachi Constant, Howard Campbell, Jr., John,
and Eliot Rosewater reveals that when each confronts
such a society with its seemingly incurable ills, he
begins to ponder what man's responsibility is to himself
and to mankind under these conditions. Can an obviously
oppressive, intolerable society be improved, or does it
merely reflect the sad state of man himself? The trauma
and soul searching these men endure while considering
! these fundamental questions apparently drives them to a
i
| state of schizophrenia. Paradoxically, while schizo-
j phrenic each protagonist develops a new personality that
| is temporarily better able to cope with the problems he
!
! faces. Ultimately, however, each must consider whether
| or not his assumption of a new identity is merely an
! 81
82
attempt to escape the answers to the questions he poses
about the very nature of society and man himself. A study
of these characters reveals a cosmic pessimism In Vonne
gut 's fiction that forces each to move further away from
the painful realities he faces and to seek solace in illu
sions, comforting fantasies.
Paul Proteus, the protagonist of Player Plano, should
be a very contented man. He appears to be well on his way
to the top of America's scientific oligarchy, accompanied
by his wife Anita, who appears to love him very much. But
appearance is not necessarily reality. Part of Paul takes
great pleasure in his work; to him the humming of his ma
chines is "exciting music," and results in the temporary
amelioration of his "vague anxieties" as he gives "him
self over to it."(10) His depression results from a
vague feeling that he would have "been more content in
another period of history."(4) Paul is vaguely aware that
such a system eliminates "the foundation of self-respect."
(151) When he learns that his friend Pinnerty has quit
j and thus abrogated his role in such a system, Paul feels
| "enchantment in what Pinnerty had done, a thing almost as
j inconceivable and beautifully simple as suicide. ..."
| (54) Such a sentiment is an illustration of Paul's
| schizophrenia, a manifestation of the deep schism within
I him. One part of the young scientist wants to remain
83
within society, while the other urges him to quit as
Pinnerty did.
It is quite apparent in his characterization of Paul
that Vonnegut is well aware of the basic psychology text
book definition of schizophrenia. Most psychiatrists
believe that schizophrenia results from a person's ina
bility to "adapt to the social demands confronting" him
and to his "own drives" and thereby results in a lack of
"a harmonious self-concept and ego ideal with clear goals
and motivations.Proteus' schizophrenia is progressive,
"the delusions may not be fixed, and the patient may at
i
times be in doubt as to ideas of reference or as to the
hostility of his environment; later he becomes convinced
2
that his delusions are real facts." While Paul's initial
reaction to Finnerty's quitting is "enchantment," he does
not really understand why. His association of this act
with suicide in a favorable context may well indicate
that the death of his own social identity may not be an j
unpleasant thought to him even at this early stage of his j
I
neurosis. Paul must learn to understand himself much ;
better before he can understand the forces within him.
I When his wife reveals that Kroner feels that he is not
; really sure about following the path of his father and
assuming a greater position of power and responsibility j
in Pittsburgh, Paul replies "he's got more insight into
84
me than I do. . . . I'm not sure. He apparently knew
that before I did."(15) When Pinnerty comes to visit
Paul, he studies him and then says "I thought you'd be
pretty close to the edge by now. That's why I came here."
(35) Actually his intuition is correct; Paul is close to
resigning his position, but he does not realize this yet
because he does not understand the depth of his own dis
satisfaction. Vonnegut provides another example of Paul's
divided loyalties when he describes the young scientist's
desire to drive across the river occasionally to that
part of Ilium that engineers never visited, the area
where the people displaced by machines live. He removes
his scientist's coat for an old leather coat, thus sym
bolically rejecting the values of his own society. He
tells Pinnerty that a psychiatrist would label such ac
tions as "a swat at my old man, who never went anywhere |
without a Homburg and a double-breasted suit."(72) While
i such a judgment may very well be valid, Paul's father may
i j
also symbolize the very technological oligarchy he managed . j
' Obviously Paul cannot move from the values of his society j
I I
I to those of another as easily as he can change coats. i
j
i When he sees members of the Reconstruction and Reclama-
| i
! tion Corps, "his skin began to itch as though he had sud-
i denly become unclean."(21) Later his feeling would change.
He would have a
85
feeling of newness— the feeling of fresh, strong
identity growing within him. It was a generalized
love— particularly for the little people, the
common people. God bless them. All his life
they had been hidden from him by the walls of
his ivory tower. Now . . . he had come among
them, shared their hopes and disappointments,
understood their yearnings, discovered the beauty
of their simplicities and their earthy values.
This was real, this side of the river, and Paul
loved these common people, and wanted to help,
and let them know they were loved and understood,
and he wanted them to love him too.(88)
While Paul feels love for the useless people much the same
way Eliot Rosewater does in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,
Vonnegut's presentation in both cases is ambiguous.
Eliot may very well be insane when he professes such
feeling, a problem we will deal with later. Paul is very
drunk when he describes his feelings of love for the com
mon people. In light of the irresponsible actions of the
members of the Ghost Shirt Society during the abortive
revolution, Vonnegut may be suggesting that Paul not only
I
does not understand the struggle within himself, but also
is unable to distinguish between appearance and reality j
on either side of the river; he does not understand either i
j i
1 the common people or the engineers. Proteus's knowledge
j of himself does grow, however. When he reaches the point
j that he no longer wants that part of his social self
! identified with management to exist, he watches it die:
j "He felt oddly disembodied, an insubstantial wisp, nothing-
: ness, a man who declined to be any more."(117-118). Paul
86
is quite capable of such a change since his name Proteus
3
"suggests the ability to assume different forms." After
such an irreversible act, Paul searches for a society he
can accept, one that does not put unreasonable demands
upon man and consequently dehumanize him. Considering
his inability to distinguish between appearance and real
ity, it is understandable that he slides into "the fantasy
of the new, good life ahead of him. Somewhere, outside
of society, there was a place for a man— a man and wife—
to live heartily and blamelessly, naturally, by hands and
wits."(126) What Paul seeks is a separate peace, a farm
on which he can live and ignore the demands of an unjust
society. Unfortunately for him, however, the farm proves
to be inadequate. When he attempts to grasp the "hand of
nature," he soon discovers it is "coarse and sluggish,
hot and wet and smelly."(224) Once again Paul's inability
to distinguish between fantasy and reality is apparent.
When Paul finds a separate peace unsatisfactory, he
continues to search for an answer to the ills of American
society. He believes he finds it when he discovers the
Ghost Shirt Society, a revolutionary group that likens
man's situation to that of the Indian when the white men
began to impose their values, since "Indian ways in a
white man's world were irrelevant."(250)
87
. . . the Ghost Dance religion,' said Lasher, 'was
the last, desperate defense of the old values.
Messiahs appeared, the way they're always ready
to appear, to preach magic that would restore
the game, the old values, the old reasons for
being. There were new rituals and new songs
that were supposed to get rid of the white men
by magic. And some the more warlike tribes that
still had a little physical fight left in them
added a flourish of their own— the Ghost Shirt.'. . .
They were going to ride into battle one last
time, . . . in magic shirts that white men's
bullets couldn't get through.'(250)
Lasher finds the analogy valid since "The machines are to
practically everybody what the white men were to the
Indians. People are finding that because of the way the
machines are changing the world, more and more of their
old values don't apply anymore."(27*0 Paul notices that
a half-wit, Luke Lubbock, is wearing a Ghost Shirt. When
he asks Pinnerty if Luke really believes that it is bullet
proof, Pinnerty replies that "It's the symbolism of the
thing."(250) The fact that It is Luke who is wearing the
shirt should remind Paul of the time when he saw the cos
tumed Luke leading the parade of a secret fraternal order.
When he stepped out of one costume In order to change into
another, Paul noticed that Luke looked "ragged and drab,
and none-too-clean. And Luke had somehow shrunk and sad
dened and was knobbed and scarred and scrawny. He was
subdued now, talking not at all, the meeting no one's
eyes."(82) Desperately Luke began to put on his other
costume, and suddenly he was "growing again, getting his
88
color back" as he dressed. When he finished, he "was
talkative again— important and strong."(82) Lasher is
much better able to distinguish between appearance and
reality than Paul. He tells the young scientist that
Luke's actions are "Harmless magic: good, old-fashioned
bunkum."(82)
Paul wants to believe that the Ghost Shirt Society
is a positive force for changing an America dominated by
machines. When the organization has been destroyed, Vonne-j
gut reveals that the conspirators Paul is "the one most j
i
out of touch, having had little time for reflection, havingj
been so eager to join a large, confident organization with
seeming answers to the problems that had made him sorry
to be alive."(289) He finds it simpler to transfer from
one organization to another and hence is not really ready
i
to change his life. Lasher tells the young scientist that
he knew all the time that the movement would fail, hence
he "didn't let himself lose touch with reality."(289)
Paul feels a moral responsibility to search for a solution
to the problems posed by an unjust society, but he chooses
unwisely because of his own insecurity. When Paul is
questioned by the government at his trial, he is encased
in electronic gadgets to the point that he resembles a
4
machine more than a human being. In answer to this
dehumanization, Paul declares that "The main business of
89
humanity is to do a good job of being human beings . . .
not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and
systems."(273) One of the telling ironies in Player Piano
is that Paul nobly declares his humanity at the very moment
that a completely rational, unemotional, heartless govern
ment seems to dehumanize him. Yet, immediately afterwards
he joins an organization that is based completely upon
emotion, the kind of irrationality revealed in the inten
tional destruction of sewage plants and food facilities
by people who hate any and all machines and fail to use
their rational powers of discrimination.
As Player Plano concludes, Paul Proteus observes
that the common people who took part in the revolution
against machines are now seeking to reassemble the very
machines that made them obsolete. Paul would like to
drink to "a better world,1 1 but when he thinks of "the
people of Ilium, already eager to recreate the same old
nightmare," he merely says, "To the record."(293) He is
unable to improve or even change his society, but at last
he is able to distinguish between appearance and reality.
Ironically, he realizes that he has misinterpreted Fin-
nerty's motives in quitting society, one of the determin
ing factors in his rejection of his own socially acceptable
identity and adoption of his identity as a rebel. He
understands now that Finnerty had "got what he wanted
90
from the revolution, . . . a chance to give a savage blow
to a close little society that made no comfortable place
for him."(320) Weak and helpless as he is, and destined
to be executed by his government, Paul is at last able to
face reality and perceive that his society is ill because
of its citizens; a revolution will not change this situ
ation since the blight seen in man's institutions merely
reflects his own condition, the blight within himself.
This is indeed a very pessimistic view.
In his second novel, The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut
once again utilizes a protagonist who, like Paul Proteus,
apparently has everything necessary to be happy, and yet
feels dissatisfied with his society. Despite the fact
that Malachi Constant is "worth more than the states of
Utah and North Dakota combined,"(251) he is unhappy and
pines "for just one thing— a single message that was suf
ficiently dignified and important to merit his carrying it
humbly between two points."(17) In a sense, what Malachi
desires is some sign that he is living in a universe in
which man has a purpose; the irony of this situation is
that all his suffering does have a purpose— the transmis
sion of the Tralfamadorian word for "greetings."
Just as Paul develops schizophrenic symptoms when
confronted by what he considers an unjust society, Winston
Niles Rumfoord fragments Malachi»s personality and thus
91
temporarily eliminates his feelings of dissatisfaction.
Rumfoord creates the dual personalities of Unk before
and after his "operation." After Unk has had his mind
"cleaned out" of all previous thoughts, he is able to
read a letter he had written earlier without any suspicion
that he had written it:
Before turning to the signature, Unk tried to
imagine the character and appearance of the writer.
The writer was such a lover of truth that he would
expose himself to any amount of pain in order to
add to his store of truth. He was superior to
Unk and Stony. He watched and recorded their
subversive activities with love, amusement,
and detachment.(132)
Until he reads the letter, Unk feels content after his
operation; he knows what his purpose in life is: the
destruction of Earth. The question of why Unk is dis
satisfied with his life on Mars before his operation is
crucial to an understanding of Vonnegut1s conception of
man in society. Before his operation Unk views Martian
society as essentially democratic with all men in the
Martian army equal. However, like Paul Proteus, Unk
perceives that mere appearance is not reality. When he
discovers that there are certain hidden leaders, an
invisible government in a sense, he realizes that he is
being used. By taking away Unk's power to govern his own
destiny Rumfoord makes him feel as if he no longer has any
human dignity. The irony of this is that Rumfoord himself
92
discovers that he is being used by the Tralfamadorians for
very paltry reasons.
When Unk discovers that during the period that his
mind was "cleaned out" he killed his best friend Stony
Stevenson, he deals with the question of his moral respon
sibility for his actions. After weeping, he has a
"thorough understanding now of his own worthlessness,
and a bitter sympathy for anyone who might find It good
to handle him roughly."(260) No longer split into the
Malachi and Unk Identities, Constant is faced with the
same choice that confronted Paul Proteus: should he try
for a separate peace? While his companion Boaz is happy
remaining with his pet harmoniums on Mercury far away
from the pressures of human society, Malachi finds that
he wants to live with people, but cannot bear to return
to Earth. His wife perhaps best expresses his sentiments
when she sarcastically bids adieu to "all you clean and
wise and lovely people." Man is not clean, sweet, or
lovely, but Malachi learns to love him at a distance
and realizes that the "purpose of life, no matter who
is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be
loved."(312) In a sense, he escapes from the blight of
Earth society and finds a separate peace on Titan by
centering his life on a smaller societal unit— the family.
Isolated from the rest of mankind, Malachi and his wife
93
gradually learn to love one another and In doing so
perhaps assume the roles of Adam and Eve. While at first
glance it would appear that Vonnegut is calling for the
renewed viability of the family unit as a corrective to
the dehumanizing larger societal unit, such is not the
case. A "nation of two" is in reality merely an escape,
an illusion albeit very comforting. It does not answer
the question of whether or not the sad state of man's
institutions reflects his own internal situation. We
see further evidence of Malachi's retreat from reality in
the very way he dies, for he dies comforted by the illusion
that he is joining his "best and only friend, Stony Steven
son," the very friend he unwittingly murdered earlier.
While both Paul Proteus and Malachi Constant are
fragmented by the pressure of confronting societies they
cannot accept, their reactions vary. With a schizophrenic
schism in his personality, Paul turns his back on his
technologically, almost anti-human society and with a
new identity soars to a higher level of self-awareness
only to return to that same society greatly disillusioned.
When he surrenders to the government he knows he will be
executed for his role in the abortive revolution, but he
does so because he at last realizes that he cannot change
the status quo for the better because mankind is inher
ently weak and deserves its fate. Malachi, on the other
94
hand, also achieves a greater degree of self-awareness
while his personality is fragmented, but he cannot bring
himself to accept the harsh realities Proteus perceives.
He dies having learned a great deal about himself, but
still clinging to his illusions, apparently unable to
distinguish between appearance and reality, truth and
illusion.
In his next novel, Mother Night, not only does
Vonnegut once again speculate on the very nature of so
ciety and mankind, but he also expands his exploration
of the difficulties in distinguishing between appearance
and reality to include the self-deception inherent in
schizophrenia. He ponders the moral dilemma of an Amer
ican living in Germany during World War II. Howard W.
