verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Kurt Vonnegut as Billy Pilgrim's Case Worker: Slaughterhouse Five Reread for the Era of PTSD

by Neil Earle, American Popular Culture

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” This simple declarative sentence takes readers of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five inside the mind of one of the most fascinating characters in American post-World War II fiction. It helps all aspiring writers to know that even the agile Vonnegut had to struggle for years to find a proper vehicle for conveying the horror of World War II. The author's own personal inciting event was, as is well known, the massacre of the German city of Dresden in February 1945, and the gruesome after-affects of war, any war, we are now learning. What is immediately significant about Slaughterhouse Five and Billy Pilgrim is that the very recently departed Vonnegut bears witness in this work to the fact that there are walking wounded still among us, suffering survivors from what has been called “the last good war.” Even that descriptor was challenged lately by World War II veterans of the “Greatest Generation” recently quoted on PBS. One articulate ex-serviceman suggested the characterization of the “necessary war” instead. This revisionist point hits home with jarring effect as military transports ferry back to our shores the severely traumatized victims of “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the very controversial invasion and occupation of Iraq, an operation that seems, at this date, very much stuck in time.

This essay briefly reviews evidence from within the text of Slaughterhouse Five that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is not only setting off Billy’s fantasy voyages to Tralfamadore but also lies behind the erratic, heavy-footed trajectory of his sad winding path through post-war life. It argues that Vonnegut has done the culture a favor by creating a superb literary portrait of the very archetype of the walking wounded – Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut offers with his trademark wryness an at times bemused portrait of a man becoming psychologically disoriented from experiencing griefs simply too great to be borne, a theme in Western literature that could be profitably traced back to the beginnings of Western literature. It is at least possible to read the “heart-devouring anger” of Achilles over the death of Patroculus in Book IX of The Iliad and the almost spastic (for the Bible) “Lament” for David over Jonathan in Samuel-Kings as ancient evidences of PTSD. Thus the latent sub-theme inside Slaughterhouse Five advances the claim that this work can be profitably restudied alongside insights from two of the clearest-communicating psychologists of the late twentieth century, men whose work was appreciated on the popular level: Dr. M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, and Dr. Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning. First, it is good to seek some definitions: Exactly what is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Leonard Mustazza - Forever Pursuing the Genesis
Das Reich der Zwei - Mother Night

59
If we link the title's possible [mythic] meaning to the morals that Vonnegut does specify [about pretending, death and love], we are left with the question how are pretense, death, and love associated with the primeval mythic personag referred to in the title? The answer to that question will be the subject of this chapter.

62
The concept of mythic backward movements and miscreations that [classical authors] speak of can well be applied to Vonnegut's novel... For his entire life, Campbell has benn involved in nothing so much as attempting to create for himself a little universe, a limited sphere of operations in which he can enjoy order, beauty, light, and love.

63
Mother Night... is not concerned simply with the small, beguilling truths that one invents for oneself to survive happily. Rather, its main focus is the collision of one man's little world with those of potent others within the greater chaos; and in a more general and figurative sense, with the endless conflict between our own "supercilious lights" and the greater darkness.

65
Like his counterparts in other Vonnegut novels, Howard uses as a means of escape a mental construct that represents for him a re-creation of reality along familiar mythic lines. The particular creation myth to which he subscribes is... a well-known and conventional one that Vonnegut turns to again and again in his fiction: the story of Noah.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Uniformity and Deformity in "Harrison Bergeron"
An exploration of the main theme of "Harrison Bergeron"
Marek Vit

In this essay, I will attempt to explore what Kurt Vonnegut illustrated in his short story "Harrison Bergeron"--the fact that uniformity (of any kind) leads to the loss of individuality, and therefore to absolute deformity of humanness.
"The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal," the story begins. "They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal in every which way." (Vonnegut 1968:7) In this haunting story, Vonnegut probably wanted to warn our society of similar kind of equality, equality that can be fatal for human race.
The theme of absolute equality has already appeared two years before "Harrison Bergeron" was published for the first time in Fantasy and Science-Fiction Magazine (1961). It was Vonnegut's novel The Sirens of Titan. However, in this work the theme is only a minor feature and is not really developed (see Vonnegut 1975:158). The idea probably intrigued Kurt Vonnegut and forced him to develop it into a short story. Those who are familiar with Kurt Vonnegut's writing will certainly recognize some other themes of this story. For example the fear of de-humanization of human beings, being stuck in amber (Harrisons inability to overthrow the system) and so forth.
In "Harrison Bergeron", Kurt Vonnegut presented a scary view of a future society, where everyone was equal. "Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else." (Vonnegut 1988:7). It was the job of the agents of the United States Handicapper General to keep it this way. Beautiful people had to wear ugly masks. People not heavy enough had to wear handicap bags full of lead. Clever people had to wear a radio in their ear tuned to the government transmitter, which sent out sharp noises to keep people from taking advantage of their brains. It was a world where competition was the greatest of sins.
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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Leonard Mustazza - Forever Pursuing the Genesis
The Sirens of Titan and the "Paradise Within"

47
As in the case of many of Vonnegut's novels..., the movement towards Eden [the discovery of the paradise within on the Edenic Titan for Malachi and Beatrice] of sorts begins with its antithesis, the fallen world... The primary case of its trouble, Vonnegut is careful to point out, has to do with the spiritual alienation of the species, the sense that life is without inherent meaning colliding with the desperate belief that there must be some source of meaning out there somewhere.

