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Literature

The Banality of Irony | Harriss on Mother Night

By Dan Pyle in Religious Studies on

Cooper Harriss   Mother Night finds Vonnegut back on terra firma, inhabiting the near past and present tense for the first time as he works out the vagaries of postwar life, coming to terms with virtue’s erosion and the illusion of innocence. Still, something is amiss. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about …

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Angry Sordid Present | Elmer on Player Piano

By Dan Pyle in Literature on

Jonathan Elmer   An insurrection erupts, and is crushed. We are in the years following World War III, and the United States has emerged victorious again. Player Piano is set, more or less, in our present time (Vonnegut tells us that “the characters are modeled after persons as yet unborn, or, perhaps, at this writing”—1952—“infants”). Of course, there has not yet …

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