Campbell, Jr., would just as soon ignore the entire con
flagration and find happiness through a separate peace.
He and his wife Helga create a nation of two, a world in
which a man and a woman attempt "to be endlessly fasci
nating to each other, body and soul, sufficient reasons
for living, though there might not be a single other
satisfaction to be had."(97) Thus, we once again see the
motif of the familial unit with the interesting fusion of
family and society in the phrase "nation of two." Howard
fails in his attempt to fashion this "nation of two" just
as Paul Proteus failed in Player Piano. Both cannot
95
escape the reality of their society. When the two of
them are separated, they talk "like the patriot lunatics"
all around them. But, according to Campbell, this does
not count. "Only one thing counted, The nation of two."
(3^) When Helga dies and their nation of two ceases to
be, Campbell becomes "what I am today and what I always
will be, a stateless person."(34) Since Campbell is
labeled a "stateless person," Vonnegut once again is
equating the family with natural society. Perhaps he is
questioning the vitality of both. It may well be that he
sees the defectiveness of both, but sees no better alter
native. Both may be necessary evils. This would explain
why man cannot ultimately escape society by fleeing to
his "nation of two." Since Howard is "stateless," it
becomes clear why Vonnegut placed Sir Walter Scott's
"Breathes there the man with soul so dead/ Who never to
himself hath said" on the page facing the novel's opening
chapter. Campbell retreats from the realities of the
atrocities around him by seeking escape in a hedonistic
"nation of two" and by creating a personal morality play
with himself as the leading character and hero, an Amer
ican double agent. Such a device temporarily allows him
I
to avoid examination of the soul-searching question of
human goodness or evil since he can smugly boast of the
| fact he is an "honest man . . . deep inside."(31)
96
One of the classic symptoms of simple schizophrenia
is the "gradual withdrawal of interest and a progressive
decline of responsible behavior with absence of commitment
5
to a definite way of life." Both Paul Proteus and Malachi
Constant consider a separate peace as a solution to their
problems during the period of their fragmentation, when
they cannot succeed in improving man's lot by working
within a social framework. Vonnegut has said that while
cultures "warp" men, they are necessary as "external sup-
g
ports." Malachi Constant at least expresses his feelings
of love for mankind and works within the smaller societal
unit of the family to practice a selfless love and compas
sion for his wife Beatrice. Howard Campbell Jr. never
even considers the question of how he can improve his
society. His love for Helga is not a manifestation of
his love for mankind, but such a selfish, ego-centered
love that it is quite appropriate that the diary of his
"nation of two" becomes a best selling pornographic book.
When he discovers that he has been deceived by Resi North
and has been sleeping with her rather than with her sister,
Helga, he readily accepts her; he does so because her love
provides him with ego-gratlfication. After his first
night with Resi, for example, he even boasts that he is
still as virile as a youth. One of the keys to Campbell's
self-centered cosmic view is the fact that the phrase
97
"Mother Night" that serves as Vonnegut's title for this
novel comes from a speech by Mephistopheles in Goethe's
Faust:
I am part of the part that at first was all, part
of the darkness that gave birth to light that
supercilious light which now disputes with Mother
Night her ancient rank and space, and yet can not
succeedj no matter how it struggles, it sticks to
matter and can't be free. Light flows from sub
stance, makes it beautiful; solids can check its
path, so I hope it won't be long till light and
the world's stuff are destroyed together.(xi)
Mephistopheles' optimism that before long, darkness and
evil will succeed in destroying the light of the world is
appropriately justified in Campbell's case as well as in
the case of Cat's Cradle and Player Plano where the Faust
motif may well be Vonnegut's way of expressing his sus
picion of man's scientific bent to master the secrets of
the universe. The Nazi at one point defines evil as "It's
that large part of every man that wants to hate without
limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that
part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so
attractive."(190) There are two Howard W. Campbell, Jrs.
He would like to believe that the part of him that accepts
what the Nazis do to Jews and calmly writes Nazi propaganda
is only the side of himself that he presents to the world.
The real Howard Campbell Jr., he believes, is secretly
virtuous and well aware of the difference between right
and wrong. In considering the question of Campbell's
98
responsibility for his actions, we must ponder Vonnegut's
moral to the novel, his admonition to all those who would
allow themselves to become schizophrenic: "We are what we
pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend
to be."(v) Campbell is able to "strut like Hitler's right-
hand man."(31) Yet, he is surprised that "nobody saw the
honest man I hid so deep inside."(31) He is quick to
admit that he has always "been able to live with what I
did. How? Through that simple and widespread boon to
modern man-schizophrenia."(136) This disease is particu
larly disturbing to Campbell when he learns that he broad
cast without even knowing it the fact that his wife Helga
had "disappeared." "It represented, I suppose, a wider
separation of my several selves than even I can bear to
think about."(140) Such is the hypocrisy that the "under
thirty" generation charge against the Establishment today,
the discrepancy between the real and the ideal, the pos
sible and the ideal.
This fragmentation of Campbell is quite apparent in
his reaction to his father-in-law's statement that even if
Howard had been an American spy he
could never have served the enemy as well as you
served us, . . . 'I realized that almost all the
ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of
anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi came
not from Goebbels, not from Hitler— but from you.'
He took my hand. 'You alone kept me from conclud
ing that Germany had gone insane.'(75)
99
How can Campbell reconcile the fact that he is secretly
virtuous with the fact that he has kept many Germans such
as his father-in-law committed to the Nazi cause by writ
ing and broadcasting propaganda that he does not actually
believe? One answer would be that he cannot, and when he
realizes his own evil and that of mankind he decides to
hand "Howard Campbell Jr. for crimes against himBelf."(202)
Such an interpretation would link Howard to Paul Proteus
and Malachi Constant who found death attractive after their
discovery of man's true nature. The problem with such an
interpretation though is that it is quite apparent that
Campbell never achieves the degree of self-awareness of
either Proteus or Constant; he consistently rationalizes
his behavior by indicating that he is only acting like a
Nazi. Vonnegut indicates in his "Editor's Note" that to
say that Campbell is a playwright is to warn the reader
that "no one is a better liar than a man who has warped
lives and passions onto something as grotesquely artificial
as a stage."(ix) He will not even admit that he is ill.
He declares at one point that "it was my world rather than
myself that was diseased."(194) What Campbell has done is
to develop schizophrenic symptoms just as Proteus and
Constant did when they were confronted by an apparently
unjust society.
100
Since Campbell believes himself to be secretly vir
tuous and thus not responsible for his actions as a "Nazi
war criminal," he cannot understand why people hate him.
He hides from his enemies in New York and refers to the
city as his purgatory. If Purgatory is thought of in the
traditional sense of a place for souls "who have died with
out repentance for venial sins or who have not yet paid
7
for their sins, the guilt of which has been removed," it
is quite clear that Campbell absolves himself of any guilt
feelings, and it is equally clear that he does not repent.
He glances out of his window toward what he describes as
"a little private park, a little Eden formed by Joining
backyards."(17) The reason that the park seems like an
Eden or Paradise to Campbell Is that he observes children
who play hide-and-seek crying Olly-olly-ox-in-free. (18)
He, too, "hiding from many people who might want to hurt
or kill me, often longed for someone to give that cry for
me, to end my endless game of hide-and-seek with a sweet
and mournful— "Olly-olly-ox-in-free."(18) When Howard
indicates that he is going to commit suicide for crimes
committed against himself, he is not being completely
honeBt. The reason that he wants to kill himself is that
it Is becoming increasingly more difficult for him to
rationalize the actions of that part of himself that is
dark and evil. The title of the novel, "Mother Night,"
101
and Mephistopheles1 statement indicates that Campbell's
dark self may very well be in the process of destroying
all the light within him. At the conclusion of the novel,
he is no longer capable of love, even self-love. Resi
North describes him as "so used up that he can't love
anymore. There is nothing left of him but curiosity and
a pair of eyes."(l73)
Campbell's desire for a world in which he can cry
"Olly-olly-ox-in-free1 1 is a desire to escape reality.
Children can take a break from the games they play, but
Campbell cannot escape the reality of his position as a
twentieth century man; in his case he has the additional
burden of being a Nazi war criminal living in New York.
At one point he tells a policeman that he expects another
war because "each person does a little something. . ."
(178) Rather than face this problem of the "Mother Night"
forces at work within man, Campbell seeks escape by creat
ing his own world, a world in which he can watch his ac
tions as a Nazi with detachment and even smug amusement,
secure in the knowledge that he is actually only acting.
He consistently lies to himself even though at one point
he proudly declares that he "can no more lie without
noticing it than" he "could unknowingly pass a kidney
stone."(126) Campbell is disturbed when the Israelis
fail to distinguish between Adolph Eichmann and himself.
102
He sees a very clear distinction and remarks that
This man /Eichmann7 actually believed that he
had invented his own trite defense, though a
whole nation of ninety some-odd million had
made the same defense before him. Such was his
paltry understanding of the God-like human act
of invention.(126)
Campbell, of course, was a writer and does have an
8
imagination. He uses essentially the same argument as
Eichmann, but says he knows better and hence is regener
ated somewhat. Whether he is or not is a mute question
since Campbell's villainy, heroics, guilt, or regener
ation is never clearly confirmed. He is one more victim
of Vonnegut's ambivalent concept of man. One example of
Vonnegut's hazy portrait of Campbell is the fact that there
is quite a bit of evidence to indicate that this Nazi jus
tifies his actions during World War II by rationalizing
that he is an American spy and consequently inventing the
American spy, Frank Wirtanen. Howard admits at one point
that
The government of the United States neither
confirms nor denies that I was an agent of theirs.
That's a little something, anyway that they don't
deny the possibility.
They twitch away that tid-bit, however, by
denying that a Frank Wirtanen ever served that
Government in any branch. Nobody believes in
him but me. So I will hereinafter speak of him
often as 'My Blue Fairy Godmother.'(31)
Since no one but Campbell believes in Wirtanen, the agent
may be imaginary. In one of their "imaginary" conversa
tions, Wirtanen indicates that Campbell will become a spy
103
because "... you love good and hate evil . . . and . . .
you believe in romance."(30) Howard would like to believe
this about himself, but he is honest enough to admit that
"The best reason was that I was a ham. As a spy of the
sort he described, I would have an opportunity for some
pretty grand acting. I would fool everybody with my
brilliant interpretation of a Nazi, inside and out."(31)
Significantly, Wirtanen tells Campbell that "espionage
offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he
finds irresistible."(145) He also indicates that the only
other person who knew about Campbell's espionage work was
the now-deceased President Roosevelt.
What evidence is there then that Wirtanen actually
"exists? Campbell would have the reader believe that
Wirtanen met him just before Dr. Jones' Nazi headquarters
was raided by FBI agents and revealed that both Kraft
and Resi North were Communist agents. Howard may very
well have imagined the entire incident. When he returns
to Jones' house he indicates that "Nobody had missed me."
(159) If Campbell is capable of creating Wirtanen, then
he is also capable of inventing a letter from the agent.
He is told by his Israeli lawyer that all "I need to be
a free man . . . is the barest proof that there was such
a person as Frank Wirtanen, and that Wirtanen made me an
American spy."(199) It Is shortly after this discussion
104
that Howard may have fabricated Wirtanen1s letter. Vonne-
gut never Indicates whether this letter is real or not.
If the letter is Indeed Imaginary and Campbell realizes
he has invented it, perhaps he decides not to face this
shattering truth in court; he commits suicide, ostensibly
because he finds the prospect of wandering the Earth as a
free man "nauseating," and also, he says, because he feels
that Howard W. Campbell, Jr. has committed "crimes against
himself."(202) Campbell's marked degree of schizophrenia
is apparent in his detached reference to himself in the
third person; an actor even to the end, he is able to
dissociate himself from his identity as a Nazi war crimi
nal. He dies unable and unwillingly to distinguish be
tween appearance and reality, between the world as he
would like it to be, and the world as it actually is.
"Mother Night" is an apt title for this novel since
Campbell is never able to accept the fact that these
dark forces are very much a part of him.
In Vonnegut's next novel, Cat's Cradle, the protag
onist John faces the same dilemma as Campbell; he too finds
himself in a society that, like that of Nazi Germany and
Ilium, New York, does not seem to highly value the individ
ual, but rather appears to reward its "Papa" Monzanos and
Felix Hoenikkers who care nothing for mankind. Unlike
Campbell, however, John realizes that he is no better
105
than the people he observes. Like Paul Proteus, Malachi
Constant, and Campbell, John develops an entirely new
identity In an effort to cope more effectively with his
environment. Instead of a chainsmoking, twice-divorced
alcoholic, he becomes a pleasant young man who is a candi
date for the Presidency of San Lorenzo. His transformation
is a form of schizophrenia, for it really represents his
attempt to flee from what he recognizes as a very un
pleasant world. Rather than try to face the problem of
evil in society and possibly in man himself, John first
seeks a separate peace with San Lorenzo's national sex
symbol, Mona. She destroys any dreams he might have of
turning their bomb shelter into a hedonistic paradise,
however, by refusing to have sexual intercourse with him.
Mona remarks that "It would be very sad to have a little
baby now. Don't you agree?"(215) Whether he wants to or
not, John is compelled to face reality; it would indeed
be sad to bring nov; life into such a world.
Groping to understand man's handiwork, the senseless
destruction he sees around him, John considers the possi
bility of becoming a nihilist. After observing what a
nihilist has done to his apartment and to his cat, John
declares that "... after I saw what Krebbs had done,
in particular what he had done to my sweet cat, nihilism
was not for me."(7l) Gradually Bokononism, the religion
and philosophy of the self-confessed mountebank Bokonon,___
106
begins to make more and more sense to him; this Is not
surprising since such a doctrine can explain the actions
of the Hoenlkker family, Howard Campbell Jr., and even
the absurd antics of Sherman Krebs. At one point Prank
Hoenlkker tells John that man Is the only thing sacred to
the Bokononists (173); what Bokononism tries to do is to
reconcile the humanistic view of man as sacred with the
harsh reality of man's actions in society. Bokonon be
lieves that "good societies could be built only by pitting
good against evil and by keeping the tension between the
two high at all times."(90) Such an explanation might
please Campbell who dies because he cannot justify his
own human nature. Bokonon summarizes his feelings on the
subject of evil in a poem:
'Papa' Monzano, he's so very bad,
But without bad 'Papa' I would be so sad;
Because without 'Papa's' badness,
Tell me, if you would,
How could wicked old Bokonon
Ever, ever look good?(90)
He seems to be saying that there is no such things as
absolute evil or absolute good; both are relative and can
only be evaluated in terms of each other.
Bokonon and his companion McCabe recognizes that the
only way they could continue to rule San Lorenzo and pre
vent the people from staging a revolution was by turning
the natives' attention from their own dire conditions to
a morality play, a struggle between absolute good and
107
absolute evil. McCabe remained In the capital and assumed
the role of a cruel dictator while Bokonon went Into
exile and became a gentle holy man. The result was not
what either expected:
. . . the drama demanded that the pirate half
of Bokonon and the angel half of McCabe wither
away. And McCabe and Bokonon paid a terrible
price in agony for the happiness of the people—
McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and
Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint. They
both became, for all practical purposes, insane.