48
Rumfoord: he exists now as a wave phenomenon that materializes on earth only at fixed intervels, the miraculous materializations that people so avidly await. More importantly, at the same time that he lost his physical substantialit, he gained certain extraordinary talents, including ability to read minds (22) and to see into future (24). He does not hesitate to use these talents in his self-appointed mission to reorder human priorities and thus save humankind from meaningless.
The Church of God the Uttery Indifferent

49
(as in piano and other novels?) Feelings are unimportant to Rumfoord, and people are expendable. The experiment is all.

51
He also sees it that they handicap themselves with weights and other devices meant to hamper natural human advantages. In effect, Rumfoord has nothing less than to remake the human species, not in his own image, for he will remain superior and (52) unhandicapped, but in an image that he considers good.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Leonard Mustazza - Forever Pursuing the Genesis
The Machine Within - Player Piano

33
Vonnegut's artistic originality lies, I think, precisely ih his deliberate avoidance of easy categorisation, his refusal to write derivative formula fiction, an nowhere is his originality of vision better displayed than in his first novel, Player Piano.

34
What I would like to suggest here is that, rather than exploring the extent to which the novel is derivative or classifiable, we apply the question of genre to Vonnegut's narrative technique. When we do that, we discover something quite surprising that reveals both Vonnegut's awareness of his literary predecessors and his own unique view of such concepts as political and personal freedom and the human condition generally.
Through roughly the first half of Player Piano, Vonnegut writes--quite deliberately, I am convinced--a standard and ostensibly derivative dystopian novel... Paul Proteus's discontent with his lot and his society is very much like that of Orwell's Winstton Smith or Huxley's Bernard Marx. What is more, Paul's search for an "Edenic alternative"--presented precisely in those mythic terms--is also doomed to failurbecause it is to remote from the concerns of his society. Following that failure, however, Paul's life takes an interesting turn... [Vonnegut] now leads his protagonist down the darker paths of the human psyche: Paul's forsed conscription as a head of a rebel movement; the revelation of Paul's own deep-seated resentments agains his father and his resultant prejudice toward the society his father had helped to create; and, finally, his realisation that the rebels he has joined with are motivated to act not out of social consciousness or altruism, but out of mere vengeance and, vorse, boredom.
Though human beings in the novel are not portrayed as altogether lacking in will--an idea that grows more and more pronounced in Vonnegut's fiction over the years--they are nevertheless seen as the products of dark inner forces, inner machines, as it were, that impel them to act and to believe they do so only by choice.

35
Placed within the familiar generic context, Vonnegut's version of the future as political nightmare would seem the weakest of the well-known dystopian visions, the most ambiguous in terms of what the protagonist wants out of life and what he dislikes about the society in which he holds so high place... Paul is like a person who, after reading a historical fiction, wistfully longs to have lived at an earlier time, a more exciting and tumultuous period, anything other than the boring present. This, so to speak, "literary bias" is further suggested by Vonnegut's allusions to the conventional myths of the golden age and Judgement Day.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора The Use of Fragmentation in Slaughterhouse-Five
Jason Dawley

In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut uses fragmentation of time, structure and character in order to unify his non-linear narrative. Vonnegut's main character, Billy Pilgrim, travels back and forth in his own life span "paying random visits to all events in between" (SF 23). The result is Billy's life is presented as a series of episodes without any chronological obligations. This mirrors the structure of the novel which has a beginning, middle and end but not in their traditional places.

The first piece of information that is given about Billy is that he has "come unstuck in time" (SF23). With this sentence Vonnegut has turned time from the intangible to the tangible and thus he is now able to use it to fit his own purposes. By using the word "unstuck", Vonnegut implies that Billy has now become free. Consequently, Vonnegut's narrative, as well as Billy, has achieved a freedom of sorts. Vonnegut will not be tied down by the conventions of time; now he will be able to place Billy in any time frame he chooses. Vonnegut moves Billy rapidly,having him experience a mere fragment of his life before whisking him off again. This creates a collage effect in the novel, which is made up of bits and pieces of Billy's life. By fragmenting Billy's life like this, Vonnegut is able to bring the events that comprise his life closer together. One minute Billy is marching through a forest and the next he is waiting at a public pool for his father to teach him how to swim. This co nstant fragmentation of Billy's life serves, ironically, to unify Billy's character for the reader. By going back and forth in Billy's life the reader is able to see a whole picture of what Billy is actually like instead of just one fragment of his personality.

