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Consistencies in Vonnegut's Writing

I'm just making this so I can keep track of some of the consistent features in Vonnegut's writing.

Humor: From genuinely funny things to tragic incidents (such as the bombing of Dresden), Vonnegut can find humor in any moment of life.

Tangents: One thing I've noticed in all three of the books that I've read is that Vonnegut constantly changes topic. In Slaughterhouse-Five it comes in the form of different times, in A Man Without a Country, it is in his changes of subject matter fueled by the same idea, and in God Bless you, Dr. Kevorkian, it is in new interviews. To me, it seems like his mind moves faster than his hands, so he just goes with it and writes all over the place (although quite a bit more eloquently).

Analogies: The most convincing and controversial arguments that Vonnegut makes (about war, natural resources, and human life itself) are often told in terms of other things. This both makes the matters easier to understand and adds some emotional appeal, as the analogy contains connotations of its own.

Incorporation of Message into Text: Basically, as I found with both Slaughterhouse-Five and A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut doesn't just make a message that can be taken from what words are said or what actions are done, but just the idea of the book, its organization, its style become incorporated into the idea. I went over this in an earlier blog when I talked about how all of Slaughterhouse-Five is written like a Tralfamadorian book. Here are 2 passages that show one of the messages in A Man Without a Country:

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Don't use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." (23)

And there, I've just used a semi-colon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules." (132)

I find it incredibly inspiring when messages become integrated so thoroughly that the presentation itself is part of the message. A great example of this was a play we saw at Drama Fest last year called Removing the Glove. It made an allegory between being homosexual and being left handed. Long story short, in the end, there was no real resolution, no real conclusion, but that was the beauty of it because in such an ordeal, there really hasn't been any sort of resolution.

(I may update with some more ideas as I continue analyzing his writing)

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian: A 50 Minute Speed Read

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian is a simple 78 page book that I decided to pick up yesterday just to have a better understanding of Vonnegut's writing style and how he approaches content.

For those who don't know who Dr. Kevorkian is: here you go

For those who don't know who Dr. Kevorkian is, but don't feel like browsing his Wikipedia article, he is a man who supports death-by-choice (assisted suicide) in the cases of terminal patients.

The premise of the book is that Kurt Vonnegut has himself nearly killed hundreds of times by Dr. Kevorkian so he can go towards the Pearly Gates, but not in them, and interview people up in heaven. Each interview only consists of a few questions, and never quite reaches what the reader wants it to. The interviewees (is that a word?) range from everyday heroes and villains to Hitler, Shakespeare, and Isaac Newton.

Overall, I thought the book was kind of neat. I suppose it's probably one of those things that's better in theory to tell your friends about at a social gathering than to have them read on their own and discuss (like the movie Idiocracy, for example). It didn't really waste any of my time, as I read most of it after my Precalulus midterm, but I'm not sure how much it will really help with my research project.

I feel like sharing this quote from the Shakespeare interview:

"I asked him if he had love affairs with men as well as women, knowing how eager my WNYC audience was to have this matter settled. His answer, however, celebrated affection between animals of any sort:

'We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk in the sun, and bleat the one at the other: what we chang'd was innocence for innocence.' By changed he meant exchanged: 'What we exchanged was innocence for innocence.' That has to be the softest core pornography I ever heard."

Psychopathic Personalities

"Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born with consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything."

I don't even know where to begin with this. Vonnegut just has such a way of making analogies. He words things in a way that really reaches out to me. He could be saying something that I fundamentally disagree with, but he would say it with such strength and determination and confidence that I would have no choice but to love and respect the man.

And when I grow old, I hope to be like Vonnegut. I hope to reach a point before I die when I have created my own unique life philosophy: unwavering, solid, and uniquely mine. I hope that I can stop for a moment, take a look around the world, and simply say, "this is how things are."

A Man Without a Country: A Retrospect

Yeah, I've already finished A Man Without a Country. Sorry about that. >_>

I had time to read this past week, but no time to really stop and analyze. I just wrote down nice quotes on an index card. So now that I'm analyzing some of Vonnegut's nonfiction, I really like the way he thinks.

One thing I've been noticing in his pieces is that he has a way of expressing ideas in totally different ways. My personal favorite example, as you can see in my 2nd blog post, is that he has an entire essay explaining how fossil fuels are like a drug. We, as humans, are horribly addicted to them, and it's far too late to help, but soon we'll be forced to go cold turkey.

In another essay, he describes himself as a Luddite (someone who hates new technology). While I personally love technology and computers, he creates such a lovely description of him delivering a piece of writing that I want to agree with him. THE POWER OF PATHOS OWNS US ALL. While he could have just typed it and emailed it, Vonnegut describes, rather memoir-like, how he typed it, printed it out, marked it up with pencil, went to the convenience store to buy an envelope, talked to the man there, and so on and so forth. It really shows the journey of everyday life when you go out and live it, and, being a socialist and a humanist, I think that's definitely something Vonnegut believed strongly in.

I think it's great too, but I haven't had much time in recent years to go out and live my life because of school work, so for now, I'll just have to take Vonnegut's word for it.

