What we have in Jailbird is an extremely closely woven narrative built up of ironic juxtapositions and incongruities stated and counterpointed as in an elaborate symphony. The development of character in terms of psychological realism is not important to Vonnegut (though a Dickensian presentation of idiosyncracy is) and in fact some of his characters' names are close anagrams of one another—Leland Clewes/Cleveland Lawes; Arpad Lean/Delmar Peale—as though to suggest that their personalities are accidental and that in essence they are the same—strange machines making weird noises and doing odd things to one another, whose actions in the world always turn out contrary to what they intend…. Human beings, in Vonnegut's novels, are pawns of forces they cannot comprehend and of which they are only vaguely aware. In Sirens of Titan, for example, the whole of human history is explicable as the procurement for an alien space traveller of a spare part for his stranded vehicle so that he may proceed to the other end of the universe with his message which, translated, means "greetings." (pp. 148-49)

Neither is Vonnegut interested in fine writing. His style is a sort of high class telegraphese conveying vast amounts of information very rapidly and is ideally suited for the presentation of disparate narrative strands which shuttle back and forth as the plot proceeds to be tied at the novel's end into a surprising but satisfying knot. In Jailbird several chapters begin with Starbuck sitting on the bench by the bus stop outside his prison on the first day of freedom contemplating his past and his fate as a man always in the wrong place at the wrong time, who has thereby inadvertently "set the cause of humanitarianism back a hundred years." Events in his own life and in its social and political background are recalled associatively and without respect to chronology by means of some ironic or symbolic link. (p. 149)

Why is Vonnegut an excellent writer? Because he displays that quality Sir Philip Sidney called energia—a total involvement of the imagination with the material whose by-product is a series of delightful inventions expressed with a kind of nonchalant grace…. One of the pleasures of reading Vonnegut lies in [the] … nonchalant skill with which he sets up his balloons and shoots them down: Watergate, proliferating corporations, Nixon, the Eastern establishment, greasy, born-again crooks, and so on. The price one often pays for this pleasure is Vonnegut's communicated sense of defeat: in Sirens the protagonist is given a quiet, comfortable park bench on which to die; in Cradle he becomes a monument frozen in an attitude of infantile defiance; in Jailbird he retreats happily to a warm jail…. (pp. 149-50)