Vonnegut also uses time fragmentation in order keep the Dresden bombing fresh in the reader's mind. When Billy goes back to Dresden the reader goes with him. The reader is able to get a first hand account of the massacre, but, at the same time, to gain a distance from it. Vonnegut gives the reader both worlds. The reader is able to live through the horrors of war and then, in almost the same instant, reflect on them. The fragmentation of Billy's life in the war and after enables the unification of the emotional and intellectual response of the reader.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Leonard Mustazza - Forever Pursuing the Genesis
Mythic Vonnegut. An Overview (pp. 15--32)

-- Virtually every commentator - directly or implicitly - tries to classify Vonnegut's style and subject matter.

-- Mythic writer. Critics who have used term myth in connection with Vonnegut's novels can be broadly divided into two groups: those who regard him as essentially a "myth-maker"; and those who have notices and analyzed his use of conventional myths, classical and biblical.

-- Jess Ritter sees Vonnegut as a myth-maker who is more present- rather future-oriented.

-- Vonnegut himself, in his 1973 address to PEN Conference in Stockholm, suggested that myth-making is what writers ought to do, for it is their only chance of positively affecting the future of the planet: "I am persuaded that we are tremendously influential, even though most national leaders, my own included, probably never heard of most of us here. Our influence is slow and subtle, and it is felt mainly by the young. They are hungry for myth which resonate with the mysteries of their own times.
We give them those myths.
We will become influential when those who have listened to our myth have become influential."

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Bugs in Amber
by Marek Vit

That we, people, are "bugs in amber" is one of the main themes of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five; or Children's Crusade. Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is, in my opinion, very similar to this book. While Slaugterhouse-Five is an American novel, a mixture of the author's Second World War experiences and science fiction genre, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a British play set into William Shakespeare's Hamlet. What are these two literary works similar in, then? It is the central theme. Both works show that we are physically stuck in this world, our future is already given, and we have no way of escaping our destiny. Both writers provide a little room for their character's imagination which is, in my opinion, crucial item of both literary works.
In this paper I will try to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel to help me point out the major theme of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and to explain and clarify the theme's meaning and main message.
The main theme of Slaughterhouse-Five is expressed several times throughout the novel. One of the examples is the passage which shows (from the view of the Tralfamadorians -- alien beings) that the future is given and that one cannot change it.
"All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance." (Vonnegut:27)
Another passage of the novel describes the theme more directly. It is the part when the Tralfamadorians kidnap Billy Pilgrim and he asks "why?".
"Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why." (ibid 76-77)
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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Kilgore Trout: Kurt Vonnegut's Alter Ego

By Stephanie E. Bonner
Thanks to vonnegut.com

In 1922, two residents of Indianapolis, Indiana had a son who would later become one of the premiere writers in 20th century American literature. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born to Edith and Kurt Sr. on November 11, 1922. He graduated from Shortridge High School in 1940, attended Cornell University for a year, then joined the army. He fought in World War II and was captured by the Germans in 1944. As a Prisoner of War, he lived through the firebombing of Dresden, an event which inspired his acclaimed novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. After he returned from Europe in April of 1945, he married Jane Marie Cox and spent several years studying at the University of Chicago and working as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. In 1947, he went to work at General Electric Corporation as a research laboratory publicist. He worked there for 3 years until he left to become a full time writer in 1950. In the past 47 years, he has become one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.
Kurt Vonnegut's first novel was entitled Player Piano and was published in 1952. Since then, he has written over a dozen other novels, collections of short stories, a collection of essays and interviews, and a play, Happy Birthday Wanda June. He spent 1965 in residence at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and taught writing at Harvard in 1970. He also was awarded a M.A. degree from the University of Chicago. Vonnegut currently appears on the Barnes and Noble Booksellers bag and is featured on a Visa commercial in which he buys a copy of one of his own books.
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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора from The Children’s Crusade : Medieval History, Modern Mythistory by Gary Dickson