Oh the irony.

New Post coming...eventually.

I apologize for not updating so long (even though no one ever checks my blog and no one seems to be updating their blogs either). You know what, I'm going to pretend I have an avid reader, and his name is Thomas.

So I apologize for taking so long for my updates, Thomas. I've been really bogged down with all of my regular AP English work this week, as well as all of the last-minute work that my other teachers are trying to assign. This has just been a pretty terrible week for me as a whole, so this weekend, expect something about A Man Without a Country.



On a positive and totally unrelated tangent, the Forensics Team's performance of V for Vendetta won 4th place out of 9 Multiple groups at the Newton South tournament last Saturday. Yay!

War in Reverse: A Tribute to Kurt Vonnegut

"He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuch in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter plains flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hid them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed." (74-75)

The video is a tribute to Vonnegut. The quote comes from Slaughterhouse-Five.

It's strange. I'm reading his biographical information and watching these videos, and I can't help but feel sad. And a bit of love for the man. Maybe It's just all of the work and stress I've been doing over the past few days cracking me, but it's weird. I just really love Vonnegut. His life story, his books, his ideas. Maybe I'll reread Slaughterhouse-Five after all. I definitely plan to at least read Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions after this project is over.

Reflections on Slaughterhouse-Five Part 2

So I suppose this is my obligatory late night entry. I mean, we've all gotta have at least one of them.

And, considering that it is 3:43 AM, you're in luck, as I am having trouble forming cohesive words and sentences, so this blog won't be too long.

I just finished all of my Annotated Bibliographies. I probably did them wrong, as my responses weren't rhetorical enough and I couldn't find many central claims, but I finished them, so I guess that's what really counts.

In doing them, I came to realize how many little connections there are in Slaughterhouse-Five. The fictional author Kilgore Trout that Billy Pilgrim is obsessed with is mentioned throughout the book and is finally introduced as a real character much later on. Similarly, various other characters and events are mentioned prominently when they are important and are mere side notes when they aren't important to the current scene. The most interesting of these, in my opinion, was a radio talk show that Billy mentions going on to talk about Tralfamadore at the beginning of the book. Having read this, I assumed he went to a tabloid station or some science fiction group. However, at the end of the book, it is revealed that he pretended to be an author so he could enter a literary critic discussion. The book is full of little connections like this that, while less deep or thought-provoking than the movies Babel or Memento, make it definately worth a second readthrough (which I will not be sparing the time for, unfortunately).

The house has been slaughtered. (Or, reflections on Slaughterhouse-Five)

So I finished Slaughterhouse-Five. I don't feel like I really wrote enough entries to justify already finishing my blog... Oh well!

The book was...interesting. It's hard to tell whether it was Vonnegut's writing style and humor were the key factors in pulling me through the book, or if it was the plot. Wait, never mind. I'm pretty sure it was Vonnegut's writing style and humor. In fact, I'm almost positive, which is ironic considering the plot was what pulled me into the story.

But my detachment from the plot, in my personal opinion, is a representation of the Tralfamadorian way of thinking. That is to say, life is all preplanned. We are on a set path, and we could move around in the 4th dimension and see our death before we experience our first kiss, and none of it would make any difference. I'm going to quote a passage that explains Tralfamadorian books:

"Billy couldn't read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out - in brief clumps of symbols seperated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams.
'Exactly,' said the voice.
'They are telegrams?'
'There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message - describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.'"

So here's a basic layout for the book: Billy Pilgrim is in World War II, and he is tossed around through time, one day seeing his daughter being married, the next day in the bombing of Dresden, the next in a train headed for Dresden, and the next witnessing his own death. Yes, Billy Pilgrim dies 70 or so pages before the book ends. But it's all for naught, because he was always supposed to die that day, and he always would.

Even the bombing of Dresden is a rather melodramatic moment. Billy knows it's going to happen. The reader knows it's going to happen. And when it does, there is no surprise. No suspense. The story doesn't concern itself for what part of Billy's life is the beginning, or the middle, or the end. It's just about the greater picture of what war is like, what life is like, what time is like.

That being said... I found the little snippets and bits of Billy Pilgrim's life rather annoying. He is a man who is crazy. Not in an interesting writing style sort of way, and not in a uniquely-genius-outlook-on-life kind of way, but just in a crazy way. He is so emotionless and thoughtless and boring throughout the story.

But I guess that's how Vonnegut wanted the story written. Or something like that. The whole point of the book is that when you see life like a Tralfamadorian, nothing really matters; cause and effect as we know them are useless. Well, that may be so kind little man in the back of my head, I might say (if I were I crazy [like Billy Pilgrim {Hey, I've already got enough voices in here!}]), but the book was still a bit bothersome to read.

Anyway, that about covers it. My initial reflections at least. Yes, this unbearably long post just consisted of my initial reflections on the book. Fear not faithful readers who, unless you're skipping to the bottom [DON'T DO THAT], have actually read this entire passage, I will update with even deeper thoughts and ideas! Until then, adieu, adieu, adieu.