(144-145)
Apparently man can be neither saint nor devil without
i
losing his sanity. The San Lorenzo natives do not realize
this, however, and applaud the antics of Bokonon whose j
very life "becomes a work of art"(144) much the same way
i
as the life of Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
In Mother Night Vonnegut reveals that not all lies
are morally evil. Lies "told for the sake of artistic !
I
effect . . . can be, in a higher sense; the most beguiling j
i
forms of truth."(MN ix) John comes to accept Bokonon's !
philosophy that lies can be truth and can help man to j
better understand his own paradoxical nature. While
Howard W. Campbell, Jr. is linked to Mephistopheles and
hence to the dark side of man, the very forces of "Mother
Night" within him, Bokononists recognize that man has a
vast potential for good and also a strong desire to search
for truth and for answers to the ills of his society and
himself. A Miss Faust exemplifies this aspect of the
108
Faustus legend when she tells John that she has "trouble
understanding how truth all by itself, could be enough
for a person."(52) Because "truth was so terrible, . . .
Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with
better and better lies."(l43) In The Books of Bokonon
he reveals that people should "Live by the foma (harmless
untruths) that make you brave and kind and healthy and
happy."(v) Vonnegut inserts his feelings of anti
nationalism when he has Bokonon caution that man should
be able to distinguish between appearance and reality;
he should realize, for example, that the conception of a
nation is really meaningless, a granfalloon.(82) (A
"false karass, a seeming team that was meaningless in
terms of the ways God gets things done, . . .)(82) Such
a doctrine comforts Bokononists since they can dismiss
the horrors resulting from wars between nations as not a
manifestation of something inherently wrong with mankind,
but merely an example of yet another misconception man
will rid himself of when he sees the truth in The Books
of Bokonon. What is meaningful for Bokononists is the
struggle within man between the forces of good and those
of evil. If the natives of San Lorenzo can only under
stand these forces by becoming involved in the "Foma"
of a staged morality play, then in a sense a lie helps
them to understand a truth.
109
Although John develops a form of schizophrenia that
splits his personality and results in his becoming a
Bokononist, Vonnegut is not necessarily advocating Bokon-
onism as a solution to either the problem of an intoler
able society or that of man's inherent evil. He may be
advocating the Bokononist doctrine that man and society
must have a satisfying set of "lies" to follow to make
life endurable. One must remember that the natives of
San Lorenzo do find life less unbearable because of
Bokononon and do derive some spiritual satisfaction from
the Bokononist ritual of Bokomaru (the expression of man's !
1
love for his fellow man through the rubbing of the soles ;
j
of one's feet), even though their physical condition is |
i
deplorable, they are oppressed by a dictatorship, and |
s
their world is about to be virtually destroyed. j
In his next novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,
Vonnegut does not destroy his world to emphasize the dire
condition of mankind as he did in Cat's Cradle, but he
makes conditions sufficiently bad that his protagonist,
Eliot Rosewater, like John before him, becomes schizo
phrenic and retreats even further into a world of illusion.
Eliot is as wealthy as Malachi Constant and as much a
part of America's social elite as Paul Proteus, but he
is dissatisfied with what he feels is an empty meaning
less existence. Just as all previous Vonnegut protagonists
110
are fragmented by the painful sight of the plight of their
fellow man, Eliot, too, adopts a new Identity that enables
him to adjust more effectively to his environment. While
searching for the proper role, he writes his wife Sylvia
that "Hamlet had one big edge on me. His father's ghost
told him exactly what he had to do, while I am operating
without instructions."(42) During this quest, Eliot fre
quently changes clothes with the poor people he encounters:
His sixteen-foot closet became a depressing
museum of coveralls, overalls, Robert Hall
Easter specials, field jackets, Eisenhower
jackets, sweatshirts and so on. Sylvia wanted
to burn them, but Eliot told her, 'Burn my tails,
my dinner jacket and my gray flannel suit
instead.'(33)
During the period that Paul Proteus searches for his proper(
role in society, he changes his clothes when he goes to
the section of Ilium where the citizens displaced by auto
mation live. Both thus manifest an empathy for the poor
and displaced that eventually leads them to assume a new
identity; both become outcasts who live among the dregs
of society whom they yearn to help. Eliot decides that
he will "love these discarded Americans, even though
they're useless and unattractive. That is going to buy
my work of art."(47)
The phrase "work of art" echoes the Vonnegut state
ment that "Lies told for the sake of artistic effect . . .
can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of
Ill
truth."(MN Ix) Eliot lies to himself in much the same
way that Howard W. Campbell, Jr., does. A schizophrenic
person traditionally becomes "incapable of blending feel
ing, thought, and action in a meaningful and constructive
9
fashion." The line between "fact and fiction grows
blurred" and the patient "becomes careless in appear
ance, sloppy in work habits, and impervious to respon
sibility. As the illness grows in strength, he may show
an incredible indifference to his own fundamental physical
10 !
comforts and needs." Eliot feels intense guilt because
he once accidentally killed three unarmed firemen when he
mistook them for Nazi soldiers during World War II; he
also feels somehow guilty for the American fire bombing |
11
of Dresden during that war. His actions as an altruist, j
j
the identity he adopts in a schizophrenic fashion, re- j
lieves him of some of this burden. Eliot's illness clouds j
his ability to distinguish between appearance and reality
in much the same way it affected Campbell. Rosewater
argues that the people he helps are "the people who, in
generations past, had cleared the forests, drained the
swamps, formed the backbone of the infantry in time of
war. . ."(69) The reader learns that "The people who
leaned on Eliot regularly were a lot weaker than that—
and dumber, too."(69) While he professes to love the
poor, when he is told that his "clients" "... love you,
112
they hate you, they cry about you, they laugh at you, they
make up new lies about you every day. They run around
like chickens with their heads cut off," Eliot "felt his
soul cringe, knew he could never stand to return to Rose-
water County again."(213) Deep within the altruist Rose-
water lies the more aristocratic identity with its conven
tional disdain for the poor and uneducated. His father
feels this way all the time and cannot bear the sight of
Eliot's "clients."
While Eliot's desire to help the poor is laudable,
j
his methods are not. He pays people who are on the verge
of committing suicide not to do so; such action does not
solve these people's problems, but merely postpones them, j
By making the last payment on a motor scooter for a client
and his girl friend, Eliot indirectly contributes to their
death two days later in a smashup. Vonnegut responded to i
i
the question of whether Eliot's altruism was a model man
should imitate by declaring that "the unselfish love of
Rosewater certainly changes lives. Yes— what we need is
a world filled with unselfish love. Everybody will be
12
more comfortable. Vonnegut's response is clouded by
his usual shades of ambivalence. The word "comfortable"
contributes to this passage's sarcastic tone; Eliot,
Malachi Constant, and Howard Campbell, Jr. all live in
an illusory world that is far more comfortable than the
113
real world. The fact that Vonnegut Intimates that Eliot's
brand of altruism would result In a more comfortable world
and not necessarily a better world suggests that his
schizophrenia is comfortable since it shields him from
the harsh reality of the conditions around him, particu
larly the nature of the people found in Rosewater, Indiana,
who "have neither pride nor self respect . . . are totally
unreliable, not maliciously so, but like cattle who wander
aimlessly."(138) Vonnegut suggests throughout his novels
that men like Paul Proteus and Eliot Rosewater may be
justified in a way in seeking escape from such a society.
When Paul tries to work within the framework of his tech
nological society to try to help the poor, he fails. He
i
i
cannot succeed because the haves of Ilium, New York, so- j
I
ciety have dehumanized the have nots to the point that
the poor are inhuman, a screaming mob of senseless cre
atures who crave only revenge. The Ilium society, secure,
seemingly invulnerable, will destroy Paul, but by doing
so it will free him from the intolerable burden of living
under its yoke. Similarly, Eliot Rosewater's "clients"
are almost intolerable, but it is, Vonnegut suggests,
American's social conditions that have made them so.
Eliot like Paul finds he cannot work within his society,
but must live with the poor and try to help them; he must
try to create a utopia. Eliot's utoplc welfare fiefdom
114
fails because he unwittingly dehumanizes the people in
much the same way as Proteus's society. The book he keeps
of his "transactions" with his clients is a record book of
their spiritual and financial debt to him. There is some
thing demeaning and demoralizing about coming to Eliot1s !
office to ask him for help; indeed, people slink in and
out as if they were visiting a house of prostitution.
Because of Vonnegut's complex, ambivalent treatment of
Eliot, however, it is extremely difficult to determine
whether this young millionaire's altruism accomplishes
more good than harm. j
It should be clear from this discussion that Eliot
is a far more complex character than Paul Proteus. If
one compares Player Plano with God Bless You, Mr. Rose-
water, it is quite apparent that Vonnegut has become
much more ambivalent. Paul and Eliot are both dissatis- ;
I
fied with their societies and both become schizophrenic
and assume a new identity that enables them to mix with
the poor and apparently useless Americans alienated at
the nadir of society. Paul learns that he has been de
ceived by what is mere appearance rather than reality;
the poor and the useless in his society have been dehuman
ized to the point that they are beyond his help. Unable
to improve his society by working within its framework
as a manager or to alter its structure by staging a
115
successful revolution, with a great deal of disillusion
ment Paul appears to embrace death as an escape from an
intolerably harsh reality. In Eliot's case, on the other
hand, it is never clear if he learns to make this distinc
tion between appearance and reality. His very last action
is shaded in ambivalence. When he gives all his money to
the very poor who are his clients, it is never clear
whether he does so as one more act of his altruistic
love and his need to assuage his burden for the deaths
of the unarmed German firemen and the citizens of Dresden,
or whether he finally realizes that he has hurt Rosewater,
Indiana's citizens rather than helped them by creating a
i
welfare state, and so gives them his money as a way of
meeting his responsibility to his "clients."
While one cannot be sure of Eliot's motives, God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater appears to fit into a pattern
seen in Vonnegut's earlier novels and thus it is possible
to speculate concerning his view of man and society. Man,
unable to work within the framework of an intolerable so
ciety to effect social reforms, may seek a separate peace,
but he will find it unsatisfactory because it is he him
self who is sick. In the disillusionment of Paul Proteus
and Malachi Constant, the suicide of Howard Campbell, Jr.
and the Insanity of Eliot Rosewater we see how Vonnegut's
protagonists react when they recognize the "Mother Night"
116
forces at work within man. Each briefly becomes schizo
phrenic and assumes a new identity in an effort to cope
with this problem. This new identity in each case involves
a further retreat from the real world and an unpleasant
society into a more comforting illusory world. But does
this mean Vonnegut has given up on his society? While
Player Plano ends on a totally pessimistic note, God Bless
You, Mr. Rosewater1s conclusion is ambivalent. While the
novel's cosmic view is obviously dark indeed, whether it
is totally black depends upon how the reader Interprets
Kilgore Trout, Rosewater's defender. If Trout is reliable,
however, then Eliot should be lauded rather than condemned,
and a world filled with people practicing a modified form
of his altruism with more restraint would indeed be a much
more pleasant place than Rosewater, Indiana.
FOOTNOTES
"^Arthur P. Noyes and Lawrence C. Kolb, Modern Clln-
Ical Psychiatry (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company,
1963), P. 325.
2Arthur P. Noyes, p. 339.
^Lawrence Urdans, ed. The Random House Dictionary
of the English Lanugage, College Edition (New York:
Random House, 1968)7 p. 1064.
4
I wish to thank my colleague, Brian Higgins, for
pointing this out to me in an unpublished article.
- ’David L. Sills, ed. "Schizophrenia" in Interna
tional Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 14 of-
17 vols. (New York: Crowell Collier and Macmillan Inc.,
1968), p. 1045.
g
A letter from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to myself dated
May 20, 1969.
^Van A. Harvey, A Handbook of Theological Terms
(New York, 1964), p. 200.
^Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods (New York: Holt,
1966), p. l6l. Fromm points out that the Bible uses the
word yetzer to indicate the evil impulse. Since the word
means imaginings (evil or good), "the important fact" is
"that earlier evil (or good) impulses are possible only
on the basis of that which is specifically human: imagi
nation. For this very reason, only man . . . can be evil
or good."
^Francis J. Brace.land and Michael Stock, Modern Psy-
chiatry: A Handbook for Believers (New York: DoUbleday,
1963), p. 127.
10Francis J. Braeeland, Modern Psychiatry: A Hand
book for Believers, p. 129.
■^See chapter four where this subject is discussed
in great detail.
12
A letter from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to myself dated
May 20, 1969.
CHAPTER IV
POINT OP VIEW IN VONNEGUT'S "DRESDEN" NOVELS
I
In each of his six novels, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is
concerned with evil and the way it manifests itself in
man. A reading of Slaughterhouse-Five and God Bless You,
Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut's two most recent novels, makes
it clear that for him the fire bombing of Dresden by the
United States during World War II which he observed first
hand as a German prisoner is of great personal signifi
cance; he sees this act as a symbol of the human poten
tial for destruction and senseless slaughter. Apparently
psychically scarred by the holocaust he saw, Vonnegut for
twenty years has "been trying to do fictional justice" to
1
it. In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, the
novel he finally wrote about the Dresden fire bombing,
Vonnegut reveals that he would
hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost
me in money and anxiety and time. When I got
home from the second World War twenty-three years
ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write
about the destruction of Dresden, since all I
would have to do would be to report what I have
seen. . . .
But not many words about Dresden came from my
mind then— not enough of them to make a book
anyway. . . .(2)
118
119
The reason why this book particularly and God Bless You,
Mr. Rosewater to a lesser extent were apparently so diffi
cult for Vonnegut to write is that his memories of Dresden
so affect him that it is difficult for him to impose an i
adequate consistent aesthetic distance between himself
and his protagonists, Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater.
John Keats coined the term "Negative Capability" to
describe the ability of the artist, in his case the poet,
to free himself from the confines of his own personality
J
and ego and to adopt the identity of the person or persons i
he is writing about. Keats' friend Woodhouse wrote to a j
i
John Taylor that the young poet was !
j
right with regard to his own Poetical Character—
And I perceive clearly the distinction between j
himself & those of the Wordsworth School. . .. !
The highest order of the Poet will not only |
possess all the above powers but will have so j
high an image that he will be able to throw his
own souls into any object he sees or imagines,
so as to feel be sensible of or express, all
that the object itself wod see feel be sensible
of or express— he will speak out of that object—
so that his own self will with the Exception of
the Mechanical part be "annihilated."— and it
is(of) the excess of this power that I suppose
Keats to speak, when he says he has no identity--
As a poet, and when the fit is upon him, this is
true. . . .2
While by Keats' definition an artist who is able to anni
hilate his own personality when writing a novel has "nega
tive capability," this is surely not Vonnegut's case in
Slaughterhouse-Five and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. His
120
difficulty In establishing sufficient distance between
himself and his protagonists is similar in many ways to
D. H. Lawrence's dilemma in Sons and Lovers. Mark Schorer
has written that in this novel
There is a psychological tension which disrupts
the form of the novel and obscures its meaning,
because neither the contradiction in style nor
the confusion in point of view is made to right
itself. Lawrence is merely repeating his emotions,
and he avoids an austerer technical scrutiny of
his material because it would compel him to master
them. He would not let the artist be stronger
than the man.3
|
i
We will center our discussion on Vonnegut's similar diffl- |
i
I
culty in distancing himself from his protagonists Billy j
Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater in Slaughterhouse-Five and |
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The reactions of Billy and j
Eliot in the fire bombing of Dresden are crucial to an
understanding of their character aberrations. In each
novel Vonnegut utilizes a different point of view to deal
with this problem. Because of the parallel in Slaughter-
i
house-Five between his experience in Dresden and that of
Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut creates a mask, a narrator who
4
serves as what Wayne Booth calls an "implied author"
and thus provides a certain distance between author and
protagonist.
