WWII
During World War II, at the age of 23, Kurt Vonnegut was captured by the Germans and ended up imprisoned in the city of Dresden, “the Florence of the Elbe.” He was there when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people. Vonnegut survived with other prisoners holed up in a meat locker deep beneath …
Billy Pilgrim can’t stay in one place. Like Winston Niles Rumfoord before him, Pilgrim has become unstuck. But while Rumfoord bounces around in space, appearing in his sitting room on Earth for only a few minutes at regularly scheduled intervals, Pilgrim is smeared across time, living many moments and timelines at once. He is a baby, a middle-aged optometrist in …
Greetings, Mr. and Mrs. America, from Earth to Titan and past to present, and all the ships in space. Let’s go to Dresden Slaughterhouse, Building Five. <***> Nice to see Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater, Howard W. Campbell, Prof. Rumfoord (of the Rhode Island Rumfoords), and all of the others who’ve joined us from Kurt Vonnegut’s earlier stories. Here’s Kurt himself, …
I recently clicked on a listicle dedicated to mapping out precisely where some dozen classic television shows were set in New York City. It was clickbait, to be honest (so it goes), but enjoyable clickbait that helped to place the fictional settings of I Love Lucy, Family Affair, The Jeffersons, All in the Family, and others, in their relative geographical …
We know that Slaughterhouse-Five took a long time to write because Vonnegut tells us so: “I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time” (2). The first approach was documentary: “I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have …
The boss cleans up after, the boss is always the last one to turn out the lights and lock the door, which means the boss is the last one to look for spills and messes and things-out-of-place that will be a nuisance tomorrow. A good boss does that, anyway. She’d worked for jerks who left clean-up for others, went off …
Rick Van Kooten Following the bleak nihilism of Cat’s Cradle, the next novel written by Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, presents a more optimistic side of Vonnegut’s philosophy, even as it is presented as a blistering satire as in Cat’s Cradle. In many ways, Vonnegut’s body of work up to this point could be considered not only a literary project …
Rebekah Sheldon God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a book about economic inequality in America. It is a satirical examination of how class is lived and injustice justified, and so it is certainly timely. But I want to talk about pornography instead. There is a single example of pornography in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It is a dirty …
Eric Sandweiss “A sum of money,” Vonnegut’s narrator alerts us, will be “a leading character” in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the novelist’s 1965 tale of the hazard of old fortunes (1). Like his creator, Eliot Rosewater—the holy fool who fills that lead role in a more conventional sense—is also struck by money’s personal charisma. Mr. Rosewater, a science …
Sarah Phillips Kurt Vonnegut was a prophet, albeit a satiric and stridently earthly one. Vonnegut’s 1965 book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: Or Pearls before Swine diagnosed and warned us about the growing problems that got us where we are today. Those problems were (and are) unfettered free market capitalism, run-away greed, income and wealth inequality, and media-palooza.1 I …
Cooper Harriss I take satisfaction in observing the ways that Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater rehearses with some precision a number of specific themes I’ve discussed in the first four installments of this project. The title’s benediction (“God bless you!”), which we see recur among the townspeople even to the point of betrayal, registers secularism’s religious unconscious, mirroring …
Ed Comentale As self-appointed dean of Salo University, an institution dedicated fully to training in the liberal arts, I have been tracking Vonnegut’s shifts in thinking about the human and his uneasy relationship with humanism as a system of thought and value. As I see it, his first few novels are marked by an increasing pessimism about human nature …
Ted Castronova On page 189 of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the orphan Selena describes the oath she was forced to take every day. Part of it reads: I understand 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, …
Jonathan Elmer Howard W. Campbell Jr. is a playwright and a spy. What is the relation between the two? At the level of narrative, the relation is as intimate as can be. When Frank Wirtanen approaches Campbell about spying for the Americans, he indicates that he fixed on Campbell because of the “medieval romances” he writes: “you love pure …
Ed Comentale Apparently, Kurt Vonnegut—beloved hippie hero of postmodern literature—almost became a Nazi. That’s what we learn, at least, in the first few surprising pages of Mother Night. Vonnegut opens his 1961 novel by describing the wealthy German Hoosier clan into which he was born. He recalls “the vile and lively native American fascists” he grew up with in …
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 …
Rick Van Kooten Kurt Vonnegut’s first two books, Player Piano and Sirens of Titan, can arguably be categorized as science fiction, but Mother Night is a distinct departure from that genre. I have been an enthusiastic fan of Vonnegut since my younger days, but I admit that of the six texts being considered in the academia of Salo University, …
Sandy Shapshay Vonnegut’s first novel takes us into an automated, dystopian future; his second carries us deep into outer space; but Mother Night (1961), his third novel, brings us back to Earth and to the not-so-distant past. From the introduction we learn that Mother Night deals to some extent with what must have been the author’s own traumatic involvement …
Ted Castronova In Mother Night Vonnegut finally unleashes a long-held rage directly at its target: The Second World War. Many people see WWII as horrible because of what Germans did. They tend to overlook what Russians, English, and Americans did. Vonnegut can’t, because he was witness to what American and British bombs did to German civilians. As an American POW, …
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 …
