Word: pilgrims
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reinforce the universality of his appraisal of war of its associated deaths, Vonnegut tosses in people and places from all his other books. Howard W. Campbell, the Nazi was criminal and star of Mother Night, visits this book's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, in Dresden to deliver one of the best passages in the book, a critique of the American fightingman. Eliot Roseater, of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater fame, shares a mental hospital ward and his favorite author with Pilgrim. Ilium, N.Y., hometown of Cat's Cradle and Player Piano, makes its third appearance in that role. And, finally, various...
...grumbling just the other day with some revolutionary cohorts about how we could best spread out culture once we took over. It was decided to pave over the whole of Southeast Asia to make way for one gigantic Frosty's, the world's biggest. Then I read that Billy Pilgrim, the hero of Slaughterhouse-Five, the character we identify with and live, helped put together his little empire with a part interest in Tastee-Freeze frozen custard stands. This type of coincidence of inspiration is what kinds my age achieve all the time with Vonnegut...
Rebirth with Newby is no hallelujah experience. It means confronting and finally answering the question that one's particular destiny has been asking from the beginning. At the end, Townrow lives out the dream that has haunted him from the opening page. Like a saintly pilgrim, he sets off across Port Said harbor in a small boat, ferrying the coffin of the dead man whose estate he came to plunder, and then moves out to sea in search of an absolute emptiness in which to find himself...
Everyman Figure. The task is beyond him. Eventually he presents his publisher with the jumbled chronicle of another American prisoner who also survived the raid, as well as some of the horrors of peace and prosperity. Too archly named Billy Pilgrim, the second survivor is hardly a real character-"there are almost no characters in this book," Vonnegut says, "because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces." But he does very well as something between a consumer-age Candide and a Vonnegut Everyman figure...
...prejudice for objective appraisal." The latter type has three awful exemplars in Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne, who recently collaborated on a book called Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without. As the selections begin with Beowulf, and include such dispensable works as Hamlet, Pilgrim's Progress, the poetry of Hopkins and Eliot, it is clear that the three iconoclasts are prepared to do without a great deal that Burgess is not. The essay in which Burgess puts a few of the 50 treasures back in their places, and the three "naughty, smackable" cutups back...