Just as the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five is
ending, Vonnegut suddenly introduces a note of science
fiction. He tells his readers that
121
Somebody was playing with the clocks. . . . The
second hand on my watch would twitch once, and
a year would pass, and then it would twitch
again. There was nothing I could do about it.
As an Earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks
said— and calendars.(18)
He then quotes a stanza from Theodore Roethke's "The
Waking". . .:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.(l8)
The key word here may very well be sleep. Slaughterhouse-
Five in a way is a vision, a dream, Vonnegut's version of
Finnegans Wake in which he and the reader both learn by
"going where I have to go." At this point in the novel
an implied author, Vonnegut's mask, assumes the role of
narrator and continues in this capacity for the next eight
chapters. This implied author has a Tralfamadorian phil
osophy of life which makes it painless for him, as we
shall soon see, to describe the fire bombing of Dresden
and Billy's suffering in a cold, detached, objective
manner. Tralfamadorians, it should be remembered, are
machines devoid of all human feelings of love and compas
sion. In the final chapter Vonnegut reappears and specu
lates on whether or not he can accept such a view of life.
In Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut himself appears as
a peripheral character occasionally, but he is always name
less and faceless. At one point, for example, the Amer
icans have eaten much too much and are now very sick-.
122
Billy Pilgrim, the novel's protagonist, notices an Amer
ican near him who "wailed that he had excreted everything
but his brains. Moments later he said 'There they go,
there they go,' he meant his brains."(109) Vonnegut tells
the reader, "That was I. That was me. That was the author
of this book."(109) A possible reason why he fails to
describe himself is that one of Vonnegut's central points
in this novel is that war dehumanizes man; he confides to
the reader that
There are almost no characters in this story, and
almost no dramatic confrontations because most
of the people in it are so sick and so much the
listless playthings of enormous forces. One of
the main effects of war, after all, is that people
are discouraged from being characters.(140-141)
The "enormous forces" at work are those of war and man's
apparent readiness to be inhumane. Vonnegut indicates
his feelings about both when, speaking in his own voice
in the novel's first chapter, he describes his reaction
to the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah:
Those were vile people in both those cities, as
it is well known. The world was better off
without them.
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look
back where all those people and their homes had
been. But she did look back, and I love her for
that, because it was so human. . . .
People aren't supposed to look back. I'm cer
tainly not going to do it anymore.
I've finished my war book now. The next one
I write is going to be fun.
This one is a failure, and had to be, since it
was written by a pillar of salt. . . .(19)
123
His tone in this passage is important. The word "vile"
and the phrases "as it is well known" and "The world was
better off without them" all contribute to the general
note of sarcasm.
It is important to note that Vonnegut apparently
feels that Slaughterhouse-Five was not "fun" to write, but
a book that he felt compelled to finish. Like Lot's wife,
he felt compelled to turn around and look back at Dresden
where all "those people and their homes had been." Be
cause "looking back" at Dresden is so painful for him,
Vonnegut labels this novel a failure. A number of critics !
!
have accepted Vonnegut's statement at face value and |
neglected to explore the question of point of view in
the novel. Wilfred Sheed, in his recent review of the
novel entitled "Requiem to Billy Pilgrim's Progress,"
speculates that Vonnegut is unable to write a novel of
conventional form about the fire bombing of Dresden per
haps because "in a sense he has been blinded by the glare
of the fire bombs." Instead, Vonnegut "has turned his
5
back on the raid and written a parable." Although
Sheed's title emphasizes the many similarities between
Slaughterhouse-Five and Pilgrim's Progress, Vonnegut's
novel is not a parable. The very differences between
these two works reveal Vonnegut's concern with his own
personal reactions to his experience in Dresden. While
124
Banyan's Christian set out on a journey with Heaven as his
goal, Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim Is a pilgrim who Is not a
Christian and does not even think about Heaven. While
Christian Is warned that the City of Destruction will be
burned by heavenly fire, Billy Pilgrim Is shocked when he
observes bombed Dresden, a city with a skyline that was
"intricate and voluptuous and enchanted . . . like a
Sunday school picture of Heaven. . ."(129) burned by a
hellish fire bombing. Finally, when Christian and Hopeful
are about to leave the plain, they see "a pillar of salt
with the inscription 'Remember Lot's wife.' They marvel
much at this monument that seems to warn them against
6
covetousness." Vonnegut, on the other hand, interprets
the action of Lot's wife as not covetousness, but as a
very human concern for the welfare of the inhabitants of
both Sodom and Gomorrah. He then goes one step further
and indicates that Slaughterhouse-Five in a sense does
the same thing; it too looks back at a holocaust with
feelings of human compassion and love. The key to these
differences between the views of Christian and Pilgrim
becomes apparent when one realizes that since Pilgrim's
Progress is an allegory, a parable, it deals with "a re
examination of the objective norms of experience in the
light of human ideality. It includes the making of a new
version of reality by means of an ideal which the reality
125
7
of the fiction proves." In S1aughterhouse-FIve there Is
no Idealism, only shock and outrage over the havoc and
destruction man Is capable of wreaking in the name of
what he labels a worthy cause.
The subtitle of Slaughterhouse-Five, "The Children's
Crusade," Is a reminder of man's so-called idealism and
romanticism. Vonnegut seems to agree with Charles Mackay
whom he quotes as declaring that
History in her solemn page informs us that the
crusaders were but ignorant and savage men, that
their motives were those of bigotry unmitigated,
and that their pathway was one of blood and tears.
Romance on the other hand, dilates upon their
piety and heroism and portrays, in her most glow
ing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnani
mity, the imperishable honor they acquired for
themselves, and the great services they rendered
to Christianity. . . . Now what was the grand
result of all these struggles? Europe expended
millions of her treasures, and the blood of two
million of her people; and a handful of quarrel
some knights retained possession of Palestine for
about one hundred years 1(14)
Vonnegut appears to imply here that man's romanticism and
idealism are both more appearance than substance. Wars,
even "holy" wars, are the result of man's avarice no
matter how hypocritically he may rationalize it. When
Billy Pilgrim is actually a prisoner of war, he finds that
in the harsh reality of war "nobody had any good war
stories to tell."(48) Vonnegut, in fact, also feels that
war is not glorious and reveals that he told a mother who
hated the glorification of war by America's movie makers
that "I don't think this book of mine is ever going to be
finished. . . . If I ever do finish it, though, I give
you my word of honor; there won't be a part for Prank
Sinatra or John Wayne. I tell you what . . . I'll call
i
it 'The Children's Crusade.'"(13) Later in the novel,
when Billy and his young companions stumble into a German
prisoner of war camp shortly after the Battle of the Bulge,
an English prisoner says
You know— we've had to imagine the war here, and !
we have imagined that it was being fought by aging
men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars
were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly
shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God— ' I said
to myself. 'It's the Children's Crusade.'(91)
One of these young soldiers envisions "their virtue and
magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for them
selves, and the great services they rendered to Christian- j
Ity."(44) Billy, of course, feels no such call to duty; j
like Vonnegut he Is preoccupied in trying to answer the
question of man's role in society and In the universe, a
question which, as we shall see in chapter five, is impos
sible for Vonnegut's protagonists to answer.
When Billy is in the mental ward of a veterans' hos
pital with Eliot Rosewater, Vonnegut reveals that "both
found life meaningless, partly because of what they had
seen in war. . . . And Billy had seen the greatest massa
cre in European history, which was the fire bombing of
127
Dresden. . . . So they were trying to re-lnvent themselves
and their universe. Science fiction was a big help."(87)
Science fiction is necessary for both men because they
cannot find the answers to their questions in the real
world. Rosewater remarks that "everything there was to
know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov . . . but
that isn't enough any more. . ."(87) Later, the young
millionaire tells a psychiatrist "you guys are going to
have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or
people just aren't going to want to go on living."(88)
Such an attitude is similar to Bokonon's view in Cat's
Cradle that "Foma," harmless untruths, are necessary
because mere truth is not enough to explain to man what
he needs to know about evil, guilt, and human responsibil
ity. One reason why science fiction is such a "big help"
to Billy and Eliot is that it permits them to go beyond
mere factual truth to moral and metaphysical truth. Vonne
gut's summary of a story by Kilgore, both men's favorite
science fiction writer, will illustrate this point:
. . . "The Gutless Wonder." It was about a robot
who had bad breath, who became popular after his
halitosis was cured. But what made the story
remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was
that it predicted the widespread use of burning
jellied gasoline on human beings.
It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots
did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no
circuits which would allow them to imagine what
was happening to the people on the ground.
128
Trout's leading robot looked like a human
being, and could talk and dance and so on, and
go out with girls. And nobody held it against
him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people.
But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But
then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to
the human race.(l44)
This tale is actually about man's moral responsibility for
his actions during war time. It is possible for a society
to become so calloused and hardened by war that it is no
longer human. Under such conditions, it will accept a
creature capable of dropping burning jellied gasoline on
human beings without any feelings of remorse or guilt as
long as he is not guilty of the petty social faux pas of
halitosis. Such a society will embrace a robot who has
fire bombed innocent civilians in much the same way that
Dresden was fire bombed, but because Billy Pilgrim asks
disturbing questions about Dresden, it will not accept
him but merely view him as "a repulsive non person who
would be much better off dead."(l65) Heading science
fiction as a means of probing for the truths beyond reach
in the real world does have some dangers, however, espe
cially because science fiction tends to take the rather
naive view that the world is a battleground in which
forces can be labeled as good or evil. When Billy tells
the Tralfamadorians about the violence and destructive
ness of man, he "expected them to fear that the Earthling
combination of ferocity and spectacular weaponry might
129
eventually destroy part of, maybe all of the innocent
Universe. Science fiction had led him to expect that."
(100) Billy's reading of Kilgore Trout's novels blinds
him though. For just as he feels that he is speaking
"soaringly" and is coming out forthrightly for good and
against evil in the universe, he is shooked by the Tralfa-
madorian reaction. He learns that the "idea of prevent
ing war on Earth is stupid" since man or alien cannot
alter human destiny.
Since at times Billy apparently accepts this Tralfa-
madorian view of man's place in the universe, the reader
is forced to ponder whether or not Pilgrim is speaking
for Vonnegut or not. As was pointed out earlier, Vonne
gut 's intense feelings about the fire bombing of Dresden
make it difficult for him to distance himself from Billy
Pilgrim. Both men are forty-six years old; both were
prisoners of war who were in Dresden during the holocaust.
Because of this obviously close bond between writer and
protagonist, occasionally there is a certain inconsistency
in Billy's characterization. In chapter two, for example,
the narrator reveals that Billy is a "senile widowe«"(2)
Later in the same chapter we learn that Billy's daughter
Barbara "thought her father was senile, even though he
was only forty-six— senile because of damage to his brain
in the airplane crash."(24) Billy, on the other hand,
130
thought that he was
far from senile . . . he was devoting himself to
a calling much higher than mere business.
He was doing nothing less now, he thought,
than prescribing corrective lenses for Earthling
souls. So many of those souls were lost and
wretched, Billy believed, because they could
not see as well as his little green friends
from Tralfamadore.(25)
Still later in the same chapter we learn that "Billy had
his head broken in an airplane crash, by the way— before
he became so vocal about flying saucers and traveling in j
time."(39) The tone of this sentence suggests that
Billy's accident caused him to have hallucinations about
Tralfamadorians, yet we learn that after his plane crash |
and his ride to a hospital he was unconscious for two
days after the operation and "he dreamed millions of j
things, some of them true. The true things were time
travel."(135) We are told this by the narrator of
Slaughterhouse-Five. Either we must accept the view that
Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim both believe in flying saucers,
Tralfamadorians and time warps, or, more likely, we can
postulate that Vonnegut has created a narrator with a j
i
distinct personality, an "Implied author." In such cases j
as this where an author creates a mask, the reader must
ponder the reliability or unreliability of such a narrator,
and hence consider the aesthetic distance not only between
author and protagonist, but also between author and
narrator.
____________________________________________________________________
131
The need for such scrutiny on the reader's part
becomes apparent even in the first chapter of Slaughter
house-Five where Vonnegut, speaking as himself and not
using a mask, explains that he loves the wife of Lot for
expressing her feelings of love and compassion by turning
to look back at the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah
even though it means being transformed into a pillar of
salt. What may be quite confusing to the reader is the
fact that Vonnegut's view that man must try to ameliorate
the suffering of his fellow man or at least show some
concern is not shared consistently by either his implied
author or by Billy Pilgrim. An excellent example of this
disparity in point of view in the novel occurs when Billy
Pilgrim drives through the Negro slum area of Ilium, New
York:
The people who lived here hated it so much that
they had burned down a lot of it a month ago.
It was all that they had and they'd wrecked it.
The neighborhood reminded Billy of some of the
towns he had seen in the war.
'Blood brother,' said a message written in pink
paint on the side of a shattered grocery store.
There was a tap on Billy's car window. A black
man was out there. He wanted to talk about some
thing. The light had changed. Billy did the
simplest thing. He drove on.
Billy drove through a scene of even greater
desolation. It looked like Dresden after it was
fire bombed— like the surface of the moon. The
house where Billy had grown up used to be some
where in what was so empty now. This was urban
renewal. A new Ilium Government Center and a high-
rise apartment buildings were going up here soon.
That was all right with Billy Pilgrim.(51)
132
The tone of this passage is confusing because the motives
of both narrator and protagonist are shaded in ambivalence.
It appears that from the point of view of the narrator,
Billy pragmatically takes the course of action most fea
sible, to do the "simplest thing" and drive away when a
Negro tries to talk to him. Similarly, Vonnegut's narra
tor likens a section of Ilium under urban renewal to the
condition of Dresden after its fire bombing. He then
reports that Billy is apathetic and does not really care
whether there is urban renewal or not even though it
results in the destruction of his childhood home. It is
difficult for the narrator to understand Billy because
i
his motives are quite different. While Billy, like Vonne- j
gut, is torn between a desire to forget Dresden and the
pain this memory brings and an obsession to find a way to
reconcile the human suffering he observed there, the nar
rator pragmatically adopts the Tralfamadorian philosophy
of ignoring unpleasant times and concentrating on "the j
good ones."(102) He declares "so it goes" whenever he j
i
describes an unpleasant event such as the death of Billy's
parents or the airplane crash that killed all the pas
sengers except Billy. "So it goes" is a Tralfamadorian
expression used by the aliens to describe an unpleasant
event which cannot be avoided since man and alien both
live in a universe in which there is no such thing as free
133
will. Such a doctrine Is Irreconcilable with Billy's
personal motto of "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.1 1 (52) The
narrator smugly tells the reader that "Among the things
Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present,
and the future."(52)
While the novel1s narrator reports that Billy turns
away from a sight reminiscent of Dresden's fire bombing,
he does not appear to understand the motives behind such
an action. Billy is not following the Tralfamadorian
philosophy of indifference, because as a human filled
with compassion he cannot. Rather, his actions are a
result of the equipoise between his painful memories of
Dresden and his almost intolerable fixation on the suffer-
i
ing he observed there. While at one moment the memory of j
|
Dresden may make the urban renewal project in Ilium some- j
I
thing he wants to pass through quickly and the sight of a I
I
Ghetto Negro equally unpleasant, at other times he marries
a fat woman to alleviate her suffering and loneliness and
also cries over the agony of a horse who he has unwittingly
mistreated. The question Vonnegut never answers in refer
ence to Billy and his slogan is what young Pilgrim can and
cannot change. Can he do anything about the human and
even non-human suffering he observes? In chapter five we
134
will see that because of Vonnegut's epistemological plural
ism such a question Is unanswerable.
