Word: trout
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CALL ME KILGORE. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- Kurt Vonnegut created me. My full name is Kilgore Trout and I'm the author of over 100 novels and 2000 short stories; all science fiction, all unheard of. I often had strong intimations that I was merely the creation of another human being; a particularly sadistic fellow who wanted only to write about somebody who suffers all the time. I was never sure of this idea until I met him in his last novel, Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut wrote himself into this book and approached...
...Creator made a bad mistake. He liberated me. Invoking the names of Tolstoi and Jefferson, who in their own middle-age had freed their slaves, he said: "Arise, Mr. Trout, you are free, you are free." At the same time Vonnegut paradoxically decided the rest of my life for me. I was to become a respected thinker, win the Nobel Prize for Medicine, and die a fulfilled individual. I was shocked to learn this, but I wasn't the least bit thankful. Because my whole life, as he wrote it in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse Five and then...
Drag. This turnabout sounds like something that might have been thought up and then discarded by Kilgore Trout, the seedy science-fiction writer who skulks through the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Its spinning out does not amount to much unless the reader is unusually titillated by characters in drag. The novel's plot involves a pretty secretary named Georgie who at first accepts man's lot-being pawed by his boss and whistled at by foul-mouthed female construction workers-and then gradually rebels, fleeing to the Maine woods with a winsome and similarly disaffected FBI girl named...
Dwayne Hoover, similarly, is programmed to go mad. But, as Vonnegut observes, smiling benignly, "people who go crazy need someone to give them their ideas, somebody to write their words for them." This donor is Kilgore Trout, the bedraggled science-fiction writer who, on encountering Dwayne's question ("What is the purpose of life?") as a graffito in a New York movie-theater men's room, finds that he has no pen or pencil with which to write his answer: "To be/the eyes/and ears/and conscience/of the Creator of the Universe/you fool." Trout has been invited to give...
...more and more becoming a central character in his own novels, seems to conclude on an even grander destructive note, namely the destruction of his own fictional universe. "I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come," he tells his creation, Kilgore Trout, when they meet at Midland City. "Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoy freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career." It is, perhaps, the ultimate goal of every creator...