Like his fellow humorist Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut attains his main strength as a writer in his grasp of persona. Wear the right mask, he knows, and you can say anything. Critics are disarmed by this approach, not knowing which voice is that of the "real' Vonnegut and which only an illusion…. Thus, the typical Vonnegut book is endearing, puzzling, and infuriating, as is Palm Sunday, a book which should make Vonnecultists of the four or five Americans who still are not. Try, but it's hard to dislike Palm Sunday. (pp. 57-8)

Not one, but three Kurt Vonneguts inhabit the pages of Palm Sunday. In the quasi-scientific language he seems to love, they are KV-1, KV-2, and KV-3, or the Risque Buffoon, the Freedom Fighter, and the Mandarin Simplifier.

KV-1, Risque Buffoon, cracks jokes both dismal and hilarious, advises graduating classes to get plenty of bran in their diets, and wonders about Queen Victoria's reaction to the drawing of his anus featured as part of the official KV signature. This would have been crude back in study hall, of course, but KV-2, Freedom Fighter, is whisked in quicker than you can say Bill of Rights to explain away such bourgeois aversions. Taboos against mentioning and drawing no-no body parts are really devices for keeping the workers in their places and squelching dissent.

If that sounds oversimplified, blame it on the presence throughout Palm Sunday of KV-3, the Mandarin Simplifier. Vonnegut has a penchant for reducing complex problems of art or morality to simple a-b-c solutions….

More importantly, parts of Palm Sunday are especially timely. As KV-2, Freedom Fighter, Vonnegut returns frequently to a lament over the decline of the Freethinker tradition of Bertrand Russell and Ralph Ingersoll and Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken, and of KV's humanist great grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut. No one-liners can hide Vonnegut's pain as he discusses his wife's and daughters' conversions to "born-again" Christianity ("working white magic through rituals and prayers," Vonnegut writes of the faith that destroyed his marriage).

In his personal anguish, perhaps Vonnegut pinpoints the reasons for the revival of fundamentalism and the current attacks, from rostrum and Rose Garden, on humanism:

I would be a fool to say that the Freethinker ideas of Clems Vonnegut remain as enchanting and encouraging as ever—not after the mortal poisoning of the planet, not after two world wars, with more to come.

Behind the veils of ironist and jester, we sense that at some distant point the multiple KVs merge into a laughing, suffering man very much of his time. Like his literary forebear Mark Twain he is horrified by the headlines, and as puzzled by our faltering civilization as another clown prince of modern times, Charles Chaplin (a Vonnegut idol). Vonnegut's answer—a simple answer, of course—is much like theirs. He laughs. (p. 58)