The major difficulty for the reader of Slaughterhouse-
Five Is that while the Implied author accepts the Tralfa
madorian view of the universe wholeheartedly, Billy Pilgrim
only accepts this view intellectually, not emotionally.
Emotionally, his view of the universe is much closer to
Vonnegut's sentiments in the first chapter where the au
thor speaks for himself. Billy, like Vonnegut, cannot
endure the sight of human suffering even though the Tralfa
madorians tell him that there is nothing he can do about
it. As a child Billy was forced to contemplate "torture
and hideous wounds at the beginning of and at the end of
nearly every day of his childhood" since he had "an ex
tremely gruesome crucifix hanging on the wall of his bed
room in Ilium."(33) When he sees a group of cripples
selling magazine subscriptions in his neighborhood he
knows at the intellectual level that he should follow the
advice he heard from a man from the Better Business Bureau
and call the police, but instead he weeps although he does
not know why.(34) The narrator does not understand Billy's
weeping either and declares that "Every so often, for no
apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping.
Nobody had ever caught Billy doing it. Only his doctor
knew. . . . It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and
135
not very moist."(53) Billy Is crying In despair for the
plight of mankind even though his intellect refuses to
recognize this fact.
Intellectually, at least, Billy tries to escape
from the sight of human suffering by adopting the Tralfa
madorian philosophy. When he meets a boy whose father
died in Vietnam, he tells him "about his adventures on
Tralfamadore," and assures "the fatherless boy" that his
father "is very much alive still in moments the boy would
see again and again." He then asks, "Isn't that comfort
ing? "(117) The boy and his mother flee the office declar
ing Billy to be insane. Apparently Pilgrim finds that he
cannot comfort others with the Tralfamadorian philosophy;
he cannot even ameliorate his own suffering. When Billy
marries his fat wife Valencia, the narrator knows that
Billy didn't want to marry ugly Valencia. She was
one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he
was going crazy when he heard himself proposing
marriage to her, when he begged her to take the
diamond ring and be his companion for life.(93)
Pilgrim's "disease" is his inability to accept human suf
fering; during their honeymoon night, Valencia thanks
Billy for marrying her and tells him "I'm so happy. . . .
I never thought anybody would marry me."(l03) Billy does
not feel any love for her, but he is reconciled since "He
had already seen a lot of their marriage, thanks to time-
travel, knew that it was going to be at least bearable
136
all the way."(104) A marriage that is "bearable" seems
a small price for Billy to pay if it relieves the pangs
he feels when watching Valencia suffer as an unmarried,
fat, unloved woman. For the reader, perhaps the key to
Billy's "disease" comes when he cries, as a barbershop
quartet composed of his fellow optometrists sings "That
Old Gang of Mine." Billy
. . . found himself upset by the song and the
occasion. He had never had an old gang, old
sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway,
as the quartet made slow, agonized experiments
with chords— . . . . Billy had powerful psycho
somatic responses to the changing chords. His
mouth filled with the taste of lemonage, and
his face became grotesque, as though he really
were being stretched on the torture engine called
the rack.(148)
The narrator reveals that Billy "could find no explanation
for why the song had affected him so grotesquely. He had
supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself.
Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere
inside, and he could not imagine what it was."(149) While
neither the narrator nor Billy knows the secret, it soon
becomes apparent to the reader when he observes that Vonne
gut has metaphorically linked Billy's reaction to the sing
ing of the barbershop quartet with another quartet, the
German soldiers who were with him in slaughterhouse-five
during the fire bombing of Dresden. When these guards
first observed the virtually complete destruction of their
city, they
137
rolled their eyes. They experimented with one
expression and then another, said nothing, though
their mouths were often open. They looked like a
silent film of a barbershop quartet.
'So long forever,' they might have been sing
ing, 'old fellows and pals; so long forever, old
sweethearts and pals— God bless 'em— '(133)
Billy weeps when he observes his fellow optometrists sing
ing "That Old Gang of Mine" because it reminds him of the
fire bombing of Dresden and human suffering he associates
with it.
The Dresden holocaust made such an impression on
Vonnegut that he devoted twenty years trying to write a
novel about it. It made such an impression on Billy Pil
grim that as an optometrist who by dint of his profession
should help people see more clearly, he frequently feels
compelled to travel back in time and relive the events
leading up to the climactic day of the Dresden air raid.
Although the novel's implied author can accept the de
struction of the city with a Tralfamadorian "so it goes,"
Billy cannot because Vonnegut cannot. Both protagonist
and author respond in characteristic Vonnegut fashion—
ambivalently. While Billy and Vonnegut would very much
like to purge themselves of the painful memory of the fire
bombing of Dresden, they find themselves fixated on the
needless suffering they observed there. This condition of
dynamic equilibrium seems irreconcilable; in chapter five
we shall see that a very common pattern in Vonnegut's
138
fiction (perfectly in accordance with his cosmic view)
is his concentration on the very human conflict between
man's desire for personal comfort and his desire to ameli
orate another's sufferings.
It is crucial to an understanding of Slaughterhouse-
Five to realize that Billy's feelings concerning human
suffering are directly linked to his experience at the
fire bombing of Dresden. In an article entitled "Time
and the Modern Novel," Dayton Kohler may well have pin
pointed why the Dresden holocaust is the key to the struc
ture of this novel when he wrote that
The modern novelist is alert to that time sense
which runs through all awareness of the relations
between fact and meaning, objects and ideas, out
ward appearance and inner reality; and he tries
to make the form of the novel correspond, at
least in its technical aspects, to his perception
of reality.8
The fire bombing is at the center of Billy's consciousness
and is much more real to him than his shallow life as an
optometrist in Ilium, New York. Since as was indicated
earlier, Billy's journeys have such a dream-like quality,
it is impossible and futile to try to determine whether
or not he actually travels in time to visit the Tralfa
madorians and to revisit Dresden just before the fire
bombing. Moreover, such a question is irrelevant. What
is important is that Pilgrim frequently feels himself
drawn to Dresden by what was by far the most traumatic
139
experience of his life. When he does travel there, how
ever, he utilizes the Tralfamadorian conception of time
travel to jump away whenever he comes too close to the
actual day of the firebombing. On the night before the
actual fire bombing of Dresden, for example, the narrator
reveals that
Nothing happened that night. It was the next
night that about one hundred and thirty thousand
people in Dresden would die. So it goes. Billy
dozed in the meat locker. He found himself en
gaged again, word for word, gesture for gesture,
in the argument with his daughter with which this
novel began.(142)
It is less painful for Billy to endure his daughter's
scolding than to endure the fire bombing once again.
Since Vonnegut has constructed Slaughterhouse-Five
with the fire bombing of Dresden at its center, all Billy's
time travel and memories are linked to it by what Freud
refers to as repression:
In the Id there is nothing corresponding to the
idea of time and (a thing which is very remark
able and awaits adequate attention in philosophic
thought) no alternation of mental processes by
the passage of time. Conative impulses which
have never got beyond the Id, and even impres
sions which have been pushed down into the Id
by repression, are virtually Immortal and are
preserved for whole decades as though they had
only recently occurred. . . . It is constantly
being borne in upon me that we have made far
too little use in our theory of the indubitable
fact that the repressed remains unaltered by the
passage of time. This seems to offer us the pos
sibility of an approach to some real profound
truths.9
According to Freud, the Id is the seat of man's primal
140
drives, especially his instinctual aggressive drive for
power. Since Vonnegut apparently links the fire bombing
of Dresden with what to him is the very problem posed by
man's seemingly unbounded proclivity for evil, it is quite
natural for him to try to have Billy repress such a memory
deep within his Id. Despite such efforts, however, even
his repressed thoughts are part of his stream of conscious
ness. Yet even while Billy's thoughts flow during his
sleep-like state, his memory of the actual Dresden bombing
is still too painful for him to face directly. Conse
quently, as the two following examples will show, Vonne
gut, by use of stream of consciousness, sensory impression,
and interior monologue, shows that all Billy's thoughts
lead indirectly, yet ultimately, to Dresden and the dis
turbing yet unanswerable question for him of why man
destroys and kills.
Billy begins one of his journeys through time as a
German prisoner of war about to be given a shower in
Dresden in 1944. When a German soldier turns on a master
valve, the water is like "scalding rain." It "jangled
Billy's skin without thawing the ice in the marrow of his
long bones."(73) This sensation of being showered with
hot water causes young Pilgrim to go back in time to his
infancy. Suddenly "He was a baby who had just been bathed
by his mother." In order to powder him, his mother takes
l4l
him into "a rosy room . . . filled with sunshine."(73)
The remembrance of that sunshine upon him causes Billy to
jump forward in time to a point when he is a "middle-aged
optometrist again, playing hacker's golf . .. on a blaz
ing summer Sunday morning."(73) When he bends down to
retrieve his golf ball safely trapped in the cup, Billy
suddenly travels in time to the moment he finds himself
trapped by the Tralfamadorians, "strapped to a yellow
contour chair . . . aboard a flying saucer, which was
bound for Tralfamadore."(73-74) The logic behind this time
shift appears to be his association of the word trapped.
A Tralfamadorian tells him that all men and all Tralfa
madorians are like bugs trapped in amber. "Only on Earth
is there any talk of free will."(74) Billy has moved from |
taking a shower in Dresden in 1944 to talking to aliens
on the planet Tralfamadore in 1967, but his focus is still
on man's inhumanity exemplified by the Dresden holocaust;
for when he ponders the question of human free will what
he really is asking is if man indeed does have free will,
what rationale can he possibly have to explain his actions
during war time, particularly his fire bombing of Dresden.
Lawrence Bowling, in an article entitled "What is
the Stream of Consciousness Technique?" points out that
a novelist may use either sensory impression or interior
monologue to reveal a character's mind:
142
In interior monologue, the mind is active; from
concrete sensory impressions, it works toward
abstract thoughts and ideas. In sensory impres
sion, the mind is more or less passive; it is
concerned merely with perceiving concerte sense
impressions. In reveries and dreams, the mind
seems to be in this same state, and the same
technique may be used in presenting these
imaginary sensory impressions.10
While the journey of Billy which we have just examined may
be classified as an example of sensory impression, some of
his more complicated trips defy classification; they are
not interior monologues by Bowling's definition, since
Billy’s mind remains passive throughout. In one such
trip, which we shall not examine, it is obvious that the
reader by studying Pilgrim's thought patterns is able to
infer something about Vonnegut's view of Dresden and human
suffering since this appears to be the proximate reason
that his protagonist's mind wanders. It is clear that
Billy is passive and believes he travels through time
simply because he has to do so. While Pilgrim does not
learn from his travels, perhaps Vonnegut hopes that his
readers will, to paraphrase the author's earlier reference
to Roethke's "The Waking," learn by going where they have
to go.
Billy Pilgrim is walking in a forest with his com
panion Roland Weary when he first comes "unstuck in time."
(37) Suddenly he finds himself a little boy with his
father at a YMCA pool. When his father tries to teach
143
him to swim by the sink-or-swim method, Billy sinks to the
bottom of the pool. He dimly senses somebody rescuing
him, and resents It.(35) Billy next jumps in time to 1965j
the day he visited his mother at "Pine Knoll, an old
people's home."(38) His mother summons all her strength
and whispers with great anguish to her son, "How did I
get so old?"(38) Immediately afterwards she passes out
and Billy goes to a waiting room where he finds himself
sitting on The Execution of Private Slovak, a book which
declared itself to be a "true account of the death before
an American firing squad of . . . the only American sol
dier to be shot for cowardice since the Civil War. ..."
(39) Billy reads in the book that according to a staff
judge advocate, Slovak
has directly challenged the authority of the gov
ernment, and the future discipline depends upon
a resolute reply to this challenge. If the death
penalty is ever to be Imposed for desertion, it
should be imposed in this case, not as a punitive
measure nor as retribution, but to maintain that
discipline upon which alone an army can succeed
against the enemy. There was no recommendation
for clemency in this case and none is here recom
mended. . . .(39)
At this point it may become clear to the reader that
Billy's journey through time is following a certain pat
tern, one based upon association of ideas rather than
association of sensations. Billy is perfectly helpless
while at the bottom of the swimming pool, just as helpless
as his mother who passes out after summoning all her
144
strength to ask one question; It Is this Idea of helpless
ness that links these two memories with the plight of
Private Slovak. Slovak was helpless before a government
that demanded that he obey orders without question, per
haps without thought. When Slovak pondered his plight
as a soldier during war time he became afraid and com
mitted an act of cowardice, for which the government
executed him. While the narrator can dismiss Slovak
with a Tralfamadorian "so it goes," Billy cannot; this
soldier's story reminds him, perhaps, that the fire bomb-
!
ing of Dresden was carried out by men who were just carry
ing out orders. Pilgrim jumps in time away from this un-
!
pleasant memory to a Little League banquet he attended I
with his son. A coach there declares, "I'd consider it
an honor just to be water boy for these kids." The logic
behind Billy's connection of Slovak and this exhilarated
coach is apparently precisely the attitude that Slovak's
government expects of him in Vonnegut's view. Billy's
next jump in time is based upon his association of the
word water, which the coach used, with a New Year's Eve
in which he persuaded a woman to come into the "laundry
room of the house and then sit there up on the gas dryer
which was running."(4l) Even this act is related to
Billy's experience in Dresden since it is an abhorrence
for human suffering caused by his observation of the fire
145
bombing there that results in his loveless marriage to
Valencia. The very fact it is a loveless union may ac
count for the fact at one point that Billy is in the
laundry room "being unfaithful to his wife, Valencia
for the first and only time."(4l) Since it is his only
transgression, it is still possible for him to retain
reader sympathy which, as was pointed out earlier is
necessary in Slaughterhouse-Flye since Billy's Dresden
experience, his desire to purge himself of such memories,
and his fixation on the human suffering he witnessed there
are essentially those of Vonnegut and are consequently the
very heart of the novel.
II
Even though Vonnegut's use of a narrator and his
manipulation of the novel's time scheme and aesthetic
distance make Slaughterhouse-Five a difficult book to
fully understand, his apparently strong identification
with Billy Pilgrim makes it necessary for him to utilize
these techniques. Perhaps the necessity for such a com
plex point of view can be better understood if one exam
ines Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which was
written just before Slaughterhouse-Five and tangentially
touches upon the same theme, the fire bombing of Dresden.
