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Kurt Vonnegut

Untitled | Phillips on Cat’s Cradle

Sarah Phillips   Dr. Angela Hoenikker Conners, PhD Planet Titan (previously of 4918 North Meridian Street Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, Planet Earth) Mr. Jonah Breit San Lorenzo, Planet Earth (Forwarding Service Requested) Dear Mr. Jonah Breit (“dear” in this case being over-generous): No doubt you will be surprised to hear from me, convinced as you are that I met my demise …

Apocalypse Then | Elmer on Cat’s Cradle

Jonathan Elmer   Although it takes him six novels—until Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)—to directly confront his personal trauma of surviving the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, all of Vonnegut’s early work seems simultaneously to approach, and retreat from, the cataclysm of the Second World War. Maybe “directly” is not the right word, even for the apparently autobiographical Slaughterhouse; but certainly before Slaughterhouse, Vonnegut …

The Weaponization of Knowledge in Cat’s Cradle | Comentale on Cat’s Cradle

Ed Comentale   Aren’t we all getting a little tired of this crap? Here at Salo U, we have to fight for knowledge on two fronts. Looking above, to the institutions of power, we confront shabby resources, political posturing, a fickle market, and meddlesome administrators. Looking below, to the public we hope to help, we find suspicion, resentment, outright hostility. …

Fun House | Castronova on Cat’s Cradle

Ted Castronova   Whatever anyone knows is known by no one. —Emerson Scott Boolard *** This does not reflect the actual opinions of its author. *** Stave I I am a professor. I had a thought to write an essay. It was to be about Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. I was walking across campus thinking about my essay. Some students …

I, John, Saw, or MAKE RELIGION LIVE! | Harriss on Cat’s Cradle

Cooper Harriss   The company line on Cat’s Cradle concerns Vonnegut’s invention of a religion—Bokononism—to satirize his contemporary vagaries of knowledge and authority. See the cat? See the cradle? Religion is a lie, the story goes; it’s not true but an invented dimension of human cultures. Like the lies we tell our children, religion arouses fear, provides comfort, establishes meaning, …

Reading Mother Night in Russia(n) | Phillips on Mother Night

Sarah Phillips   Kurt Vonnegut was the most popular American writer in the Soviet Union in the 1970s,1 and it will not surprise Vonnegut fans to learn that he predicted his own success. In Mother Night (1961), the protagonist Howard W. Campbell, Jr. provides a fictional account of one Stepan Bodovskov’s (plagiaristic) literary success in Russia, in particular the success …

Becoming Completely Yourself | Elmer on Mother Night

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 …

Facts I Can and Cannot Do Without: Vonnegut’s Mother Night and the American Totalitarian Mind | Comentale on Mother Night

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 …

The Banality of Irony | Harriss on Mother Night

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 …

Mother Night: Why People—Even Smart Ones—Believed Howard Campbell | Van Kooten on Mother Night

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, …

Campbell’s Confessions | Shapshay on Mother Night

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 …

History . . . by a Hare | Sandweiss on Mother Night

Eric Sandweiss   “The march of time.” “The progress of mankind.” “Time’s arrow.” I admit I had not encountered the image of history as a swift hare (nor art as the defeated tortoise, watching its rival jump into the lead) until I approached the finish line of Mother Night (261), Vonnegut’s first novel-length reckoning with the people and places of …

Vonnegut v. WWII | Castronova on Mother Night

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, …

Rumfoord and Friends: Awful Game Masters; A Reflection on Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan | Castronova on The Sirens of Titan

Ted Castronova   Who’s in charge, anyway? We believe that we have free will, but perhaps we are under the control of a higher being. What if that being is under the control of another being? Who is under the control of another, and so on and so on? Andrew Dabrowski of Indiana University’s mathematics department has developed a metaphysical theory …

The Fast Reverse | Elmer on The Sirens of Titan

Jonathan Elmer     “Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.” “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole.” Taken together, these two sentences—the first is the opening line of The Sirens of Titan (1959); the second comes from an interview in 1977—capture a style of assertion, unique to Vonnegut, that veers wildly from pontification …

Shaping Our Ends | Harriss on The Sirens of Titan

Cooper Harriss     In college I worked summers at a camp near the North Carolina coast, an outpost so remote that an evening’s entertainment often took the form of riding the free ferry some three miles across the Neuse River and back. On one occasion I struck up a conversation with a fellow passenger, a local commercial fisherman who …