Word: mothered
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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KURT VONNEGUT has written five novels (Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine, Mother Night, and The Sirens of Titan); periodic short stories that keep popping up in magazines like Playboy and science fiction anthologies like Tomorrow, the Stars; a book of collected short stories called Welcome to the Monkey-house; and a new novel out this spring called The Slaughterhouse Five, the first two chapters of which were recently printed in Ramparts...
...CHARACTERS accept major defeats when they happen because they accept everything that happens. They even come to beg for defeat when it becomes clear that influencing cause and effect, indeed determining the course of their own lives, is for them impossible. Mother Night opens with the voice of Vonnegut coming at us through the mouth of a Nazi war criminal sitting in an Israeli prison awaiting trial. At the end of the book he does himself in when he suddenly finds he has the evidence to acquit himself...
...offer an example of Kurt Vonnegut's explanation of human behavior, this is how he explains why Jones in Mother Night could seem perfectly normal and yet lead the insane "Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution...
Styron's hero is an unwed celibate, his one and only sexual experience being with another black man. He has a Moynihan-style one-parent family. His mother is much contented with her life as a house slave. He leads a life of loneliness and frustration during his childhood, thoroughly cut off from other children his age. He receives all of his education from whites...
...sexual interests in white women. However, in the entire book, which spans the length of his life, only three black women are shown. The first is Turner's grandmother, a freshly captured slave who dies at age 14 after giving birth to Turner's mother. The grandmother is portrayed as a noble, if bestial and uncomprehending, savage. Turner's mother is shown as an ignorant, narrow, self-satisfied women. Not only is she proud to be a house slave of the Turner family, she accepts being raped at the point of a broken bottle by a drunken white overseer...