Hocus Pocus (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
- First Published: 1990
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Socialism, War, Economics, Fantasy, Photography or photographers, Ecology, Paranoia, Vietnam or Vietnamese people, Hedonism, Motorcycles or motorbikes
- Locales: Scipio, NY
Hocus Pocus is perhaps Vonnegut's grimmest and most powerful indictment of Americans and American life, indicative of why fifteen years later he would title his collection of essays A Man Without a Country. This novel is set in 2001, enabling Vonnegut a decade earlier to project his vision of what America would soon become. What he sees is revealed by his first-person narrator, his typical war veteran; this time, it is a veteran of the Vietnam War—fittingly for this novel, America's most humiliating military venture. The narrator is presented as the last person to leave...
[The entire page is 854 words long]
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