The most popular twentieth-century American work of fiction to nourish itself from the Children’s Crusade is Kurt Vonnegut’s acclaimed anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969), which was both a best-seller and a critical success. If the horror of the World War II fire-bombing of Dresden overshadows Slaughterhouse-Five, the book’s alternative title demands to be taken just as seriously.
Kurt Vonnegut’s time-traveling hero Billy Pilgrim, a young, naive GI in wartorn Europe is a true American innocent abroad. Given the childlike diminutive of his fi rst name and the medieval peregrinus of his last, he makes an excellent symbolic child-crusader. His comrades in arms, and indeed some of the German troops, are likewise represented as youngsters. Their forty-three-year-old U.S. colonel admits he forgot that wars were fought by babies. Looking at their freshly shaved faces, he gets a shock. “My God, my God,” he exclaims, “it’s the Children’s Crusade.” As much the innocent victims of war as the German civilians, these young American GIs fighting World War II in Europe are the new child-crusaders.
Slaughterhouse-Five fuses the absurd inhumanity of mass destruction—which the attack on Dresden exemplifies—with the theme of the Slaughter of the Innocents. Calling it “the Children’s Crusade” allows Vonnegut to give an anti-heroic twist to the notion that World War II had been a Crusade in Europe. That was the title Dwight David Eisenhower chose for his military memoirs (1948), and in retrospect, his choice of title seems inevitable. Four years earlier, on the eve of the Normandy invasion, General Eisenhower delivered a solemn address to the Allied Expeditionary Forces which began: “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade....” During the war the minumum age of conscription for American servicemen fell from twenty-one to eighteen, as it was for the British. These were boy-soldiers. Boy-crusaders, some might say.
Was it, as one critic suggests, Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East (1932) which supplied Vonnegut, an admirer of Hesse, with his motif of the Children’s Crusade? Hesse called his eastern journey a pilgrimage and a Children’s Crusade. But another critic points out that Vonnegut had to look no further for boy soldiers than the great anti-war classic of World War I, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Its German troops were “little more than boys.” An example closer to home for Vonnegut would be Stephen Crane’s novel of the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), with its youthful protagonist and his young friend. These Union soldiers were the “brave boys in blue.” There was also the World War II refrain—“Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come home.” Fighting men were now “the boys.” Vonnegut’s boy-soldiers did not lack military antecedents.
To find out about the actual Children’s Crusade, Vonnegut and his friends in Slaughterhouse-Five, turn to Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). Mackay, a Scottish journalist and man of letters (1814–1889), wrote in the spirit of Voltaire that “vile monks” preaching to “deluded children” set it in motion. Vonnegut may have used Mackay to relocate the pueri in his World War II American Children’s Crusade, but he jettisoned Mackay’s cynical perspective. His child-crusaders were naive, not “deluded.” Consciously or not, Vonnegut was exploiting the mythic theme of childhood innocence which nineteenth-century America shared with medieval Europe.
Widespread and intense opposition to the war in Vietnam was commonplace across the campuses of America when Slaughterhouse-Five appeared in 1969. So Vonnegut’s idea of a Children’s Crusade spoke to the politicized, activist, anti-war students of America’s colleges, who, by then, were already veterans of their own abortive Children’s Crusade on behalf of Senator Eugene McCarthy. The climactic moment of the anti-war campus rebellion, the shooting of students at Kent State (1970), came only a year after Slaughterhouse-Five was published.

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Kurt Vonnegut: After the Slaughterhouse

from Martin Amis - The Moronic Inferno & Other Visits to America

Inveterately regressive, ever the playful infantilist, Kurt Vonnegut recently shuffled his career into a report card, signed it, and tacked it to his study wall. The report was chronological, grading his work from A to D. This is what it looked like:

Player Piano A
The Sirens of Titan A
Mother Night A
Cat's Cradle A+
God Bless You, Mr Rosewater A
Slaughterhouse-Five A+
Breakfast of Champions C
Slapstick D
Jailbird A

The burden of the report seems clear enough: Kurt started confidently, went from strength to strength for a good long spell, then passed into a trough of lassitude and uncertainty, but now shows signs of rallying.
The graph charted by the American literary establishment — viewed by Vonnegut as, at best, a flock of cuecard-readers, at worst a squad of jailers, torturers and funeral directors — would be even starker, and much less auspicious. Their report would probably go something like this: B-, B, B-, A, A-, B-, B, D, C.
'Anyway, the card isn't quite up to date,' I said, half-way through lunch in a teeming trattoria on Second Avenue. Vonnegut is a mildly lionised regular here, but it was mid-December, and we took our chances among the parched and panting Christmas shoppers of New York. Our table seemed to be half-way between the lobby and the toilet. I wondered, protectively, whether we'd have done any better during Vonnegut's heyday; perhaps the head waiter hadn't liked Slapstick either. 'What about your new novel?' I asked. 'How would you grade Deadeye Dicky Vonnegut looked doubtful. 'I guess it's sort of a B-minus,' he said.
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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора (via Universität Paderborn)

