Word: infernos
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Despite their battling in the inferno, the Vietnamese have not lost their humanity. The violence which for decades they have been forced to content with and resort to has not obscured their goals or tarnished their ultimate vision. Vietnam will be free, and Vietnam has taught America the price and the value of freedom...
Kilgore Trout. The geography of Vonnegut's universe extends from the inferno of Dresden, where he underwent the fire-raids of World War II (Slaughterhouse-Five), to the purgatory of Ilium, alias Schenectady, N.Y., where he labored unhappily as a public relations man for General Electric (Player Piano). It also includes the mysterious paradise of Tralfamadore, a planet where little green men explain to earthlings that time is not a flowing river but a range of mountains, all eternally coexistent. Many of Vonnegut's characters, too, coexist from book to book. Kilgore Trout, the science-fiction writer...
...last third of the book is taken up with the journey of Reuben through The City, into which he plunges after a long struggle with manic depression and bad luck. The City is an inferno with eerie similarities to the surface world that Reuben has just left. The inhabitants of The City survive in a condition they cannot bear and cannot conceive of escaping from. They endure by shooting heroin (the whole book could work on the level of a descent into a junkie's world), by eating human flesh out of insane hunger; they cower in corners to avoid...
...Vietnamese attitude toward the conflict may be induced from this evidence. They certainly do not relish being bombed or shot at, but for years they have continued to battle in the inferno in the attempt to free their country. The willingness shared by millions of Vietnamese to continue their struggle in the awful face of constant destruction indicates that they place such a high priority on their revolution that they are willing to risk annihilation to secure its success...
...fashioned novelist who has forgotten he must compete with television, sex books and the Good Life for the raddled reader's attention. No matter. Raddled or not, readers should ignore the flaws. Swallow the magic apples. Brush up on terza rima (to identify those snippets of The Inferno that Gardner can't keep from including). Borrow a French dictionary (to translate Gardner's morsels of French). But press on at all costs to the end. The masterpiece to be found there is Clumly's final speech on law and order, which shapes and caps the book...