Word: vonnegut
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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...
...LIKE TO relate Kurt Vonnegut's latest book to the strike. Doesn't it seem that, now, whenever we turn to our minds to do a little thinking we always find the same unexplainable desire to go do political stuff? The politics of the strike are so much with us that most of the time it's near impossible to be at ease if we're not at the rally. And these days nearly every hour there's a rally we're not going to if we're not there. (I hear a muffled echo out my window...
Throughout Vonnegut's book there is a persistent and unavoidable sense of preoccupation similar to the feeling of obligation we now feel towards strike activities. What he is obligated to in Slaughterhouse-Five is death. This isn't a very easy thing for a fatalist to be obligated to Fatalism (that is, the belief that the "reasons" why things happen to us are a series of random events beyond our control) serves us particularly well as a transition--to, for example, move us philosophically from event to event in our existence. When someone's existence terminates in the book...
...Kurt Vonnegut doesn't really want to write a war book about death. That's why its presence hangs throughout this book as something he is unable to avoid. He takes off the first chapter to explain he doesn't want to write about war. He just has to. The book is more a thing of his environment than of himself? But we, for some reason, don't believe him when we read him saying that war is a topic he's been forced to deal with. I don't know Why we don't believe it. But, for some...
YOUR BASIC Vonnegut book shows you what cause and effect are like through the example of someone's attempt to live. This one, Slaughter-house-Five, is more of an illustrated essay. It's more painful and less mystifying complex than, say, The Sirens of Titan. But that's because we're not supposed to be out for good times this trip; that's the way it goes. Here's part of what we find on this time...