Vonnegut chooses to use a narrator whose very attitude
146
towards Eliot Rosewater Is ambivalent, fluctuating mar
kedly at times, especially when describing the young
millionaire's obsession with Dresden. As a result, there
is not always an adequate aesthetic distance and the
reader never really feels the same degree of empathy for
Eliot that he does for Billy Pilgrim. The key to Vonne
gut 's response to Eliot's character aberrations may be
his feelings about the fire bombing of Dresden; yet, these
feelings are only implicit, never explicit. The narrator
reveals that Eliot Rosewater is a young millionaire who
accidently killed three German firemen during World War II
when he mistook them for Nazi soldiers. He develops a
fixation on fire as a result of this traumatic experience
which lends itself quite easily later to his extreme re
sponse to the Dresden bombing. Because this fixation
goes virtually unnoticed, Eliot is released from his sani
tarium apparently cured of his shock. He marries a bril
liant, beautiful girl and takes charge of the Rosewater
Foundation. The reader probably has no difficulty accept
ing these events, but he becomes confused perhaps when he
learns that Eliot suddenly begins to feel vaguely discon
tented. The young millionaire begins to give money away
and to wander through the country exchanging his clothes
with the poor and visiting volunteer fire stations.
Finally he settles in Rosewater, Indiana, and dedicates
147
his life to giving the poor what many times is obviously
questionable help.
One would expect an omniscient point of view to
clarify, but in this novel it mystifies. The narrator
points out early in the novel that "Eliot was a sick man,
even then."(33) Why should he be sick? Apparently
Eliot's illness is linked to his preoccupation with fire
stations and firemen, but this is never made clear. One
learns that Eliot lies about being a fireman:
This was bunk about Eliot's having been a fireman.
The closest he had ever come to that was during
his annual childhood visits to Rosewater County,
the family fief. Sycophants among the townies
had flattered little Eliot by making him
of the Volunteer Fire Department of Rosewater.
He had never fought a fire.(32)
Why should Eliot love firemen and the poor of Rosewater
county to such an extent? Is the reader to admire him
for such sentiments? The narrator does not directly
answer these questions, but he presents spokesmen and then
comments on their statements. Eliot's wife, Sylvia, for
example, declares that "Eliot is right to do what he's
doing. It's beautiful what he's doing. I'm simply not
strong enough or good enough to be by his side any more.
The fault is mine."(67) The reader cannot accept this
statement at face value, however, because the narrator
has already warned him that Sylvia's mental illness has
148
given her a distinctly new personality, the third
since her marriage to Eliot. The core of this
third personality was a feeling of worthlessness,
of shame at being revolted by the poor and by
Eliot's personal hygiene, and a suicidal with to
ignore her revulsions, to get back to Rosewater,
to very soon die in a good cause.(66)
Does her insanity mean that her statement is not true?
The puzzled reader can only compare it with that of
Kilgore Trout, Eliot's favorite science fiction writer
and a man who, the narrator reveals, "never tried to tell
anything but the truth."(186) Trout tells Eliot:
Your devotion to volunteer fire departments is
very sane, too, Eliot, for they are, when the
alarm goes off, almost the only examples of en
thusiastic unselfishness to be seen in this land.
They rush to the rescue of any human being, and
count not the cost. The most contemptible man
in town, should his contemptible house catch fire,
will see his enemies put the fire out. And, as
he pokes through the ashes for remains of his
contemptible possessions, he will be comforted
and pitied by no less than the Fire Chief.(211)
If this is true, then Eliot is to be lauded. Sylvia's
psychiatrist diagnoses Eliot as insane, however, and de
clares that he is "bringing his sexual energies" to
Utopia.(87) If Eliot is indeed channeling all his sexual
drives into altruistic activity, this would explain his
apparent Impotence, a subject so sensitive that he and
Sylvia only refer to it indirectly. Vonnegut's feelings
concerning fire and thus indirectly the fire bombing of
Dresden are such that he seems compelled to cloud Eliot's
character in a mist of ambivalence. In the most important
149
scene In the novel, the narrator reveals that Eliot had
a book hidden in his office, and it was a mystery even
to him
. . . why he should hide it, why he should feel
guilty every time he got it out, why he should
be afraid of being caught reading it. His feel
ings about the book were those of a weak-willed
puritan with respect to pornography, yet no book
could be more Innocent of eroticism than the book
he hid. It was called The Bombing of Germany. . . .
And the passage Eliot would read over andover
again, his features blank, his palms sweating, was
this description of the fire-storms of Dresden. . . .
(200)
After reading a detailed description of the effect of the
fire bombing, Eliot
beheld the fire-storm of Indianapolis. He was
awed by the majesty of the column of fire, which
was at least eight miles in diameter and fifty
miles high. The boundaries of the column seemed
absolutely sharp and unwavering as though made of
glass. Within the boundaries, helixes of dull red
embers turned in stately harmony about an inner
core of white. The white seemed holy.(201)
After Eliot has spent a year in a sanitarium, he
regains his memory and realizes that the garden he is in
"in downtown Indianapolis could not have survived the fire
he saw. So there had been no fire. He accepted this
peacefully."(204) Eliot's illness is thus very much
linked centrally to fire, and firemen, and incidentally
to the fire bombing of Dresden. Why should he act as if
he were reading pornography when he reads about the Dresden
bombing? Even more significant, why should he link Indi
anapolis with a fire storm resembling Dresden's? The
150
narrator never provides answers because Vonnegut appar
ently feels the need to be ambivalent. He never even
clarifies the last scene In the novel when Eliot, with a
"Madonna’s smile," raises his "tennis racket as though It
were a magic wand" and adopts fifty-seven children with
the instructions for them that they "be fruitful and
multiply."(217) The metaphors would suggest that the
narrator is implying that Eliot is a Messiah figure or
at least thinks he is, but he does not re-enter Eliot's
mind at this point to reveal Vonnegut's own sentiments.
Apparently Vonnegut involuntarily associates Eliot's
fixation on firemen with the fire in Dresden and with
the need to ameliorate human suffering. Eliot devotes
himself completely to easing the suffering of the poor
in Rosewater County, yet when he leaves he does not "miss
it."(199) A possible explanation to the paradox is that
Eliot is schizophrenic in much the same way many of Vonne
gut's other protagonists are. As was pointed out in chap
ter three, part of Eliot may feel a strong desire to re
lieve the human suffering caused by man's inhumanity to
his fellow man. As in the case of Billy Pilgrim, the
fire bombing of Dresden may symbolize this inhumanity
to Eliot. Another part of Eliot, however, may be repelled
by what he finds in Rosewater, Indiana. The narrator
points out that although Eliot refuses to recognize the
151
fact, the town really consists of "shithouses, shacks,
alcoholism, ignorance, idiocy and perversion. . . ."(51)
Of all Vonnegut's novels, God Bless You, Mr. Rose-
water is probably his most ambivalent. It is the most
difficult to understand precisely because of Vonnegut's
feelings about Dresden, crucial to an understanding of
Eliot Rosewater, are never developed. Because of this
lack of development, the reader does not know how much to
empathize with Eliot, whether to scorn him as a madman or
embrace him as a saint. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut
solves the problem of how to present his feelings about
Dresden by using an implied author and probing Billy
Pilgrim's mind with a modified form of stream of conscious
ness. As a result, the reader knows Billy Pilgrim, his
thoughts and motivation, while he can only remain puzzled
by the enigmatic Eliot Rosewater.
152
FOOTNOTES
■^Robert Scholes, "Slaughterhouse-Five," The New York
Times Book Review, April 6, 1969* sec. 7, p. 1.
2Walter Jackson Bate, "Negative Capability," In
Keats: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Walter Jack-
son Bate (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall,
1964), p. 66.
^Mark Schorer, "Technique as Discovery," in The Theory
of the Novel, ed. Philip Stevick (New York: The Free
Press, 1957), p. 75.
4
Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 75.
5
Wilfred Sheed, "Requiem to Billy Pilgrim's Progress,"
Life LXVI (March 21, 1969), p. 9.
6
Elizabeth Wright, The Pilgrim's Progress: Chapter
Notes and Criticism (New York: American R. D. M. Cor-
poration, 1966), p. 27.
^Edward Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory
(London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 109.
^Dayton Kohler, "Time and the Modern Novel," College
English, X (October, 1948), 16.
^Hans Myerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley: Uni
versity of California Press, 1955), p. 58.
i
Lawrence Edward Bowling, "What is the Stream of
| Consciousness Technique?" in Critical Approaches to
1 Fiction, ed. Shiv K. Kumar and Keith McKean (New York:
| McGraw-Hill, 1961), p. 361.
CHAPTER V
THE WORLD PICTURE OP KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
A close study of Kurt Vonnegut's fiction, particu
larly his four most recent novels, will reveal his cosmic
view if Marshall McLuhan's thesis that often the medium
is the message is applied. In chapter four we speculated
that Vonnegut's intense personal feelings regarding the
fire bombing of Dresden during World War II apparently
compelled him to utilize a very complex point of view
in his two "Dresden" novels. In this chapter we shall
examine how Vonnegut's interest in the epistemological
question of mankind's ability or inability to perceive
I
reality is reflected in the narrative structure of j
Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, j
and Slaughterhouse-Five. By a close study of these novels^
it will become apparent that Vonnegut's cosmic view is
basically pragmatic and pluralistic.
Howard Campbell, Jr., the protagonist of Mother
Night, is a playwright and Nazi war criminal who has a !
|
great deal of difficulty distinguishing between reality j
and mere illusion. When he learns that his wife Helga
is dead, Howard declares "There goes the whole play about
153
154
Helga and me, 'Nation of Two,' . . . because I missed my
cue for the great suicide scene. . . . I admire form . . .
things with a beginning, a middle, end— and wherever pos
sible, a moral too."(l4l) He brushes aside the suggestion
that Helga might still be alive, and declares, "The play
is over."(l4l) This is not true, however, for the entire
novel is constructed as a "play within a play." Although
Mother Night is purportedly Howard's autobiography and he
narrates it with what appears to be a great deal of candor,
in reality, rather than face what he perceives to be the
truth about the dark "Mother Night" forces at work within
himself he becomes schizophrenic and constructs a modern
version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in which one part of I
him plays a Nazi while the other part plays an "honest j
man . . . hid so deep inside."(31) Because of Campbell's j
self-deception, it is often dangerous to accept what he I
I
says at face value. At one point, for example, he sees a
very clear distinction between another Nazi war criminal, j
I
Adolph Eichmann, and himself: !
My case is different. I always know when I tell J
a lie, am capable of imagining the cruel conse- j
quences of anybody's believing my lies, know j
cruelty wrong. I would no more lie without |
noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a j
kidney stone.(126)
|
Unfortunately Campbell does not know when he is acting and
when he is telling the truth. When he surrenders to
Dr. Epstein, the young Jewish physician declares with
155
great exasperation that "It's all play-acting. . . . It
proves nothing."(194) Just before his trial in Israel
Howard learns that Kraft believes he should not be held
responsible for his actions since he Is "a political idiot,
an artist who could not distinguish between reality and
dreams."(198)
-This difficulty in distinguishing between reality
and illusion may very well be the theme of Mother Night
and of all Vonnegut's novels. Vonnegut's moral for Mother
Night which he reveals in his introduction would seem to
|
reinforce such an hypothesis: "We are what we pretend to j
i
be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
(v) Campbell Is a playwright. To say he is a writer "is
to say that the demands of art alone were enough to make
him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it."(ix)
Hence, it is very easy for him to delude himself. He
becomes schizophrenic and smugly observes the Nazi part
of himself, secure in the knowledge that he is really
virtuous deep inside. But in Mother Night Vonnegut is
1
concerned with more than the schism within Campbell; he
is probing mankind's similar difficulty in distinguishing
ireality and truth from appearance and fantasy.
Since Campbell is not only the narrator of Mother
Night, but also a playwright, an artist who uses his
imagination to construct a more pleasant world, it is very
156
difficult to determine what Is real In his universe. The
very fact that this Nazi war criminal Is comforted by his
apparent Imaginative transformation of the real world Into
a morality play of sorts suggests that Vonnegut assumes
here a philosophic stance that closely resembles the prag
matic pluralism of William James. In Pragmatism, James
wrote
What we say about reality thus depends on the per
spective In which we throw it. The 'that' of it
is its own; but the 'what' depends on the 'which'
and the 'which' depends on us. Both the sensa
tional and the relational parts of reality are
dumb; they say absolutely nothing about themselves.
We it is who have to speak for them. . . . We re
ceive in short the block of marble, but we curve
(sic) the statue ourselves.1
In carving the sensational and relational parts of his
marble block of reality, Howard Campbell, Jr. tries his
utmost to rationalize away his feelings of guilt caused by
both his actions as a Nazi and his realization that the
sinister forces of "Mother Night" are a very real part of
man's very nature. As is the case with all Vonnegut's pro
tagonists, Campbell lives in a pluralistic universe in
which it is impossible to determine just what is real.
The reader can never completely resolve the disparity
between Howard's actions and thoughts and his view of
reality perhaps most succinctly summarized in his state
ment that it is his world rather than himself that is
diseased.(194) There is, however, one touchstone that
157
can be applied to Campbell's actions— William James's
conception that in a pluralistic universe
evil, whenever it occurs becomes the occasion for
acting; it poses a task to be performed, a defect
to be removed, a situation to be improved. Plural
ism therefore, finds immediate pragmatic verifica
tion in moral experience.2
Howard pragmatically eases his pain by assuming the role
of spectator and observing his two identities, represent
ing evil and goodness, perform in a morality play. At
first glance Campbell's actions would appear to fail
James's test for they bring him more pain than comfort.
He declares as the novel concludes that he will "hang
Howard W. Campbell, Jr. for crimes against himself."(202)
Yet, since Vonnegut apparently conceives of a pluralistic
universe, it is impossible to know if Campbell's statement
is a sincere one. Admittedly, he has failed in his attemptj
i
to construct a reality for himself that is both aesthet
ically pleasing (a play possessing a beginning, a middle,
an end, and a moral) and morally palatable. What, then,
i
is real in Mother Night? For the pluralist "reality is
l
known through a number, potentially infinite, of systems
of knowledge. Each of these systems reveals the essence
3
of reality from its point of view." Thus, in order to
discover what is real, it is necessary to reconcile a
number of different views of reality even though some of
these may be contradictory. Because of difficulty inherent
158
In such an approach, T. S. Chang has gone so far in his
study, Epistemological Pluralism, to declare that "the
external world is relatively, though not absolutely un-
„4
knowable. While Campbell's reality is not verified by
his experience, Vonnegut does not suggest what is actually
real in this novel, but instead clouds it in an ambivalent
mist. Is Campbell, for example, no better than Eichmann
and Dr. Jones, or is he, as Kraft suggests, innocent by
virtue of his "inability to distinguish between reality
and dreams."?(198) The very form of Mother Night suggests
that reality is unknowable since the novel's narrative
structure leads the reader through the complex maze of
Campbell's mind, only on the final page to deposit him
in a corner facing a blank wall.
