[Player Piano] intends to startle us with something sinister. Aspiring toward moral autonomy violates the order of creation. In grabbing for the complete freedom of God, the technological mind abuses the freedom God has given the human creature to share in life within limitations. The consequence of this overreaching is the degradation and oppression felt by all the figures in the story.

In Player Piano humanity lives under the curse brought about by its own arrogance. The novels that follow take the reader to many remote, exotic places as they recount the adventures of many wonderfully strange persons; and yet they come back to this old—Old Testament, really—predicament of the fundamental break in the relationship among persons and between them and their universe. (p. 24)

The narrative line of Vonnegut's first two novels traces the way the hero makes his path through worlds that check his decent impulses, finally to be cleansed by a restoration of the human values that had been sacrificed. Both books show the need for a new human beginning. In Player Piano, Paul Proteus rebels against the technological violation of humanity, and in The Sirens of Titan, Malachi Constant reacts against his own debauchery; but what is constant for Paul and protean for Malachi is the final commitment to compassion and to life in all its unpredictability.

There are, however, between Vonnegut's first two books, telling differences in mode and in moral penetration of their common theme. By and large, Player Piano is a traditionally composed novel. Though Vonnegut uses nonsense, creates a nonlanguage, tries his hand at word catalogues, his techniques is not in the end experimental. The anthropological material is not esoteric, and the novel's futurism and anti-utopian satire leave our imagination unchallenged. The setting of Paul Proteus' renunciation of the political system is on recognizable Earth. Now these energies are also in The Sirens of Titan, but they swing out more widely and plumb deeper. The second novel sweeps cosmically through the solar system and depicts those outer worlds not satirically, but with visionary celebration. Moreover, the moral compass takes in spiritual principles of retribution that lay deeper than the political effects brought about by Proteus' rebellion. (pp. 25-6)

Though only his second novel, [The Sirens of Titan] signals a clear advance over the first. It has reached the large popular audience for which Vonnegut wrote it, and yet subtly works through patterns that we associate with his more recent and acclaimed books.

The novel's cri-de-coeur—"'Live!'"—expresses our most primal human need and implies that the universe is set against our fulfilling such a need. Where the struggle to make the most of life is the theme of Player Piano, in The Sirens of Titan it becomes the form. With all its cosmic range, the story is told with a pointed simplicity. The choice of a popular manner underscores the universality of Constant's desire to be free and to be decent. The simplest message is given in the simplest way. Naive literature is one name for this treatment; parable is another, and in this case is more apt because it conveys the moral tone underlying the tale. The nature of the parable is such that meaning can readily be extracted from it. This is the effect Vonnegut seeks. He even tells brief stories within the novel as a whole. But paradoxes, bewilderments, and reversals in the total story make any single extrapolation seem inadequate. That the story is not reducible to a statement of its meaning is its distinctiveness. What we have is a sophisticated treatment of the naive genre. The Sirens of Titan is almost a parable. (pp. 26-7)

The plain syntax suggests values of simplicity and community, which the action will affirm. Just as the parable is the simplest form in which to express the simplest lesson, so the loose declarative sentence is the simplest grammatical structure. It so dominates the novel that it becomes formulaic, achieving at times the quality of a chant. The style speaks for artlessness and commonplace. The narrative voice provides signals to the audience for the stance it should take, and here Vonnegut expects nothing more of the reader than would the modes of communication in the popular culture. The voice is the kind, knowing, legendary one of, say, fairy tales. (p. 27)

If the voice Vonnegut develops in The Sirens of Titan is folksy, it is also complex. The rhetorical gestures express a double mood. Set against the plain manner, but serving the same purpose—to communicate directly to a common reader—is a superlative idiom. Here we find Vonnegut the pop writer trying to give another kind of art a break by giving dignity to the petty experience of contemporary life. (p. 28)

[Exaggeration] allows Vonnegut gently to satirize the material he uses. What is especially noteworthy is how Vonnegut gives meaning to what in other hands would be mere bravura devices. Conventional science fiction presents the spectacle of enormity and of the outer world to dazzle us by honoring technology. Its verisimilitude requires that we suspend our disbelief. Not so with Vonnegut. His exaggerations make us stay aware of this tale as fiction, as imagined. For him, space exploration ventures into possibilities, not facts; and the possibilities are those of inner spiritual zones, not of a fake mechanism or fixed cosmography….

