Kurt Vonnegut's latest work, Jailbird, continues the trend of his two preceding works, Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick, away from sci fi entertainment towards satiric antinovels set in the sordid present and saturated with world-weary despair…. [Jailbird] opens with a rambling, autobiographical segment…. [But it becomes] a parodistic fairy tale spiced for grown ups with Dadaistic phantasies and with a moral dictated by black humor.

In Jailbird Vonnegut operates as a satirical surgeon on the festering sores of North America's power-hungry plutocracy. His diagnosis is based on historical studies of the cruelty and injustice done to the workers of the world by American capitalists from 1890 to 1978. He holds his historical diagnosis together chronologically by tracing parallels between three quasi-revolutions of the little man: the great union strikes of the 1890's to obtain justice and tolerable living conditions for the workers; the similar strikes organized in the 1930's depression; and finally the surreal scheme of Mary Kathleen O'Looney to bring about "a peaceful economic revolution" … in the 1970's. All these quasi-revolutions end in martyrdom for the idealistic socialist leaders of the time…. (p. 159)

Jailbird is a scathing reductio ad absurdum of American capitalism's attempt to substitute the worship of Mammon and property as a guiding dream in place of Christ's Sermon on the Mount. Vonnegut discards the salvation theology of Christianity and secularizes and politicizes Christ's gospel. With this ideal of humility and altruistic love constantly in mind, Vonnegut lambasts the USA for its false promise of justice and equality for all…. It is representative of the haplessness of the little man that the narrator and antihero of this sad satire, Stankiewicz-Starbuck, becomes a passive and harmless accomplice to Nixon's Watergate cover-up in Jailbird's contemporary setting…. When Starbuck lists the rather corny examples of Christian goodness he has experienced in one day … all for the benefit of Mary Kathleen playing a fairy tale God, then Jailbird begins uncannily to resemble the parable in Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Szechuan. In both works the capitalist economy is held by the author to make the practice of Christian altruism impossible and in both works the Gods are revealed to be impotent anachronisms, leaving the only solution to be found in this world in the evolution of a new community founded on socialist ideals. But whereas Brecht's plays are resolutely optimistic, Vonnegut's novels waver irresolutely between the black humor of despair and a wistful hope beyond hopelessness.

The antihero of Jailbird shambles his way through a myriad of tests towards a wry kind of moral heroism in defeat. The plot relies on shameless coincidences; the events have an archetypal ring to them; and the problems evoked are always urgent moral ones whose solution is vital to the survival of our Western civilization. Jailbird draws its characters from a muck heap of grotesque caricatures of capitalist lawyers, politicians, and big businessmen. Their unfailing corruption serves to demonstrate the epidemic malaise of our civilization.

In Jailbird Vonnegut seems to see himself like his narrator as a philosophical jailbird resigned to his existential imprisonment in a meaningless world but amusing himself by pretending to transform the world through the magic of poetic fantasy…. Vonnegut's style resembles the behavior of one of Jailbird's characters who is always "overacting his surprise and dismay like an actor in a silent movie."… For Vonnegut is addicted to the half melodramatic, half consciously humorous hyperbole of the silent movie director. He exaggerates the contrast between unbelievable innocence and cruel power mongering, between foolish optimism and apathetic defeatism. His antinovel is thus in the tradition of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. The black humor and flippancy behind which Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut hide their sometimes sentimental, neo-Christian visions of goodness are best understood as emanating in spirit from the softhearted father of American literary satire who grew increasingly pessimistic in old age, Mark Twain. (pp. 159-60)