Word: malachi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sirens of Titan achieves an incredible complexity that probably only a style like Vonnegut's is capable of--a complexity that goes far beyond such intricate plots as Dickens' Great Expectations. Vonnegut's hero, Malachi Constant, moves through three sets of circumstances, three whole identies so remote from each other that he goes by three different names...
...throughout the book we are constantly aware of the whole, the governing force that determines all the happenings of the story, the answer to the suggestion Malachi Constant makes to explain his own good luck--"I guess somebody up there likes...
...find often when we are laughing in Vonnegut's books that we are laughing because what he points out is true. The truth, because it really exists, is funny. When Malachi Constant's father found he couldn't buy the Mona Lisa, he debased her by using her in an advertising campaign for suppositories; the whole idea is funny because we know it could happen, and it's true that that is about the way a lot of people alive today think...