The marvel that is the subject of The Sirens of Titan is the humanization of Malachi Constant of Hollywood, California, who has three billion dollars but is a spiritual pauper. He nevertheless evolves into a good man because his dissoluteness contains the seed of his virtue. In the beginning of the parable he lives in corruption. By passing through the terra incognita of his soul he comes out into magnificence. (p. 29)

In keeping with his desire to reach a large popular readership, Vonnegut vivifies Constant's trip into the inner terra incognita of love through the great contemporary mythic voyage, the space odyssey. (A Joyce or a Proust would use the less accessible metaphor of mental association to chart the route into the psyche's unknown areas.) … Winston Niles Rumfoord, who knows a great deal about space and time, says to his wife that "'life for a punctual person is like a roller coaster.'" The contour of Constant's voyage proves his point: the ups, the dips, the turns are all there; and the time-caught person rides it out. The path of the roller coaster pictures times spatially, and one can see the whole life-course at once. Blocked out this way, events appear accidental, pointless, beyond our control. The roller coaster, then, is fate. (p. 30)

As for Constant, this weary traveler made it through the thick and thin of planet-hopping but dies waiting in the snow for a bus, the commuter's nightmare come true. Nevertheless, his life "would end well," the parabolist promises us; and it does…. Constant fulfills his destiny as an Earthling with the restoration of friendship. The blatant hallucinosis of Constant's reverie bids farewell to the actual world and reminds us of the fictiveness of this fiction. (p. 37)

The requirements of the sentimental adventure story are more than amply fulfilled in The Sirens of Titan. When the novel concludes, the world is brought into precise focus as things come into a harmonious whole. It is no longer the junkyard it once was. That debris-ridden world is gone. In the end our perception of the world is corrected because Constant's preceptions have been made new through his space pilgrimage. The perfect white world at the conclusion depicts the world as though seen through Constant's moral freshness. He has come to see—we have come to see in the act of reading his parable—that our humanity is forever present, not something to be pursued or awaited, but only to be perceived and realized by loving whoever is around to be loved, as we sail together on this planet through the cold blue. (pp. 37-8)

Mother Night takes place in jail, opening with Campbell behind bars in Jerusalem and concluding with him locked up in the same place, about to commit suicide. The bare facts of time and place, along with the polarities of its dramatic movement, say a great deal about the growth of Vonnegut's work, and we may pause briefly to note his development. Strife, brutality, spiritual loss—these and other themes from the first two books recur in Mother Night; but now the treatment of such issues is more personal, more psychological. It takes place in the present, not in the future. The setting shifts accordingly from the outer space of The Sirens of Titan to inner space. The story unfolds not by flinging out through celestial bodies but by burrowing down into psychic places within a single person. Having ventured into the cosmos, Vonnegut for this adventure confines himself to the microcosm of the self. The exploration of this inner galaxy is best made through introspection rather than the mock-utopian or parable treatments of the earlier novels. Such a book might very well have been expected, though its story could not have been predicted. Near the beginning of The Sirens of Titan, the narrator declares that "Only inwardness remained to be explored." Campbell's confession gives shape to that remaining exploration. Finally, we can say this about the thematic contours of Vonnegut's first three novels: if Player Piano affirms the growth of the individual through revolt, and if The Sirens of Titan goes on to show a positive, miraculous conversion of the self, Mother Night redirects the moral energy by dramatizing a negative artistic conversion. (pp. 40-1)

A particularly apt way into the complexity of Mother Night is through form. This confessional story requires of the reader a certain literary sophistication, for the book is, after all, told by a literary artist revealing his abuses of literary forms…. [His] display of various kinds of inventions is one aspect of Vonnegut's making form the subject of his novel. Another aspect comes through Campbell's direct comments on language, which ironically yield his best insights into his behavior. Art can do this. In Campbell's case it must because his absorption into this self-created Nazi monster equates the crisis of his life with the task of his art. (p. 42)

Campbell's personal history should have taught him that there are forms and that a work has a form, but the form does not exist except as an ideal or textbook exercise. A pattern based on clarity and causality could not accommodate his own life, which is a series of disconnections. But Campbell's fate is not to know all that he is communicating. While he states a preference for ideal form, his achieved form in his confessions is highly individual. The novel itself renders the shape of his experience. (p. 43)

