Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Kurt Vonnegut, whose books are funny and whose mind couldn't be overly tortured, would, I thought, be pleased with my assumption that since a relationship between the bookplate and the book obviously existed, that relationship would have as much significance as the relationship between any other two objects, people, or ideas. The causes and effects of random occurrences being so complex that man can never foresee which events and relationships will become ultimately more valuable...
...finally concluded that since Vonnegut never explained, in so many words, what the title of the book, Mother Night, meant to the "I" of his narrative, obviously Permelia Hersey is, herself, Mother Night...
...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...
What Kurt Vonnegut does for us is to give us simple two-sentence to single-word answers to all those great questions we've forgotten we're asking while at the same time making the narrator seem disinterested, almost unconscious, of what he's told us. It makes us think we've discovered something on our own. We want to tell Vonnegut about what he's put there in his book. And because the thought is ours, we free-associate the thought into our own experience, the petty incidents of our own lives, until then it becomes crashingly meaningful...
...Vonnegut writes his novel, as a series of events reported; his purpose, ostensibly, is to show us how one event led to the next event in a man's life, and how a whole situation of complicated events determined even further turns in his life. Vonnegut's casual comments revealing the true meaning of existence and identifying the nature of the values of most people in the population are either stuck in modifying clauses (so Vonnegut can be saying it without a heavy hand). Or Vonnegut puts great truths in the mouthes of characters who don't seem...