Word: vonnegutisms
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...parables written out of anger at some inexplicable kink in the collective psyche: blind trust in science and scientists (Cat's Cradle); faith in war as a rational activity (Slaughterhouse-Five). After a lengthy period of mellowed-out serenity (and two mediocre novels, Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick), Vonnegut is mad again. His target in Jailbird is money, specifically the odd systems that people have invented for distributing and withholding...
Walter F. Starbuck, Vonnegut's hero and narrator, keeps getting his life sidetracked by great wealth. The son of immigrant servants, he was informally adopted by his parents' millionaire employer, raised as a gentleman and sent off to Harvard. In his early 60s, after an on-and-off career in Government service, he finds himself buried in an obscure job with the Nixon White House. So remote is his office that it becomes the perfect hiding place for a trunk containing a million dollars in unlaundered bills. Starbuck is sent off to a minimum-security prison in Georgia...
This plot is loose and baggy enough to give Vonnegut plenty of leg room, and he strolls about at will. He offers a lengthy account, for instance, of the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and of their subsequent executions in the 1920s. Not all of the digressions are somber. Starbuck meets Nixon and finds the President's smile "like a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer." The hero's meditations on money are childlike enough to produce odd insights. On his first morning of freedom, Starbuck leaves his seedy hotel to buy a newspaper...
Such touches are vintage Vonnegut...
...less happily, is the simple moral that runs through almost all of his work. As Starbuck puts it, "We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one." Yet Vonnegut does not believe that people are capable of doing so, at least not in a way that will make them happy. This leads to the static quality of his books: nothing much ever changes except to get a little worse. Some of the evidence Vonnegut offers is rigged: Starbuck comes to believe that wisdom does not exist and hence can not be used to improve...