The beginning establishes the fictive world of Mother Night as that of Campbell's mind. The rhetoric reveals a crisis. The litany of facts and repetitious syntax are part of Campbell's bafflement. Emotionally, he is stuck; the string of loose sentences cannot go forward. He is blocked in a cell of words; hence the physical jail. Setting and mind become interchangeable. The terms of his imprisonment further alter our sense of the beginning of the novel. He is awaiting trial and, as things stand certain execution by the Israeli government. The beginning of his memoir is really a crisis. The man who commends stories with a definite beginning starts his own memoir well past the middle of his life, very near the end. Vonnegut's formal irony here tells us more about Campbell than does his aesthetic manifesto. (p. 44)

Mother Night is not only a book about life, which is the classical business of the novel, but also is a book that has living going on in its pages. Put another way, it shows life in form while using form to represent life. This of course is Campbell's problem stated anew. (p. 45)

Though he proclaims his impending self-destruction, the novel leaves the reader with the sense that Campbell does not follow through with his announcement. We are left with the split response that is at the center of his personality. With characteristic dramatic flourish he bids, "Goodbye, cruel world!" Then, with an equally typical about-face, he speaks from another of his selves (now his dark, comic self) and follows his adieu with a histrionic gesture that raises the possibility that we will meet again—"Auf wiedersehen?" These words close the novel with the gallows humor that surrounds Vonnegut's stories. Moreover, by concluding the memoir with a question mark, Vonnegut suspends Campbell's self-examination in an unfinished state. Like Dante's damned, Campbell is doomed emotionally to relive his crime without ever coming to a releasing understanding. So it does seem likely, as he says that we will meet his many selves again and again….

Vonnegut is making a moral point through the ambiguous ending of Mother Night. The scripts Campbell tries to live by are inadequate to the contingencies of life. The pain caused by remorse is awful, but worse pain comes from the recognition that there is no resolution. Early in the novel Campbell speaks of "'something worse than Hell'" to his Israeli prison guard. Hell is decisive next to the purgatorial rotation of pretenses that leads nowhere. We have a hung ending to parallel the hung beginning. Rhetorical gesture serves as moral retribution. Campbell's imminent suicide is a comment on the world he lives in as well as on his personal despair; only in a nihilistic world could the gratuitous taking of one's life be a way of affirming oneself, as it is for Campbell. Mother Night is in the throes of giving birth to another dark child of despondence.

The ironies of the ending remind the reader to view the maze wholly from the outside and invite us to exercise our moral imagination to piece together the confusion that destroys the protagonist. This is the responsibility ironic art such as Vonnegut's places on the reader. From the outside a pattern does suggest itself. In trying to comprehend his heartsickness and penitence, Campbell moves from an egocentric view of his personal importance (he will dazzle the world with his brilliant speeches) to a recognition of his personal insignificance. "'Nobody even knows I'm alive anymore.'" Doomed and with his fantasy defenses down, Campbell confronts the idea of his personal extinction. His ego, which was once so grandiose that it hatched many make-believe selves to secure endurance, now is presented with the fact of its noncontinuance. The mind encounters no greater difficulty than realizing its nonexistence. Campbell deals with this intolerable dilemma with the same subterfuge he used to handle other dangers. Now he thinks of himself as dead, but his idea of suicide wrests only illusory power over impending doom. Mother Night lays bare for us the mechanism of the self-deceiving mind as it desperately tries to keep up with the uncontrollable distresses of life, which, for Vonnegut, are epitomized in the encompassing threat of war with its senseless violence. (pp. 50-1)

[Cat's Cradle] is a digression about the Hoenikker family, and this displacement of the narrator's proclaimed topic by a subsidiary one alerts us to Vonnegut's intention in his fourth novel. His meaning lies precisely in the book's narrative detour; for swerving reflects Dr. Hoenikker's deviation from responsibility in his scientific research, a deviation which brought about the Hiroshima disaster in the first place and then yielded ice-nine, which finally destroys the entire world.