Books
Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973.
Allen, William Rodney, ed. Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut. Jackson: UP of Missippi, 1988.
Allen, William Rodney. Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. Columbia: U of South Carolina, 1991.
Bertram, Ute H. Die Rolle des Religiösen in den Romanen von Kurt Vonnegut. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1989.
Boon, Kevin Alexander (ed. and introd). At Millennium’s End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut. New York: State U of New York P, 2001.
Breinig, Helmbrecht. Satire und Roman: Studien zur Theorie des Genrekonflikts und zur satirischen Erzählliteratur der USA von Brackenridge bis Vonnegut. Tübingen: Narr, 1984.
Brocher, Sabine. Abenteuerliche Elemente Im Modernen Roman: Italo Calvino, Ernst Augustin, Luigi Malerba, Kurt Vonnegut, Ror Wolf. München: Hanser Verlag, 1981.
Broer, Lawrence R. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989.
Broer, Lawrence R. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. . Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1994.
Davis, Todd F. Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade; Or, How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism. New York: State U of New York P, 2006.
Giannone, Richard. Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1977.
Goldsmith, David. Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and Ice. Popular Writers Series Pamphlet No.2. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1972.
Hauck, Richard Boyd. A Cheerful Nihilism. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1971.
Jones, Peter G., and M. L. Rosenthal. War and the Novelist: Appraising the American War Novel. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1976.
Ketterer, David. New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature. Bloomington: Ind. UP, 1974.
Klinkowitz, Jerome, and John Somer, eds. The Vonnegut Statement: Original Essays on the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. New York: Delta Books, 1973.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Life of Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1977.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. Kurt Vonnegut. London, New York: Methuen, 1982.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. Vonnegut in Fact: The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1998.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Vonnegut Effect. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2004.
Leeds, Marc, and Kurt Vonnegut (fwd.). The Vonnegut Encyclopedia: An Authorized Compendium. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995.
Leeds, Marc, and Peter J. Reed (eds. and introd.). Kurt Vonnegut: Images and Representations. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.
Loeb, Monica. Vonnegut's Duty-Dance with Death: Theme and Structure in Slaughterhouse-Five. Umea: Univ. - Bibliothek, 1979.
Lundquist, James. Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Ungar - Modern Literature Monographs, 1977.
Mayo, Clark. Kurt Vonnegut: The Gospel from Outer Space. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1977.
Merrill, Robert. Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Boston: Chelsea House, 1990.
Morse, Donald E. Kurt Vonnegut. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1992.
Mustazza, Leonard. Forever Pursuing Genesis: The Myth of Eden in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1990.
Pettersson, Bo. The World according to Kurt Vonnegut: Moral Paradox and Narrative Form. Abo: Abo Akademi UP, 1994.
Reed, Peter J. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1972.
Reed, Peter J., and Marc Leeds (ed. and introd.). The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996.
Schatt, Stanley. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Boston: Twayne's United States Authors Series No. 276, 1976.
Schnackertz, Hermann Josef. Darwinismus und literarischer Diskurs: Der Dialog mit der Evolutionsbiologie in der englischen und amerikanischen Literatur. E. Bulwer-Lytton, S. Butler, J. Conrad, Ch. Darwin, Th. Dreiser, G. Gissing, H. Spencer, K. Vonnegut, H.G. Wells. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992.
Scholes, Robert. The Fabulators. New York: Oxford UP, 1967.
Short, Robert. Something to Believe In: Is Kurt Vonnegut the Exorcist of Jesus Christ Superstar? New York: Harper, 1978.
Singh, Sukhbir. The Survivor in Contemporary American Fiction: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Delhi: B. R. Publ. Corp., 1991.
Streier, Eva-Maria. Bedrohung des Menschen durch Naturwissenschaft und Technologie? Antworten im Romanwerk (1952-69) von Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984.
Thomas, P.L. Reading, Learning, Teaching Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора (via Universität Paderborn)

Articles
Abádi-Nagy, Zoltán. "The Skilful Seducer of Vonnegut's Brand of Comedy." Hungarian Studies in English. 8 (1974): 45-56.
Abádi-Nagy, Zoltán. "Ironic Messianism in Recent American Fiction." Studies in English and American. 4 (1978): 63-83.
Abádi-Nagy, Zoltán. "An Original Look at 'Origins': Bokononism." The Origins and Originality of American Culture. Ed. Frank, Tibor. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1984. 601-608.
Abádi-Nagy, Zoltan. "Bokonism as a Structure of Ironies." The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. 85-90.
Abramson, Marcia. "Vonnegut: Humor to Cope With Suffering." University of Michigan Daily (22 January 1969): 2.
Adams, Marion. "You've Come a Long Way Since Shortridge High, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." Indianapolis (October 1976): 29.
Aldiss, Brian W. "Guru Number Four." Summary. 1, 2 (1971): 63-68.
Aldiss, Brian W. "Billion Year Spree I: Origin of Species." Extrapolation. 14 (1973): 167-91.
Alsen, Eberhard. "Vonnegut's Comedy of Errors." Transition. 82-83 (1983): 28-36.
Ancone, Frank. "Kurt Vonnegut and the Great Twain Robbery." Notes on Contemporary Literature. 13, 4 (September 1983): 6-7.
Andrews, David. "Vonnegut and Aesthetic Humanism." At Millennium’s End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut. Ed. Kevin Alexander Boon. New York: State U of New York P, 2001. 17-48.
Anonymous. "Vonnegut's Gospel." Time International (29 June 1970): 8.
Anonymous. "An Account of the Ancestry of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. by an Ancient Friend of his Family." Summary. 1, 2 (1971): 76-118.
Au, Bobbye G. "Contemporary Novels: A Reflection of Contemporary Culture." Modern American Cultural Criticism. Ed. Johnson, Mark. Warrensburg: Central Missouri State U, 1983. 99-104.
Auwera, Fernand. "Lucky Punch." Dietsche Warande en Belford: Tijdschrift voor Letterkunde, Kunst en Geestesleven. 122 (1977): 783-785.
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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора (via Universität Paderborn)

