Word: vonnegutisms
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...feeling after reading any of Kurt Vonnegut's novels (excepting, perhaps, the first, Player Piano) that at least we now know what the situation is, that any explanation of cause and effect just ignores several levels of complexity and will be soon invalidated...
...necessarily have to accept the naked answers Vonnegut gives us to our unasked questions. For example, the meaning of the civilization of mankind is five sentences; those five sentences don't describe the meaning--they are the meaning of civilization. But if we accept Vonnegut's world to work with, it gives us something all put together so we can see how everything relates to each other...
...Sirens of Titan achieves an incredible complexity that probably only a style like Vonnegut's is capable of--a complexity that goes far beyond such intricate plots as Dickens' Great Expectations. Vonnegut's hero, Malachi Constant, moves through three sets of circumstances, three whole identies so remote from each other that he goes by three different names...
...Vonnegut not only explains the reason for one individual's undeserved good luck (really he gives us a philosophy to deal with excessively lucky people), but he also lets us find answers to such questions as what is the purpose of an individual in his own life, what is the meaning of the civilization of mankind, and what the progress of civilization...
...VONNEGUT also shows something about why it is that we think something is funny, why we can be happy and just glad. Vonnegut's books are very funny, easily the funniest things in print. Some people I know, mostly grown-ups, say that his books are almost exclusively funny. These grown-ups also like to give little names to what Vonnegut writes like "Black Humor," a phrase which is necessarily irrelevant if it is defined in terms of other people's writings...