John survives to tell about the later calamity and changes his name to one more in keeping with trial he has endured. "Call me Jonah," are his first words. His phraseology pointedly aligns Vonnegut's narrator with Melville's storyteller Ishmael in Moby Dick, and by extension with the classical American artists who are, as William Carlos Williams terms them in Paterson, "Ishmaels of the spirit." Having narrowly escaped in their pursuit of the great white whale of knowledge, such people survive to tell us of the world's incomprehensibility. The spirit of Ishmael is that of prophecy born of affliction. Vonnegut makes of his spiritual Ishamel a darker figure who shadows forth the dire warning that we must change our ways if we are to avoid universal annihilation. The bearer of cosmic news is as familiar a figure in Vonnegut's books as is the conflict between "know-how" and "know-what." The threat of technological advancement without regard for ethical purpose necessitates the omens issued by the messenger. By placing the pursuit of knowledge in the atomic age under the sign of Jonah, Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle has extended the responsibility of the envoy and, therefore, the character of his news. (pp. 53-4)

Vonnegut's first-person narration makes Cat's Cradle a personal testimony to the warning of Mother Night, namely, that pretense and lies can overtake truth; for in Cat's Cradle, as Jonah tells his tale, lies systematically overtake actuality. (p. 59)

Jonah is not a character in the customary sense so much as he is a mock author. He is not a narrator with a personality developed from inherent qualities, for his several names tell us that he is a reduction to narrative expedient. Whether he is John, as he once was, or "had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still" because the name evokes the disaster that determined his being…. For all his unique experience teaches him, Jonah's life remains "meaningless." He tries to believe that love will make sense amid vast disorder and resigns himself to a loveless universe. "And no love waiting for me anywhere…." Passive resignation allows Jonah to live in the fallen world but it also allows him to be absorbed by the cynicism that destroyed the world. (p. 61)

Cat's Cradle concludes with [an] encounter between Jonah and a swami leading to a promised infernal text about life. Like Blake, Jonah at the End sees a visionary, Bokonon, who was something of a prophet and now, by calculated inversion, becomes an outlawed devil. He is not consumed in flames but is dying slowly of ice-nine. Jonah and Bokonon talk of their text, The Books of Bokonon, which shares in the diabolical irreverence of [William] Blake's "The Bible of Hell." Dazed, Bokonon proffers Jonah the final sentence of The Books of Bokonon, which is an urging that Jonah write "a history of human stupidity." This is to be written in untruth because in a world of radical instability and deception, inverted language is all that is left for communication. Accordingly, the epigraph to the complete novel runs: "Nothing in this book is true." We are left in Cat's Cradle not only with the negation of vision but also with the negation of communication. Solipsism, the final divorce of relations, among persons, is the ruling condition in the novel. (p. 67)

[Vonnegut's view in Cat's Cradle] is personalist and immanent. "'Think of what paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.'" Unfortunately what the novel dramatizes does not share this cheerfulness but rather encourages a judgment that a scientific and utopian belief in the limitless power and perfectibility of human nature is one of those evil illusions by which humankind tries to make life easy and wonderful while actually causing great pain. The proclamation of Vonnegut's Jonah points toward but does not reveal deliverance. He directs us to laugh at the disasters brought about by our scientific and political egotism in order that we may turn away from a prideful death-wish to appreciate what is good in the world and dear in other persons. (p. 68)

[God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater] is a companion book to Cat's Cradle…. Both novels show men of good will struggling to make sense of a bewildering, fallen universe by answering the naked needs of others…. Having discarded in Cat's Cradle the efforts of organized religion and science to improve life, and having questioned in Mother Night the capacity of art to penetrate the abiding deterioration, Vonnegut moves on to consider the power of money to humanize life through the kind offices of Eliot Rosewater…. (p. 69)

Eliot Rosewater's character is a résumé of the qualities Vonnegut developed in the principal figures of the preceding four novels. Eliot is born to privilege and, with Paul Proteus in Player Piano, turns against the system, which respects him for extrinsic reasons, in order that he can present himself as a person. Malachi Constant travels all around the solar system in The Sirens of Titan for the simple perspective of which his great material wealth deprived him, and the humility Malachi learns becomes the way of life that his fellow millionaire Eliot takes up in his backwater hometown. But noble intentions can boomerang. Howard J. Campbell goes crazy in Mother Night by trying to remain patriotic while serving the Nazi enemy. Or the high cause can overwhelm the endeavor to do what is right. Eliot openly works for the good of other, yet his mind gives way under the massive need he serves….