Bibliographies
Fiene, Donald M. "Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR: A Bibliography." Bulletin of Bibliography. 45, 4 (1988): 223-232.
Hudgens, Betty L. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Checklist. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1972.
Klinkowitz, Jerome, and Asa Pieratt, eds. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Descriptive Bibliography and Annotated Secondary Checklist. London: The Nether Press, 1972.
Klinkowitz, Jerome, Asa Pieratt, and Stanley Schatt, eds. "The Vonnegut Bibliography." The Vonnegut Statement: Original Essays on the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Eds. Klinkowitz, Jerome, and John Somer. New York: Delta Books, 1973. 255-277.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. "The Vonnegut Bibliography." Vonnegut in America: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut. Eds. Klinkowitz, Jerome, and Donald L. Lawler. New York: Delta Books, 1977. 217-52.
Klinkowitz, Jerome, Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, and Asa B. Pieratt, Jr., eds. Kurt Vonnegut: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1987.
Reed, Peter J.; Baepler, Paul. “Kurt Vonnegut: A Selected Bibliography, 1985-1992.” Bulletin of Bibliography. 50, 2 (June 1993): 123-28.
Schatt, Stanley, and Jerome Klinkowitz, eds. "A Kurt Vonnegut Checklist." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. 12, 3 (1971): 70-76.

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора (via Universität Paderborn)

Selected Dissertation Abstracts
Austin, Marvin Fraley, Jr. "The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: A Confrontation with the Modern World." DAI. 36 (1975): 3707A.
Bonadonna, Reed Robert. "'Served This Soldiering Through': Language, Masculinity, and Virtue in the World War II Soldier’s Novel." DAI. 59, 6 (Dec 1998):2015A.
Boon, Kevin Alexander. "Framing Chaos: Law in the Margin Chaos in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut." DAI. 56, 4 (Oct 1995): 1352A-53A.
Brown, Kevin Ray. "Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain: Influence, Affinities, and Contradictions." DAI. 57, 12 (June 1997): 5148A.
Camara, George C. "War and the Literary Extremist: The American War Novel, 1945-1970." DAI. 34 (1974): 5160A.
Davis, Todd Fleming Jefferson. "Comforting Lies: Postmodern Morality in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut." DAI. 56, 10 (1996): 3955A.
Edwards, Mary Janet Bailey. "Vonnegut's Dresden Story: The Cathartic Struggle." DAI. 58, 8 (Feb 1998): 3126A.
Fitzgerald, Sister Ellen. "World War II in the American Novel: Hawkes, Heller, Kosinski, and Vonnegut." DAI. 35 (1974): 3736A-37A.
Gerson, Steven Marc. "Paradise Sought: Adamic Imagery in Selected Novels by Saul Bellow and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." DAI. 39 (1978): 285A.
Gholson, Bill D. "Rhetoric, Identity, and Morality in Selected Later Novels of Kurt Vonnegut." DAI. 55, 11 (May 1995): 3511A.
Goldsmith, David H. "The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." DAI. 31 (1970): 2916A.
Goshorn, James W. "The Queasy World of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Satire in the Novels." DAI. 32 (1972): 6426A-27A.
Group, Robert James. "Familiar Novelties: Kurt Vonnegut's Comic Epics in Prose." DAI. 39 (1978): 1567A.
Haddawy, Diana Elizabeth. "Not Silence Is the Rest: Modern Treatments of the Hamlet Dilemma." DAI. 55, 12 (June 1995): 3841A.
Hancock, Joyce Ann. "Kurt Vonnegut and the Folk Society." DAI. 39 (1978): 3580A.
Harris, Charles B. "Contemporary Ameican Novelists of the Absurd." DAI. 31 (1971): 4162A.
Hearron, William T. "New Approaches in the Post-Modern American Novel: Joseph heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Brautigan." DAI. 34 (1973): 3398A-99A.
Hoffman, Thomas Paul. "The Theme of Loneliness in Vonnegut’s First Four Novels." DAI. 39 (1979): 4256A57A.
Keough, William Richard. "Violence and American Humor." DAI. 37 (1976): 2182A-83A.
Labin, Linda. "The Whale and the Ash-Heap: Transfigurations of Jonah and Job in Modern American Literature: Frost, MacLeish, and Vonnegut." DAI. 41, 11 (May 1981): 4713A.
Landis, Kathleen M. "The Rhetoric of Madness." DAI. 53, 9 (1993): 3209A.
Leeds, Marc. "What Goes Around, Comes Around: The Naive-Schizophrenic-Resurrected Cycle in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut." DAI. 48, 5 (Nove 1987): 1204A.
Loeb, M. C. "Vonnegut's Duty-Dance with Death: Theme and Structure in Slaughterhouse-Five." DAI. 41 (1980): 51C.
Lonie, Charles Anthony. "Acculmulations of Silence: Survivor Psychology in Vonnegut, Twain, and Hemingway." DAI. 35 (1975): 7871A.
Marino, Vincent. "Creating Conscience through Black Humor: A Study of Kurt Vonnegut’s Novels." DAI. 39 (1978): 2941A.
Mathews, Marsha Caddell. "Death and Humor in the Fifties: The Ignition of Barth, Heller, Nabokov, O'Connor, Salinger, and Vonnegut." DAI. 48, 7 (Jan 1988): 1770A.
McGinnis, Wayne D. "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Confrontation with Meaninglessness." DAI. 35 (1974): 3753A-54A.
Moore, Janet Cecilia. "The Feminine Pharmakon: Circe in the Twentieth Century." DAI. 54, 3 (Sept 1993): 925A.
Nandyal, Ramakrishna. "Thematic Unity in the Early Vonnegut Fiction: 'Player Piano' (1952) to 'Slapstick' (1976)." DAI. 49, 10 (Apr 1989): 3027A.
Pendleton, Edith Kay. "Cinderella Imagery in the Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut." DAI. 55, 1 (July 1994): 85A-86A.
Rice, Elaine Fritz. "The Satire of John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: The Menippean Tradition in the 1960's in America." DAI. 35 (1975): 7876A-77A.
Sachner, Mark Jeffrey. "Failure as Human and Literary Form." DAI. 42, 5 (Nov 1981): 2123A.
Schatt, Stanley. "The World Picture of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." DAI. 31 (1970): 767A.
Shaw, William Gary. "Comic Absurdity and the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." DAI. 36 (1976): 7427A.
Shor, Ira N. "Vonnegut's Art of Inquiry." DAI. 32 (1971): 3331A.
Somer, John L. "Quick-Stasis: The Rite of Initiation in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." DAI. 32 (1972): 4025A.
St. Germain, Amos Joseph. "Religious Interpretation and Contemporary Literature: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Robert Coover and John Barth." DAI. 35 (1975): 4552A.
Strehle, Susan. "Black Humor in Contemporary American Fiction." DAI. 37 (1976): 319A.
Waxman, Robert Ernest. "Updike, Gass, and Vonnegut: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction." DAI. 38 (1978): 4173A.
Weinstein, Sharon. "Comedy and Nightmare: The Fiction of John Hawkes, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Jerzy Kosinski, and Ralph Ellison." DAI. 32 (1971): 3336A.

verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора The passage on Kurt Vonnegut from
Ronald Paulson. Sin and evil: moral values in literature

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is about another holocaust, but one inficted not by the Nazis but by the Allied bomber command: Billy Pilgrim and his author are both sufering the Dresden bombing and the traumatic afterefects, but they are victims, not the perpetrators, of the fre-bombing—though little distinction is made between friends and enemies. They sufer with the Germans.
The story of Slaughterhouse-Five, like that of Catch-22, is about the ways people deal with traumas—Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians, Roland Weary and the Three Musketeers. But the traumas include war as only one of man’s sufering-evils; besides wars there are glaciers and “plain old death,” accidental and natural, and the Holocaust. The odor of Billy’s breath when drunk, “mustard gas and roses,” turns out to be the odor of the decaying bodies in Dresden bomb shelters, and the description of naked feet, whether of dead soldiers or the living Billy Pilgrim, as “ivory and blue,” equates the living with their inevitable death. And there is the veteran who after surviving the war becomes an elevator operator, catches his wedding ring in the elevator’s ornamental iron lace, and “the car squashed him. So it goes.”
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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Identity crisis: a state of the union address by Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut

By Lawrence R. Broer, The Mailer Review. Fall, 2008.
Found at Find Articles

NO TWO CONTEMPORARY WRITERS HAVE LOOKED HARDER or with greater analytical intelligence at the forces undermining the American Dream than Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Whatever individual differences of vision or temperament may separate these brooding seers, Mailer, the mystic Existentialist, and Kurt Vonnegut, the comic Absurdist, serve as shamans, spiritual medicine men whose function is to expose various forms of societal madness--dispelling the evil spirits of greed, irresponsible mechanization, and aggression while encouraging reflection and the will to positive change. It is this almost mystical vision of the writer as spiritual medium and healer that Vonnegut intends by calling himself a "canary bird in the coal mine"--one who provides spiritual illumination, offering us warnings about the dehumanized future not as it must necessarily be, but as it surely would become if based on the materialism, government corruption, and promiscuous technology of the present (Wampeters, Foma, and GranfalloonS 238). In books Mailer might call existential errands, like Why Are We in Vietnam?, The Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon, and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Mailer's particular genius has been to penetrate the facade of contemporary events to show us who we are, where we are, and where we are likely to go, pointing up the significant in the most trivial of events, and conversely placing in perspective the truly momentous acts of our time.

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Игры по-американски
Г. Злобин, предисловие к роману "Малый не промах" (1988).
Спасибо vonnegut.ru

Спасибо, Сэмюэл Коэн
и прочие гуманисты,
За вашу новую американскую "игрушку" -
Не ту, которой играют дети,
А ту, которая играет детьми,
Пока не останется ни одного ребенка...