Vonnegut's next novel, Cat's Cradle, is his most
detailed treatment of this epistemological problem, and
in it he once again appears to be presenting a pragmatic
approach to a pluralistic universe. Its very title sug
gests the difficulty in distinguishing between appearance
and reality. Just as in the case of Mother Night, the
medium of Cat1s Cradle is its message. It contains a
series of short, one-page chapters composed of aphorisms.
While these chapters are not in verse, they closely re-
5
semble The Books of Bokononj in fact, it concludes with
what we are told is the very last sentence of The Books of
159
Bokonon. Since Cat1s Cradle is narrated by John, a
Bokononist, and deals with his conversion to that philos
ophy, in a sense it is actually a "Book of Bokonon" and
consequently its reliability is suspect, especially since
Bokonon's book begins with the statement that "Nothing in
this book is true."(5) Since Vonnegut loves to play word
games, it is possible that "Bokonon" may very well be a
pun for Sir Francis Bacon. If this is true, then such a
reference actually reinforces the epistemological theme
of this novel. Sir Francis Bacon's very first aphorism
in his Novum Organum is that "Man as the minister and
interpreter of nature does and understands as much as his
observations on the order of nature . . . permit him; and
g
neither knows or is capable of more." Also, he very
severely denounces what he terms "idols," which can be
defined as "a picture taken for reality, a thought mis-
7
taken for a thing." In formulating the doctrine of
Bokononism, Vonnegut appears to have reacted to Bacon's
concern for what is real, his distaste for mere illusion,
and this Renaissance philosopher's consistent defense of
science, particularly in the New Atlantis where science
governs a utopia. Bokononism is a man-centered philosophy
that is based on the need for both human love and self-
deception in a world where scientists relentlessly turn
seeming reality into mere illusion; in fact, Dr. Francis
160
Hoenikker virtually destroys the world by changing the
very molecular formula for water.
If man cannot even believe in the formula of wa ter,
what can he believe in? Bokonon replies that man himself
is sacred,(173) and that there is a God directing human
destiny. He does not warn "against a person's trying to
discover the limits of his karess and the nature of the
work God Almighty has had it do" but he does observe "that
j
such investigations are bound to be incomplete."(15) John, |
j
the novel's narrator, meets a scientist who declares that j
his firm engages in pure research because "New knowledge j
is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth
we have to work with the richer we become."(43) John then
tells the reader that "Had I been a Bokononist then, that
statement would have made me howl."(43) A Bokononist would
find this statement ludicrous since man cannot know or
understand the world around him. In a sense this scientist
is taking a very pragmatic view of knowledge and truth,
since he feels that his company will reap tangible benefits
from its pure research. But just as in the case of Howard
W. Campbell, Jr., and his schizophrenia, William James
would deny the validity of such a premise since both cases
result in disaster— a proposed suicide and the freezing of
the entire Earth. John does not howl at Bokonon's philo
sophically pragmatic solution to mankind's plight even
l6l
though it certainly in many ways closely resembles Camp
bell's schizophrenia. Vonnegut reveals that Bokonon and
his partner McCabe decided that the only way to keep the
unhappy, poverty-stricken natives of San Lorenzo from
staging a revolution was to create a religion, Bokononism,
and then outlaw it and its founder. Then
the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city
and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so,
too did the happiness of the people grow. They
were all employed full time as actors in a play
they understood, that any human being anywhere
could understand and applaud.
'So life became a work of art,' . . . (144)
Bokonon, like Campbell, transformed life into a work
of art, a morality play; while Campbell's "work of art" is
linked to his insanity, his schizophrenia, Bokonon played
the role of a saint and also "became, for all practical
purposes, insane."(145) Yet, while both men are insane,
only Bokonon is aware that he lies. He writes in The Books
of Bokonon that
I wanted all things
To seem to make some sense,
So we all could be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise.(109)
i
The citizens of San Lorenzo practice Bokononism and thus
iio create a paradise of sorts, a lotus land where love
1
;takes the natives' minds off their hunger and disease.
162
Since Vonnegut reveals that Bokonon became insane while
writing his Books of Bokonon, it is difficult to deter
mine whether his "morality play" is like Campbell's merely
motivated by a selfish plan for survival, or whether in
his insanity this "saint" pragmatically wrote his "bitter
sweet lies"(13) in order to improve man's lot. It appears
the latter is the case, however, since in his writings
Bokonon labels the very conception of a nation a "granfal-
loon," a "seeming team" that is "meaningless in terms of
the ways God gets things done."(82) Does Bokonon's phil
osophy then pass the pragmatic tests of "leading to the
„8
fittest response to the environment" and being verifiable
9
in moral experience? John, the narrator of Cat'3 Cradle
and a Bokononist, would argue that it does because it
enables him to transform himself from a chain-smoking,
twice-divorced alcoholic into a devout man who has a
Bokononist "vision of the unity of every second of all
time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind,
all wandering children."(67) Yet the same Bokonon who
preaches a philosophy of love, the boko-maru ritual in
which two people mingle their souls by rubbing their
soles together, also kills thousands of his worshippers
by telling them that they should commit suicide by put
ting ice-nine on their tongues and thus freezing. Thus,
while Bokonon's results cannot be justified, even his
163
motives are questionable since Vonnegut invokes a plural
ism of viewpoints.
Bokonon loses his sanity when he is constantly com
pelled to live a lie; as a result, perhaps, he is obsessed
with the paradoxical conception of truthful lies. This
obsession may account for his destruction of his worship
pers. Many of his ideas cannot be easily discounted, how
ever, for there must be some reasons why almost everyone
in Cat1s Cradle is a devout Bokononist. One very good
reason for Bokononism's popularity is its conception of
man's role in a pluralistic universe. Such a view closely
parallels that of William James who firmly stated his
belief that
We are external parts of God and not external
creations, on any possible reading of the pan-
psychic system. Yet because God is not the
absolute, but is himself a part when the system
is conceived pluralistically, his functions can
be taken as not wholly dissimilar to those of
the other small parts— as similar to our func
tions consequently.10
Since Bokonon conceives of such a universe, it is not dif
ficult to see how he can speak of man as sacred (173); he
is sacred because he is an integral part of the same system
as God. While such a view is comforting, just as comfort-
I
j ing is Bokonon's suggestion that though man constantly
wonders "why,"(150) he should not waste his time trying to
distinguish between truth and illusion, appearance and
164
reality, since the world often will appear meaningless to
him because of his very nature. Newt, an artist and a
Bokononist, paints a picture which depicts "the meaning
less of it all."(l40) It is a picture of a cat's cradle,
the symbol in this novel of the difficulty of distinguish
ing illusion from reality. John, since he is a writer,
is a careful observer of the world around him, but he
comes to realize the validity of Bokonon's message. When
he observes the world from his beautiful hotel room in
San Lorenzo, he can only see the Boulevard of the Hundred
Martyrs to Democracy (San Lorenzo's one paved street), the
Monzano Airport, and Bolivar Harbor. These show places
are only an illusion of the real San Lorenzo for "The Casa
Mona was built like a bookcase, with solid sides and back
and a front of blue-green glass. The squalor and misery
of the city, being to the sides and back of the Casa Mona
were impossible to see."(13l) How does man know if he is
similarly blinded and thus unable to distinguish reality
from illusion? When, for example, Newt writes to John, he
declares that "Actually, I am a very lucky person and I
know it. I am about to marry a wonderful little girl.
There is love enough in this world for everybody, if
people will just look. I am proof of that."(26) In
reality, Newt is not loved by a "wonderful little girl,"
but exploited by a Russian spy old enough to be his mother.
165
Similarly, John’s relationship with Mona is also decep
tive. He observes that
the mirage of what it would be like to be loved
by Mona Aamons Monzano had become a tremendous
force in my meaningless life. I imagined that
she could make me far happier than any woman
had so far succeeded in doing.77
John subsequently realizes that he can never discover the
truth about the alluring Mona. He is doomed to ponder
forever the question of whether she represents "the highest
form of female spirituality" or is, in fact, "anesthetized,
frigid— a cold fish, . . . a dazed addict of the xylophone,
the cult of beauty, and boko-maru."(190)
Rather than try to resolve this dichotomy between
appearance and reality, John becomes a Bokononist and
accepts the fact that he will be unable to make that
distinction. Perhaps the main reason why he undertakes
his course of action is his philosophy of art, his theory
that "when a man becomes a writer, . . . he takes on a
sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and
comfort at top speed."(189) In light of the fact that he
holds such views, it is quite natural that he should ex-
1
press great admiration for Bokonon since this black saint
and author of The Books of Bokonon not only made his life
"a work of art," but he also brought comfort of a sort to
the natives of San Lorenzo. It does work for John who
j finds solace in its "bittersweet lies." The comfort it
166
offers him, though, Is simply the advice that any attempt
to gain epistemological knowledge Is futile. Armed with
his Books of Bokonon, John is still helpless, unable to
save mankind from annihilation and unable to summon his
God for help. Vonnegut, when asked recently about his
conception of Jonah, the Messiah, and God as they are
drawn in his fiction, replied that he found it "very hard
to believe" that "God wants things."11 He went on to
point out that "Awful things, of course, are commonly
12
perpetrated because some crook says God wants them."
It should be quite apparent at this point just how the
medium of Cat's Cradle is the message. Not only is the
novel in a sense a "Book of Bokonon" written by a Bokon
onist, but more significantly,.it is a "cat's cradle" in
which it is impossible to distinguish reality from illusion,
Vonnegut never explains whether Bokonon is a mere crook
who says "God wants things," or whether God is really
concerned with man's destiny and constructs karasses and
wampeteers to guide him. If as Vonnegut suggests in his
letter, the God in his fictional universe does not care
about things, then man cannot, like Jonah, passively await
divine action, but must actively seek to improve his
Ninevehs, his San Lorenzos and Ilium, New Yorks.
! In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut's next
novel, such is indeed the case. Eliot Rosewater
167
consciously sets out to improve the spiritual and physical
condition of the citizens of Rosewater, Indiana, his own
personal version of Nineveh which consists of "shithouses,
shacks, alcoholism, idiocy and perversion."(51) Just as
in Mother Night and Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut once again
takes as his central theme the "cat's cradle" nature of a
pluralistic universe, the great difficulty in distinguish
ing between reality and illusion. He has so equally
weighted opposing views of reality that it is impossible
to determine the real nature of Eliot Rosewater.
Just as Howard Campbell, Jr., and John react to un
pleasant guilt feelings and intolerable environments by
seeking comfort, in one case through schizophrenic play
acting and in the other through the "bittersweet lies"
of an insane prophet, Eliot also seeks comfort. While he
ostensibly goes to Rosewater, Indiana, to "love . . .
discarded Americans> even though they're useless and unat
tractive, "(4?) his real reason is to ameliorate his op
pressive burden of guilt— the guilt he feels for his unin
tentional murder of his mother in a sailing accident, his
accidental murder of three unarmed German firemen during
World War II, and his strange feelings concerning the fire
bombing of Dresden. Eliot's perplexing preoccupation
with the Dresden holocaust apparently is a result of
j Vonnegut's intense personal feelings regarding it, and
168
the resulting problems of aesthetic distancing have al
ready been discussed in chapter four. Although Eliot's
actions are pragmatically motivated, it ' impossible to
apply James's test of verifiability since it is never
clear whether this self-confessed "tin-horn saint" is
doing more harm than good. The novel's very title "God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine" affords
an excellent example of the equipoise found between two
opposing views of reality. The phrase, "God Bless You,
Mr. Rosewater," refers to the sincere expression of grati
tude Eliot receives from one of his "clients."(74) It
also refers to Fred Rosewater's statement that financially
secure widows thank him by declaring, "I don't know how
the children and I can ever thank you enough for what
you've done. God bless you, Mr. Rosewater."(122) Since
poor Fred's statement comes at a time when he is desper
ately trying to sell an Insurance policy to a prospective
client, it is questionable whether or not he is telling
the truth. Similarly, the phrase, "Pearls Before Swine,"
refers not only to a statement by a young orphan girl,
'but also to a passage in the Bible. Selena Deal is dis-
!
!turbed by the hypocrisy and stupidity she finds among the
jrich of Pisquontuit, Rhode Island. She writes to the head
jof her orphanage that, "Maybe I am just too wicked and
j
|dumb to realize how wonderful Pisquontuit really is.
169
Maybe this is a case of pearls before swine, but I don't
see how."(158) Is Selena merely an ignorant girl who
should be grateful for her treatment by the wealthy
Buntlines, or is she making a valid point about America's
aristocracy, the same thesis Eliot Rosewater expounds in
his will? The reader must decide for himself, for Vonne
gut remains mute. The Biblical reference is even more
perplexing. Matthew exhorts that man should "Give not
that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your
pearls before swine, less they trample them under their
feet and turn again and rend you."1^ Is Vonnegut implying
that Eliot's efforts to bestow love are futile because the
citizens of Rosewater, Indiana, are mere dogs and swine
who are incapable of appreciation? Such an interpreta
tion would be consistent with Kilgore Trout's statement
that "Thanks to the example of Eliot Rosewater, millions
upon millions of people may learn to love and help whom
ever they see."(213) But just how reliable a spokesman
is Trout? Vonnegut reveals that this science fiction
writer had "never tried to tell anything but the truth."
1 / \
|(212) It Is not clear despite his noble intentions to
j just what degree he does see reality, for at another point
j in the novel Vonnegut explains that "what Trout had in
I common with pornography wasn't sex but fantasies of an
I
!impossibly hospitable world."(29)
170
Trout's ambivalence is symptomatic of a pattern in
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Neatly balanced against the
evidence that Eliot should be lauded as a saint, Vonnegut
presents equally formidable data that indicates that Eliot
Rosewater is insane and unable to distinguish illusion
from reality. It must be remembered that Eliot, like
Howard Campbell, Jr., John, and Bokonon before him, is
an artist; in his case he seeks to "paint with love and
understanding" Rosewater County itself.(49) Yet, Vonnegut
reveals to the reader at one point that Eliot does not
even understand the nature of the very people he "helps."
While he considers them to be "the same sorts of people
who, in generations past, had cleared the forests, drained
the swamps, built the bridges,-people whose sons formed
the background of the infantry in times of war," they are
in reality "a lot weaker than that--and dumber too."(69)
There is a similar disparity between Eliot's view of
reality and that of his father. Young Rosewater appar
ently takes as his motto a poem by Blake:
! The Angel
I that presides
I o'er my
| birth said,
j 'Little creature,
j formed of
« Joy and Mirth
I Go love
j without the
j help of
j any thing
j on Earth.'(64)
171
Eliot thus sees himself as a noble, unselfish man on a
quest singlehandedly to bring love to his "clients." But
is this an honest appraisal or an example of self-decep
tion? Senator Rosewater counters his son’s claims with
j another Blake poem:
Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease;
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.(65)
If this poem is an accurate assessment, then Eliot's love
is actually narcissistic and he revels in the almost God
like devotion he evokes from the rabble.