The pervasive poverty in the Vonnegut world is that of love. Warm feeling between persons marks a special moment in his narratives, and there are few such moments. Intimacy is avoided rather than desired, and friendship is a passing bond. Trust of one person by another is so exceptional that we are likely to accept Jonah's isolation as the given condition. Mere awareness of emotional contact indicates a sympathetic figure who invariably comes across as vulnerable and not infrequently as a bit crazed. Where ignorance of emotion is the norm, sensitivity will inevitably seem to be a mental disorder. The masses of automatons crowding Vonnegut's fictions indicate that lovelessness has reached a crisis stage where indiscriminate affection is called for as a cure. (p. 70)

If we come to think of Eliot as living out Jesus' commandment to his disciples to answer the curse with a blessing, as Vonnegut seems to invite us to do, then we can sense the seriousness in the bitter comic ending. In the Bible the Father communicates life to his Son. Passing on life is the essential blessing. In the end Eliot does just this to his fifty-seven new, stray children: "'And tell them … to be fruitful and multiply.'"

These are the last words of the novel. They suspend the action in a mandate for regeneration. If only for this closing moment, love harmonizes the social disorder with which the story began. Eliot's presence assures us that there is one entirely good man in the world. The gesture magically shows that cruelty and confusion are merely at the service of order and goodness. The miracle Eliot performs does not wipe away the world's havoc. Chaos abides; it is the law of nature. His miracle amounts to correcting our vision; for his life teaches us that we have only to alter the way we look at the world to accept its unpredictability and to recognize the humanness in people through their need for affectionate contact. Eliot's potentiality has been intimated all along in the name Rosewater, which hints of gentleness, fairness, and transformation. The final wonder that Vonnegut observes is the transformation in Eliot's spirit. At the end he is not the lunatic philanthropist casting pearls before swine, to borrow from the novel's sardonic subtitle; nor is he the helpless madman cast in the prison of his mind or behind the bars of psychic conventionality. Rather, he is the good man casting life onto the world. (p. 81)

What I believe is most important for an understanding of Slaughterhouse-Five and for a study of Vonnegut's artistry is how his change of heart in directly confronting his subject brings about a change in the form of his fiction. In fact, the question of novelistic form is equated in the book with the task of writing about Dresden. The reader is forced to consider the very nature of the book that he is involved in through reading, just as Vonnegut forces himself to look squarely at his hellish knowledge…. Survival is what Slaughterhouse-Five is all about, and so to take up the question of the novel's survival links form to action: the problem of living through the fire-bombing of Dresden is rivaled by the problem of writing about it. The two acts are analogues, and from the tone of the passage on the viability of fiction we can pick up Vonnegut's meaning. He is not quite prediciting a future for the novel but he is negating its death notice. He is not quite prescribing a function for the novel, but he is deriding the cheap purposes it has been made to serve. We are at least made aware that the life of form relates to the form of our lives. Vonnegut comments on the reality of Dresden by treating the problems of fiction.

This indirect formulation of the novel's function expresses Vonnegut's approach to art. He questions the mold he uses. He begins before the first sentence of the story. The title page undermines our expectation about design with three titles. The proper one refers to a pig slaughterhouse in Dresden, which housed American prisoners in World War II. The second shows how language falsifies war: "The Children's Crusade" transforms brutality into sentimental heroism, calculation into innocence. The third title, "A Duty-Dance with Death," borrows from [Louis-Ferdinand] Céline to state that art must confront death frankly. The use of three titles effectively denies the adequacy of any one title for the book. Instead of a label we are given a deepening attitude toward the violence of war. (pp. 82-3)

The strategies that entangle Slaughterhouse-Five … offer clues to how its disparateness comes together. The shift, from the narrator's own predicament to Billy Pilgrim's, alters the perspective from introspection to observation, thereby making Vonnegut the narrator into a confessing witness…. Detached at the same time that he is sympathetic to Billy's experience, the narrator can suggest a way of seeing, through compassionate wisdom, the otherwise baffling war in the context of other catastrophes. The hurt and wonder of Billy's life become the hurt and wonder of every time. (p. 84)

Vonnegut's testimony puts a moral light on war to reveal alliances not shown by treaties. The essential battle here is waged by man against the violent bent in himself. Vonnegut plumbs the dark forces in the human spirit. Sentimentality, egotism, blind patriotism, materialism, these are the enemy; and for Vonnegut they are the signal qualities of American life. Against them stand conscience and feeling. Vonnegut, the witness, acts as a moral scout, smuggling himself across battle lines to reach the front of consciousness where he hopes to find final resistance to killing. His moral awareness accounts for the uncommon affection for a cherished city of the declared enemy and for the German people themselves. They are presented as fellow human beings struggling against their own propensity for violence. And to the degree that Americans yielded to their destructive urge (the violent style of postwar American life suggests a high degree), they—we—fell victims. Both political sides lost in the struggle for human decency. (p. 87)

