Word: vonnegut
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...Pontiac showroom for the scene of such collisions? "Pontiac is the leading middle-class car," Vonnegut told an interviewer some time ago. "But Pontiac is also the name of an Indian chief. The name is like a survey of American history...
With such unorthodox symbols and signposts, Vonnegut himself has been surveying America for nearly a quarter of a century. In the course of that time, he has created a closed system all his own. Indeed, it is Vonnegut's strange and captivating system, not his conventionally liberal ideas or his stolidly workmanlike prose, that has made him one of the most popular ornaments of contemporary fiction; for his devices have allowed him to comment with sadness, affection and humor about absurdities that drive lesser men to mere frothing at the mouth and black rage...
Kilgore Trout. The geography of Vonnegut's universe extends from the inferno of Dresden, where he underwent the fire-raids of World War II (Slaughterhouse-Five), to the purgatory of Ilium, alias Schenectady, N.Y., where he labored unhappily as a public relations man for General Electric (Player Piano). It also includes the mysterious paradise of Tralfamadore, a planet where little green men explain to earthlings that time is not a flowing river but a range of mountains, all eternally coexistent. Many of Vonnegut's characters, too, coexist from book to book. Kilgore Trout, the science-fiction writer...
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...
...attacks random acquaintances and random strangers, and we last see him being carted away, along with several of his victims, in an ambulance called the Martha Simmons Memorial Mobile Disaster Unit, and talking vaguely about the prospects of investing in health clubs. "The Midland City Festival of the Arts," Vonnegut concludes in one grand sentence, "was postponed because of madness...