Евгений Евтушенко.
Мама и нейтронная бомба

По всем книгам Курта Воннегута проходит цепная реакция персонажей и ситуаций, форм и идей. Даже скрупулезное расщепление его прозы вряд ли позволит выделить чистые частицы повторяемости – и писательской приверженности одной теме, веселого, беззаботного шутовства, и горькой озабоченности опасностями, какими грозит человеку им же созданная технотронная цивилизация. Чего только не намешано в воннегутовских романах и доведено до точки кипения, хотя не всегда автору удается получить желанный художественный синтез.

Последней новой вещью Воннегута, с которой познакомились в 1975 году русскоязычные советские читатели, был «Завтрак для чемпионов» (1972). В конце романа автор встречается со своими героями: полусвихнувшимся богатым фирмачом по продаже «понтиаков» Двейном Гувером и непризнанным провидцем, писателем-фантастом Килгором Траутом. Встреча произошла в Мидлэнд-Сити, штат Огайо, где по инициативе фирмы «Бэрритрон», занятой производством пластиковых бомб для ВВС США, намечался пышный фестиваль искусств.

Фестиваль не состоялся из-за безумных выходок Двейна. То ли под влиянием вредных веществ, накопившихся в организме, то ли от чтения сочинений Траута тот вдруг вообразил, будто в мире механических болванчиков он один наделен свободой воли. Тогда Воннегут решил распроститься с Килгором Траутом, который верой и правдой служил ему долгие годы, и отпустил его на свободу. О дальнейшей судьбе Двейна ничего не сообщалось, зато «Завтрак» кончался большой рисованной надписью: ETC. – «и так далее». Читалась она чуть иначе: «продолжение следует».

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Fighting to understand: violence, form, and truth-claims in Lesy, Vonnegut, and Herr

By Stacey Peebles, Philological Quarterly. Fall, 2005.
Found at Find Articles

In 1973, Michael Lesy published his first book, a collection of photographs, newspaper accounts, records from an insane asylum, literary excerpts, and other materials that together provide a portrait of the town of Black River Fails, Wisconsin, from 1885 to 1900. He called the book Wisconsin Death Trip, and it has remained in print as something of a cult classic ever since. Lesy provides an introduction and conclusion, and Warren Susman a preface, but otherwise the images and text speak for themselves, with no connecting narration or explanation. Lesy would go on to publish a number of other books, and is currently a professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College. In December of 2006, he was named a United States Artist Fellow, and in a statement he prepared for the program, Lesy says that in his work he uses "historical photographs from public archives--utilitarian images made for every purpose except art--to tell a variety of difficult truths about our country and our shared pasts." (1)

This emphasis on archival photography certainly is evident when considering the body of his work as a whole--twelve books, including titles like Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life, 1860-1945, Visible Light, and, his most recent, Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties. Yet even among these other inventive projects, Wisconsin Death Trip stands out. (2) This odd collage of information and imagination focuses on the historical, but reasonably could also be referred to as art, a novel of sorts, a collective psychological portrait, or even a scrapbook, as Wisconsin Death Trip has no page numbers. In another of his works, The Forbidden Zone, Lesy notes that "those who read the book couldn't decide if it was poetry or history, a fabrication or a discourse, a hoax or a revelation. The book took on a life of its own. It bred other books; it bred plays and ballets, concertos and an opera. It made me famous and notorious; honored and suspect." (3)

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verbava (vonnegut) все записи автора Поэтика и насилие
О романе Курта Воннегута «Бойня номер пять»
Андрей Аствацатуров для НЛО. № 58 2002 года.
Спасибо vonnegut.ru

В данной статье на примере одного текста — романа Курта Воннегута “Бойня номер пять, или Крестовый поход детей” — мы попытаемся показать, как литература конструирует определенный образ войны. В США отношение к опыту Второй мировой войны и, соответственно, вообще к феномену войны со стороны интеллектуалов, в том числе и литераторов, неоднократно менялось. Изменение претерпевало и само письмо о войне. Вторая мировая война стала зеркалом, в котором последовавшие за ней эпохи обнаруживали себя и свои проблемы, или удачной метафорой, с помощью которой художник мог наиболее адекватно передать собственное мировидение.

В этом отношении весьма характерна американская военная проза 1940-х гг., в частности, романы Нормана Мейлера (“Нагие и мертвые”, 1948) и Джеймса Джонса (“Отныне и вовек”, 1951). Война как таковая здесь, безусловно, присутствует. Но она — скорее фон, на котором разворачивается действие, имеющее к ней косвенное отношение. Война — экзистенциальная ситуация, выявляющая уже социальные проблемы послевоенной Америки, о которых говорили левые интеллектуалы: опасность исчезновения полноценной личности в условиях вынужденно-коллективного опыта и связанная с этим перспектива вытеснения органичной для либеральной Америки идеологии индивидуализма тоталитарными доктринами. В изображении войны Мейлер и Джонс совмещают традиции социально ориентированной литературы США 1930-х гг. и принципы описания войны, предложенные Эрнестом Хемингуэем и Джоном Дос Пассосом. В результате перед читателем разворачивается традиционное в формальном отношении историческое полотно с четким видением причин, следствий и возможных перспектив.

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