Vonnegut, the witness to Dresden, whose survival from disaster is also his fate, draws strength from seeing how a gesture of helpless love redefines its fatal expression. (p. 88)

There is … a tension among three shaping forces in Slaughterhouse-Five: the ancient Christian news of victory over death; the Tralfamadorian message of no death; and the message implied in the reader's unfolding consciousness about the respective choices of each message. This deepening consciousness is Vonnegut's gospel. I would put their respective views of self in this way: whereas the Christian self exists between vanity and fulfillment, the science-fiction self is eternally in isolation. Vonnegut, working against both views, seeks to measure the self's relatedness in mutuality through its capacity to grow in consciousness and compassion. Vonnegut's new covenant stipulates the obligation of spiritual nurturance among persons. (p. 93)

[Vonnegut's strategy in Slaughterhouse-Five] is to register the mind in the act of confronting annihilation. In finding a form to tell of [the disaster of Dresden], Vonnegut is able to respond to the smoldering demand that this holocaust, which killed more people than did the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, not pass silently into human history, as its planners had hoped it would. Faced boldly, narrated and thereby worked through, the trauma of Dresden is exorcised of its dark spell on Vonnegut's imagination. (pp. 96-7)

[Breakfast of Champions] fictionalizes the searching pronouncements Vonnegut was making on the potentialities of his fiction. With Prospero's affection, Vonnegut near the end of his tempestuous Breakfast of Champions proclaims the release of "all the literary characters who have served me so loyally" from the confines of his pages. He casts off, also, any vestige of the realistic novel with its meaningless accumulation of details and facts. Liberation and dispersal are possible because Vonnegut created those things; and his creation and what it imitates or represents are the subject of Breakfast of Champions. (p. 102)

In a book that dismisses detail as pointless, we can assume that facts of time and place create their own verisimilitude. The narrative present generates a mental excursion backward to action in 1492 and completed events in 1979 and 1981, all of which blend with the Ford Galaxies and Burger Chefs of our current moment that constitutes one indefinite past. Moreover, where the author hovers godlike over the events, his presence is likely to overtake the story. And it does. What I term the tale of Breakfast of Champions is its subtext. "'The Big show is inside my head,'" Vonnegut says to a character for both her benefit and the reader's. Vonnegut's mind is the arts festival for which the Midland City shindig is a metaphorical expedient. (p. 103)

In a universe where every substance is defined by its function in some experiment—"loving machines, hating machines … truthful machines, lying machines"—creatures do not encounter one another. Persons meet; robots and forces collide. The form of the tale of Trout's impact on Dwayne is that of collision. Collision in Breakfast of Champions is the unifying principle derived from a natural law of Vonnegut's cosmos. Continents, we are told, ride a slab that drifts precariously "on molten glurp"; and "when one slab crashed into another one, mountains were made." A violent crashing is continually "going on" in the universe, leading scientists to predict "that ice ages would continue to occur." Like world, like people, Nations grind against one another; creatures strike one another. We are "doomed to collide and collide and collide." Collision is the secret knowledge behind the revelations in [Trout's book] Now It Can Be Told, which implies that God moves not only in mysterious ways but also in disastrous ways. (pp. 106-07)

The destructive impact of Trout on Dwayne poses the novel's theme in structural terms: How do we respond to the inevitable collisions that make up our lives? The possible responses are obviously limited. Any attempt in the book to check disaster ends up hastening it. The agonized lives of the characters warn against such action, pursuit of money or science yield illusions of control over our lives. Passivity would seem less perilous. One can withdraw and hope, as Trout does, to spend one's days without touching another human again; but even Trout is lured out of his solitude to spread the very insight (that we are machines) that drove him there, and then he is caught in the pile-up. Again, our attempts to master the mysterious activity of the world finally implicate us further in its turmoil…. Vonnegut takes his cue from the Creator, the eternal black humorist. "For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions." The spectator's stance produces the peculiarly humorous wisdom documents recurring in the novels: Jonah in Cat's Cradle gives us his record of human stupidity; Eliot Rosewater's Domesday Book presents in apple-pie order a ledger of his philanthropic operations during the apocalypse; Trout tells it as it is in Now It Can Be Told; and to this imaginary library of visionary documents, Vonnegut makes a personal contribution of a notebook of a cosmic fan. The superstructure of Breakfast of Champions is that of an archeological scrapbook composed of wise precepts for life on a planet that was, Earth. (pp. 108-09)

