Word: vonnegutisms
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...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...
...CHARACTERS accept major defeats when they happen because they accept everything that happens. They even come to beg for defeat when it becomes clear that influencing cause and effect, indeed determining the course of their own lives, is for them impossible. Mother Night opens with the voice of Vonnegut coming at us through the mouth of a Nazi war criminal sitting in an Israeli prison awaiting trial. At the end of the book he does himself in when he suddenly finds he has the evidence to acquit himself...
...scope of time that Kurt Vonnegut deals with in his novels covers the entire length of a given man's life. It is as if Vonnegut sees this, not as the unit of man's work that turns out to be the most meaningful, but rather as the unit of man's hopeless groping for meaning that finally runs out on him. Yes, his characters do come up with sentences that explain their purpose in life, sentences which send us, the readers, into chuckles of heart-warmed complacency when we discover them; but Vonnegut's people never stop hoping...
...Because Vonnegut's people do all things (including suicide) as a matter of course, the books move right along from event to event unimpeded by emotion (most of which we are left to intuit or fabricate from our own experience). His books are unusually fast reading; and their being, as I've suggested, something of participatory novels, we find ourselves reading at a pace determined by what the book means to us rather than a pace determined by the looseness of the prose. Vonnegut told us, when two friends and I visited him at his home early this fall, that...
...whereas it took him years to write Cat's Cradle, a crazy book with mini chapters that leaps forward and around so fast one would think it was written in weeks, he put together the whole of The Sirens of Titan, a much more intricate book, in one night. Vonnegut says he was at a party where someone told him he ought to write another novel. So they went into the next room where he just verbally pieced together this book from the things that were around in his mind. It's really amazing, but it makes you feel...