No better example can be found of the "cat's cradle"
quality of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the inherent im
possibility of distinguishing reality from illusion, than
this novel's very last scene. Standing in the tranquil
I
garden of Dr. Brown's private mental hospital, Eliot raises
his tennis racket like a "magic wand" and with a "Madonna's
smile" upon his face he declares that as for the children
j of the fifty-six women who falsely accused him of being
;the father, "let their names be Rosewater from this moment
|
jon. And tell them that their father loves them, no matter
t
I what they may turn out to be. . . . And tell them . . . to
I
I be fruitful and multiply."(217) Since we have discussed
|this passage in previous chapters, suffice it to say at
|this point that it is unclear whether Eliot is a saint
ireplete with magic wand and Madonna's smile, a madman
172
still recuperating in a hospital after a complete nervous
breakdown, or a sane, repentant man who sees the damage
he has done his "clients" and seeks to rectify it by one
last completely unselfish act. Such an ambivalent passage
is typical of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a novel in
which Eliot is not the only character who has trouble
distinguishing reality from illusion. Just as John
strives in Cat's Cradle to believe in the nobility and
meaningfulness of "individual heroic acts,"(229) only to
be advised by Bokonon that such thoughts are illusory,
Fred Rosewater righteously proclajjns that
This is America; And America is one place in
this sorry world where people shouldn't have
to apologize for being poor. The question in
America should be, 'Is this guy a good citizen?
Is he honest? Does he pull his own weight?'(166)
To further show the wisdom inherent in such values, he
then opens a manuscript that purports to tell the story
of the Rhode Island Rosewaters only to discover that "the
manuscript was hollow. Termites had eaten the heart out •
I
of the history. They were still there, maggotty blue-grey j
|
eating away."(167) It is not clear whether Fred's belief
in a democratic America is similarly illusory or whether,
I
i in fact, the termites symbolize the emptiness and rotten-
!
| ness of such values or of the forces that have destroyed
j them. What, precisely, is real?
173
In Vonnegut's novels, particularly his four most
recent, his protagonists have become progressively less
able to cope with their environments and less able to
answer this question, less able to distinguish reality
from illusion in an increasingly disjointed universe.
While Howard Campbell, Jr. is unable to sustain the
fantasy of his internal morality play and feels compelled
to commit suicide when he realizes the extent of his self-
deception, John consciously turns his back on what he once
considered reality when he converts to Bokononism. While
the very construction of both Cat1s Cradle and God Bless
You, Mr. Rosewater with the equipoise of opposing view
points makes it impossible to decide what is real in
either novel, Eliot Rosewater is far more complex a
character than John because of his role. While John is
primarily the observer, Eliot is the observed.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut's most recent novel,
once again the epistemological question of what is real
j is paramount. The medium is certainly the message in
|this case since the novel is so constructed that it is
impossible not only to distinguish whether or not what
|Billy Pilgrim sees is real, but it is also impossible to
jdetermine where he is precisely in time and space. The
I
I only thing that we know is real is Billy Pilgrim's mind,
jand it is through the dimly lit corridors of this
17^
labyrinth that Vonnegut guides his readers. Since Billy's
experiences during World War II are just as meaningful
and perhaps more meaningful to him than his experiences
in the present (1968), his mind projects all his memories
with the same illumination as his present-day discussions
with his daughter Barbara.
Earlier in this chapter we referred to the plural
istic nature of Vonnegut's universe in which reality
consists of the yoking together of seemingly irrecon
cilable points of view. It is interesting to note that
in 1932 T. S. Chang speculated in Eplstemologlcal Plural
ism that "there are no such things as space and time in
the external world, for they are only our determinations
14
to condition sensible experience." It Is quite clear
that in Slaughterhouse-Five we are dealing with Billy's
sensible experiences and that the form of the novel Is
not based on chronology, but on the stream of conscious
ness of the human mind. That Vonnegut considers clock
time to be merely arbitrary is apparent from his statement
that while he was on a plane "Somebody was playing with
the clocks. . . . There was nothing I could do about it.
j As an Earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said--
| and calendars."(18) What Billy learns on Tralfamadore
I reinforces this argument. He discovers that "It is just
| an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows
175
another one, like beads on a string, and that once a
moment is gone it is gone forever."(23) The sheer arbi
trariness of man's conception of cause and effect is
apparent in Billy's experience while viewing an old war
movie. Suddenly he "came slightly unstuck in time, and
saw the late movie backwards. . . ."(63) With the laws
of causality destroyed, life appears meaningless, even
absurd to Billy's human eyes. The Tralfamadorian view
of life is comforting since it reassures man that life
does have meaning. A Tralfamadorian tells Billy that
Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining
why this event is structured as it is, telling
how other events may be achieved or avoided. . . .
All time is all time. It does not change. It
does not lend itself to warnings or explanations.
It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you
will find that we are all, as I've said before,
bugs in amber. . . . Only on Earth is there any
talk of free will. (7*0
Vonnegut is careful to keep the reality of Tralfa-
madore as much in doubt as the sanity of Eliot Rosewater
in the last scene of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. At
■ — — ......... r ... 1 ■ — ■ 1 - ■ ■ ....
one point he tells his readers that Billy's time travel is
true (135)j yet he also reveals that for both Billy and
Eliot Rosewater science fiction was a big help in their
j efforts to "reinvent themselves and their universe."(87)
| Young Pilgrim hears his good friend Eliot tell a psychi-
| atrist that, "I think you guys are going to have to come
j up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't
176
going to want to go on living."(88) It Is never clear
whether Tralfamadore exists or whether it is merely a
"wonderful new lie," a close relative of the Bokononist
"bittersweet lie." Since Slaughterhouse-Five uses the
stream-of-consciousness method, Vonnegut never has to
break this state of dynamic equilibrium, since Billy's
mind is not concerned with epistemological distinctions
and records his Tralfamadorian memories as vividly as his
much more mundane war experiences. Billy finds the Tral
famadorian philosophy seductive, much the same way as
Bokononism is, since both offer comfort of a sort. Like
John in Cat's Cradle, Billy is tempted to accept the
Tralfamadorian/Bokononist view that it is impossible for
man to understand human existence. But to accept such a
philosophy he would amost have to be a machine like the
Tralfamadorians for this doctrine does not have any room
for human compassion or love. In chapter four we dis
cussed how Vonnegut's difficulties in adequately distanc-
! ing himself from Billy and the fire bombing of Dresden
j apparently resulted in his creation of an implied author.
This persona narrates eight of the novel's ten chapters
| and is much more attracted to this Tralfamadorian theory
I
j than either Billy or Vonnegut is. Billy Pilgrim is not
S a machine, and it is precisely because he is human and
|
| feels compassion for the people of Dresden that he becomes
177
unstuck in time and directs his thoughts toward that
holocaust which remains the center of the novel.
Fated to continually revisit the memories contained
in the catacombs of his mind, Billy searches for the
lesson, if any, to be learned from the Dresden firebombing.
Vonnegut indicates that since "Billy cried very little,
though he often saw things worth crying about, . . . in
that respect, at least, he resembles the Christ of the
carol: 'The cattle are lowing,/ The Baby awakes./ But
the little Lord Jesus/ No crying He makes.'"(170) Is
Billy Pilgrim a Christ figure who, like Eliot Rosewater,
seeks to love mankind, or is he a naive child, a baby,
who is awakened by the fire bombing of Dresden to the
harsh reality of a world in which man without love or
compassion might just as well be Tralfamadorian machines,
for at least if they were machines their actions could be
j more easily explained?
There are no easy answers to these questions. If
Vonnegut has constructed his novels so that appearance
and reality, truth and illusion, exist in equipoise, what
then can be said about his cosmic view? His very ambiva
lence suggests that he conceives of a pluralistic universe
j in which God, if he does exist, is not absolute but finite
| with limited powers. True reality, if it does exist at
I all, can never really be known since it consists of the
178
svun total of all individual points of view. Man does not
have a panoramic enough view to determine whether, for
example, either the views of Eliot Rosewater or of Senator
Rosewater are closer to reality. Given such a universe,
the best man can do is to try to survive by being prag
matic, by applying a moral test to help him decide his
course of action. In chapter three we discussed the
pattern of schizophrenia In Vonnegut's fiction, the fact
that his protagonists tend to split their personalities
and become schizophrenic as a defense mechanism to pro
tect themselves from unpleasant thoughts and environmental
conditions. Since their motives are shrouded in ambiva
lence, however, it is exceedingly difficult to determine
in many cases which identity is more real and thus whether
or not their pragmatic approaches work. It is virtually
impossible, for example, to know whether Eliot Rosewater's
last altruistic deed is a realistic attempt to solve a
very real social problem or merely one more fantasy.
Although Vonnegut appears to feel that man can never
| adequately distinguish reality from illusion, truth from
j fantasy, he is not a nihilist; he believes passionately
in both the importance of the individual and the need for
human love and compassion. In chapter two we saw that
i Vonnegut opposes any institution, be it scientific, re-
: ligious, or political, that dehumanizes man and considers
179
him a mere number and not a human being. In Slaughter
house-Five he condemns war for the very same reason; it
tends to make people "the listless playthings of enormous
forces" and discourages them from "being characters."'
(140-141) While it is important that man be an individual,
it is equally important that he feel love and compassion
for his fellow humans since otherwise he may fall prey to
the dangers of a voracious egotism as seen in the case of
Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
If man finds it too difficult to love his fellow
man, the senseless mob in Player Plano, the ignorant,
greedy citizens in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, he at
least can be kind. Vonnegut's personal motto, "God Damn
it, you've got to be kind,"1'’ is also Eliot Rosewater's
baptism message to new babies. He tells them
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in
the summer and cold in the winter. It's round
and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies,
you've got about a hundred years here. There's
only one rule that I know of, babies—
'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'(110)
Perhaps with this statement Eliot has said all that Vonne
gut has to say. While the very construction of Vonnegut's
| novels reflects a belief in a pluralistic universe in
I
I which man can never know what is real or whether or not
!
!
! he is naturally depraved, he can be kind during his prag
matic efforts to grapple with the problems of a world he
can never understand.
180
FOOTNOTES
William James, Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, ;
Green, 1907), p. 246. j
2 I
Andrew J. Reck, Introduction to William James |
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1967), |
P. 76.
^Henry Alonzo Myers, Systematic Pluralism: A Study
in Metaphysics (New York: Cornell University Press,
1961), p. 181. !
1
4 1
T. S. Chang, Eplstemologlcal Pluralism, tr. C. Y. j
Chang (New York: The World Book Company, 1932), p. 25.
5 !
I am indebted to Max F. Schulz for this suggestion.
g
William Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1963), p. 99.
7
'William Durant, The Story of Philosophy, p. 100.
O
William Ernest Hocking, Types of Philosophy (New
York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1959), p. 101. j
Q j
Andrew J. Reck, Introduction to William James,
p. 76.
10
Andrew J. Reck,* Introduction to William James,
p. 81.
A letter' from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to myself, dated
May 20, 1969.
j ip I
j Letter, May 20, 1969. !
' 1” 3 i
| ^Matthew 7:6. I am indebted to Max F. Schulz for I
! pointing this out to me. !
i 14
| T. S. Chang, Eplstemologlcal Pluralism, p. 31.
I 15
See the anonymous Time review, "Price of Survival," j
Time CXCIII (April 11, 196917 107.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
181
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bate, Walter Jackson. "Negative Capability," in Keats:
A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Walter Jackson
Bate. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall,
1964. Pp. 51-68.
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: Univer
sity of Chicago Press, 1963.
Bowling, Lawrence Edward. "What is the Stream of Con
sciousness Technique?" in Critical Approaches to
Fiction, eds. Shiv K. Kumar and Keith MeKean. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Pp. 349-366.
Braceland, Francis J. and Michael Stock. Modern Psychl-
atry: A Handbook For Believers. New York: Double-
day, 1963.
Chang, T. S. Eplstemologlcal Pluralism, tr. G. Y. Chang.
New York: The World Book Company, 1932.
Conrad, Joseph. "Heart of Darkness," in The Portable
Conrad, ed. Morton D. Zabel. New York: The
Viking Press, 1963.
Durant, William. The Story of Philosophy. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1963.
Feldman, Burton. "Anatomy of Black Humor," in The American
Novel Since World War II, ed. Marcus Klein. Green-
wich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publishers, 1969.
Pp. 224-228.
Fromm, Erich. You Shall Be as Gods. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1966.
Harvey, Van A. A Handbook of Theological Terms. New York:
Macmillan, 1964.
j Hocking, William Ernest. Types of Philosophy. New York:
1 Charles Scribners Sons, 1959.
j Honig, Edward. Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory.
| London: Faber and Faber, 1959.
182
183
James, William. Pragmatism. New York: Longmans, Green,
1907.
Jamieson, Robert; A. R. Fausset; and David Brown. A Com
mentary Critical and Explanatory on the Old and New
Testaments. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan
Publishing House, n.d.
Kohler, Dayton. "Time and the Modern Novel," College
English, X (October, 1948), 15-24.
Myerhoff, Hans. Time in Literature. Berkeley: Univer
sity of California Press, 1955.
Myers, Henry Alonzo. Systematic Pluralism: A Study in
Metaphysics. New York: Cornell University Press,
1961.
Noyes, Arthur P. and Lawrence C. Kolb. Modern Clinical
Psychiatry. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company,
1963: -
"Price of Survival," anon. rev. Time, XCIII (April 11,
1969), 106-107.
Reck, Andrew J. Introduction to William James . Blooming
ton, Indiana! Indiana University Press, 1967.
Scholes, Robert, "Slaughterhouse-Five," The New York Tlm.es
Book Review, April 6, 1969, sec. 7. Pp! 1-2.
Schorer, Mark. "Technique as Discovery," in The Theory of
the Novel, ed. Philip Stevick. New Yorlci The Free
Press, 1967. Pp. 65-84.
Schulz, Max F. "The Unconfirmed Thesis: Kurt Vonnegut,
Black Humor, and Contemporary Art," unpublished
article, University of Southern California, 1969.
Sheed, Wilfred. "Requiem to Billy Pilgrim's Progress,"
Life, LXVI (March 21, 1969), 9.
Sills, David L., ed. "Schizophrenia," in International
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. XIV. New York:
Crowell, Collier and Macmillan, Inc., 1968.
Pp. 42-50.
184
Urdang, Lawrence, ed. The Random House Dictionary of the
English Language. College Edition. New York:
Random H o u s e , 1$68.
Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Cat1s Cradle. New York: Holt, Rine
hart and Winston, 1963.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. New York:
Holt,Rinehart and Winston, 19&5.
Mother Night. New York: Harper and Row
Publishers, Inc., 1966.
Player Piano. New York: Charles Scrib-
ners Sons, 1952.
"Science Fiction," New York Times Book
Review, September 5, 1965, sec. 7. P. 2.
Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte
Press, 1969.
Unpublished letter to Stanley Schatt,
dated May 20, 1969.
Welcome to the Monkey House. New York:
Delacorte Press, 19bb.
Wright, Elizabeth. The Pilgrim's Progress: Chapter Notes
and Criticism. New York: American R. D. M. Cor-
poration, 1956.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Schatt, Stanley (author)

Core Title The World Picture Of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Schulz, Max F. (committee chair), Brown, Ronald F. (committee member), Merten, Glenn (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-399196

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Identifier 7013667.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-399196 (legacy record id)

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Document Type Dissertation

Rights Schatt, Stanley

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

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