Vonnegut wants to toss out junk in order to retain only "sacred things." His reason for going to Midland City is "to be born again." He is not reborn but he relearns that forces in our souls prevent transformation. Again collision images the spiritual turmoil that awaits us. "One force had a sudden advantage over another, and spiritual continents began to shrug and heave." The sacred, then, resides neither in himself nor in any individual human being. Robo Karabekian, a trashy minimalist painter who has been invited to the Festival, brings Vonnegut to his fullest understanding of the sacred: "'Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us.'" Karabekian calls our awareness a band of light, which describes his kind of painting. The bogus painter-philosopher defines for Vonnegut, the doodler-novelist, what is sacred. Awareness is all that the fan of collision can hope to attain and awareness depends on collective, interpenetration of mind. Vonnegut writes from that band of unwavering light in himself, addressing the band at the core "of each person who reads this book," and thereby he furthers the collectivity of the sacred. (pp. 110-11)

Vonnegut in the book expresses a keen interest about what God would have to say about all the collisions going on. Vonnegut even plays God in the oldest of artistic guises, the omniscient Creator of his fictions, just to see if the giving and the taking of fictional life provides an insight into God's knowledge. How can he, as a second Creator of the world, transform reality back into its potentialities and so escape its chaos? Vonnegut's intrusion into the text, scaf-folding an overstructure of reflection, is not a gimmick but an act of love. The final silence evoked by his self-portrait resonates with the recognition of the Creator's failure to comprehend and to save his world. (pp. 111-12)

Without essentially altering his established material or practiced style, Vonnegut advances his art in Slapstick through tone. Doom is handled quietly, philosophically, in the way that Laurel and Hardy throw pies with thoughtful poise. The novel's dramatic action revolves around cruelty and turmoil, yet it reaches across a long emotional distance that removes any trace of bitterness or sentimentality. And like Stan and Ollie, Vonnegut plays himself in Slapstick. He becomes the character in this work that he said in his Preface to Between Time and Timbuktu he wanted to be—and was encouraged to be, I believe by A Time To Die, Tom Wicker's moving account of how the Attica uprising of 1971 caused him to redirect the entire course of his life. Vonnegut now uses fiction to achieve just such a personal transformation of his writing. All the Alicelike trips through wonderland that comprise the new novel are falls down the rabbit holes of his mind, wending through the remote passages of his childhood to emerge in the channel of his creative achievement. Slapstick is deliberately a spiritual autobiography, an act of Vonnegut's mind, logging his responses to the disquieting origins of his creativeness. The fictionalized memoir is not nearly as melancholy an account as Vonnegut found Wicker's to be. Vonnegut looks back from the long perspective of very old age, which can see the human comedy in the trappings of utter defeat. (p. 114)

Vonnegut's talent comes through most effectively when he lifts a simple story with an explicit moral (which he often states for us) from a known genre and then satirizes his use of it. The result is a parody narrative in which Vonnegut does not imitate human action but imitates another imitation.

Vonnegut understands well that screen low-comedy presents the audience with a poem through a series of gestures. Continuity of action counts for much less in slapstick film than does gesture. Such comedy coheres through spare ritual conduct—stupidity creating catastrophe, dumb, ill-judged violence bringing about destruction in images that we can all grasp immediately. (p. 118)

[Stan and Ollie] personify human dignity born of its own ineptitude. Slapstick is peopled by the blundering idots and scurvy knaves of that zany world, and their perpetual blundering explains that our humanity is bound up with imperfection. This sympathy for human shortcomings leads Vonnegut to plead for simple kindness. Gentle decency, far more than idealistic theories, is needed for us to live with our salutary imperfections. (p. 119)

Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin also provide Vonnegut with a way to unify his introspective folktale. They are masters of inflection. Their comedy develops as they carefully shade their physical stance and emotional attitude toward the gag. In Slapstick Vonnegut proceeds by modulating his numerous attitudes toward the jungle of extinction. Slapstick is a sequence of mental positions without a climax. A minimal story line is ornamented with dialogue and situation. The effect is that of improvisation supporting an unobtrusive plan. Wilbur's chronological recollection of his life is the story's binding thread, which Vonnegut fastens to his personal prologue and epilogue. Vonnegut as usual delights in acknowledging "all the loose ends of the yarn" while composing in strip-cartoon layout a series of gallows gags that blend, in a carefully paced tempo, outlandish behavior with a feeling of inevitability. (pp. 119-20)

In the moral background of the novel are the atomic bomb and the killing of 100 million people in this century's wars and death camps. These events shape Slapstick as well as modern history. Slapstick is Vonnegut's meditative documentary—his sorrow and pity in low-comedy form—about how we live now in the aftermath of the holocaust. During such a crisis, human beings require a sense of continuity and relatedness to what comes before and after life. We find that struggle to achieve a new relationship with the world expressed in Slapstick through the image of the survivor as creator. Creativeness, like Wilbur's happy childhood, takes two forms. The external formulation of the struggle for meaning is the novel itself. The inner, spiritual mode generating the story is rendered through Melody. Simply to go on, as Melody does, taking things as they come, is to know how to live with suffering; and when everything falls apart, to pick up and begin again with clownish joyousness from the act of doing so is all there is to do. We learn by feeling. Such purity of heart is the beginning of unity within one's spirit. (pp. 120-21)

For Vonnegut, fiction serves the great moral purpose of breathing life back into life. Books are restorative, especially if they train readers to be cosmic fans. So in dark times he uses the therapy of laughter to evoke the brightness that is concealed by fear. Because the times are deceitful, he satirizes their false claims. Because we are caught in spiritual tyranny, he celebrates the liberating power of the imagination. Vonnegut wants to reveal what Blake called "the infinite which was hid" so that we can with new energy transform the nowhere of all the mental San Lorenzos we have made for ourselves into the now-here of love.

In such a place of the heart, love and power would unite to allow the compassionate real self to emerge from the secrecy it adopts for survival. Feeling and action could then be one … Vonnegut attempts through his novels to sensitize his readers to the need for reversing the way the politics of power have infiltrated the intimacies of experience…. His novels bear witness to the rareness and the danger of recognizing others in open affection. Paul Proteus can no longer fit into his society; Howard Campbell prefers to kill himself rather than live with the newly aroused idea that he is a feeling person responsible to others; Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater go mad; Kilgore Trout secludes himself; and Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain resorts to drugs. If their collective discovery of the human is imperiling, it is also necessary. It provides the basis for a covenant relation between person and person for mutual validation at a time when conditions have made untenable any other recognition of our human purpose.

The image of the human mind strained by ideological oppression, within a body racked by pain, dominates Vonnegut's novels form the first, without any implication that life ever was or will be less burdened by suffering or exempt from death. But there is a change in Vonnegut's attitude toward his persistently apocalyptic stories, and it comes about through the same psychological introspection which attends his technical development. As the novels penetrate humanity's betrayed trusts in utopian perfectability, economic progress, scientific inquiry, social prerogative, military power, and the innate illusion of personal immortality, Vonnegut gradually affirms a true source of life: consciousness. Consciousness brings him to reject any false foundation for being, or "junk," as he calls it. Trusting in a transcendent source of being frees the human mind from laying its unlived life on institutions, which cannot fulfill the heart's yearning to live. It is significant that where Vonnegut's memory is most highly charged with social injustice and political tragedy, namely, in Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Slapstick, consciousness holds in check the immense force of doom. Consciousness formulates hope, which is why Vonnegut calls it "sacred." Hope defies explanation, in Vonnegut's reflection, because it lies in the sovereignty of the Creator of the Universe, however unpredictably his will presents itself, and in the sovereignty of human love, however rare its presence. From the dramatic action of the novels, however, we see that Vonnegut addresses that hope to the disenfranchised, who do not nourish the illusion that they are masters of their present or future. This, the message of self-giving love, is the proclamation of Vonnegut's novels. It is the best of all possible news. (pp. 124-25)

Richard Giannone, in his Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels (copyright © 1977 by Kennikat Press Corp.; reprinted by permission of Kennikat Press Corp.), Kennikat, 1977.