So it goes…
HUM 2052: Civilization II
Spring 2014
Dr. Perdigao
April 9-14, 2014
Fiction/Reality
November 11, 1922: Birthday—anniversary of Armistice Day, end of world’s most
destructive war
-born to Kurt Vonnegut and Edith Lieber Vonnegut (mother from prominent
family) in Indianapolis, IN; brother Bernard and sister Alice
1929: With stock market crash, family’s standard of living lowered, from mansion to
smaller home; KV unable to attend private schools like siblings
1940-1943: Attends Cornell University in Ithaca, NY; father tells him to “study
something useful” (he himself is out of work after war); majors in Chemistry and
Biology, preparation for career as biochemist but became involved in university
paper Cornell Sun; hospitalized for pneumonia, enlists in Army
1943-1944: Attends Carnegie Institute of Technology and University of Tennessee,
military training, studying mechanical engineering
-Before shipping out to England, returns home to find (a day later) that his mother
committed suicide (overdose of sleeping pills); reasons are the family’s economic
failure, her own inability to sell fiction to popular magazines (as KV later will)
Revisionist History?
1943-1944: Further training in artillery and advance infantry scout; joins 106th infantry
division oversees; meets Bernard O’Hare in 106th infantry
-Battle of the Bulge—captured December 19, 1944—interned by Germans as POW,
sent to Dresden, southeast Germany, architectural and artistic treasure, “open city”
like Paris, free from attack
-Works in factory, making vitamin supplements for pregnant women
1945: February 13-14: Dresden is destroyed in air raid by Royal Air Force and US Army
Air Force
-German casualties believed to have been between 135,000-250,000 (more than those
killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined); later estimates (2010 commission)
around 25,000
-KV survives because quartered in meat locker
-corpse miner, cleaning the city
-Russian army scares away guards (April)
-May 22—KV repatriated to American forces
-awarded purple heart
-rehabilitation in France, at home—marries childhood sweetheart, moves to
Chicago, does graduate work in anthropology at U of Chicago
Back to the beginning
1946-1947: Studies anthropology, works part time as reporter for City News Bureau
-leaves Chicago with masters’ coursework completed but thesis rejected (study of
American Plains Indians’ Ghost Dance Society and Cubist painters [divide
between primitive and civilized models: “Fluctuations between Good and Evil in
Simple Tales”])
-moves to Schenectady, NY—works as publicist for GE’s Research Laboratory
(brother Bernard is atmospheric physicist)
1950: First published story in magazine
1952: First novel published Player Piano, sells short stories to popular family magazines
1958: brother-in-law dies in train accident, sister Alice (his wife) dies of cancer less
than 48 hours later; KV and wife adopt their three children
1965-1967: 2 year residency at University of Iowa Writers Workshop
1967-1968: Guggenheim fellowship allows him to return to Dresden
1969: Slaughterhouse-Five; best-seller, #1 on NY Times List
-depression after novel (he vows at one point to never write another novel,
concentrates on lecturing, teaching, finishing his play)
1970-1971: Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, awarded MA from University of Chicago for
novel Cat’s Cradle for contribution to field of anthropology
Endings
1972: film version of Slaughterhouse-Five
1973: Breakfast of Champions—Kilgore Trout as famous writer
2007: April 11—dies. And so it goes.
Adapting Vonnegut
Revisions
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• The Children’s Crusade (15) (said by British colonel, 106)
• A Duty-Dance with Death (21): Céline
Framing, Breaking the Frame
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World War II contexts
1967—back to Dresden
“So it goes”
“mustard gas and roses”
“trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and
suspense and confrontations” (5)
1922
Ilium, NY
U Chicago professor—The Committee on Social Thought (10)
New York World’s Fair (18)
Lot’s wife (24)
Tralfamadore, four dimensions (26)
Derby teaching “Contemporary Problems in Western Civilization”
Fourth dimensions?
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“All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. . .
It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one,
like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” (27)
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“All time is all time. It does not change.” (86)
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Free will
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Movie backwards—being unstuck in time (73-74)
Players
Bernard V. O’Hare
Gerhard Müller
Yon Yonson from Wisconsin
Harrison Starr
Sandy
Nanny
Mary
Billy Pilgrim
Barbara
Robert
Valencia
Montana Wildhack
Edgar Derby
Paul Lazzaro
Resignifying
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Three Musketeers candy
Dispatch: candy bar: Roland Weary: Valencia’s candy
Dog
Sandy: dog: Germans: Princess: phone
Mustard gas and roses
Orange and black stripes
boxcar: wedding tent
Blue and white feet
Cold house: boxcar
Intertextuality
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Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)
(15) on crusades
Mary Endell’s Dresden, History, Stage, and Gallery (1908)
Roethke poem (20)
Dance with death (21)
William Bradford Huie’s The Execution of Private Slovik (45), American solider shot
for cowardice
Listen
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Plane crash (25)
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“true war story” (42)
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First unstuck—like experience of death (43)
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First time unstuck (43)—war: pool, 1944, first unstuck as chaplain’s assistant (30);
takes him to 1965, visiting mother (44): 1958 Little League (45): 1961 New Year’s Eve
party (46): 1957 Lions Club at Chinese restaurant (49): asleep in chair at office
during exam (56): 1967 with kidnapping (71)
Listen
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As chaplain’s assistant in South Carolina, training; altar and organ (31); “theoretical
death” (31): Schrödinger again?
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1945, after honorable discharge from army, mental collapse: veteran’s hospital (24)
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1967 kidnapped and taken to Tralfamadore
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1968 plane crash at Sugarbush Mountain, VT (25)
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Description of Tralfamadorians (26)
Listen
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Enters war after on leave for father’s funeral; at Battle of the Bulge (32)
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Roland Weary and the scouts (33)
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Weary’s weapons, Billy’s crucifix: “construct a life that made sense from things she
found in gift shops” (39).
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Billy’s mother never decided on a religion for the family (38)
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Idea of telling a version of the “true war story” (42); what Weary believes; Three
Musketeers as fiction (50)
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Staging war photos (58, 65)
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Tralfamadorian story of the world ending (116-117)
More Intertextuality
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Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966) (87)
Pirates of Penzance (93)
Tralfamadorian books (88)
Cinderella (96)
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (99)
Eliot Rosewater’s books (100)
Kilgore Trout: Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension (104); The Gospel from Outer Space
(108); The Gutless Wonder (168); The Big Board (201)
Trout’s life, stories (167)
Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov—but it “isn’t enough anymore” (101)
Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s book (128, 162)
Required Texts
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Keep Listening
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Rosewater and Billy: “So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their
universe. Science fiction was a big help” (101).
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Fourth dimension (104)—William Blake
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“Jesus—if Kilgore Trout could only write!” “He had a point: Kilgore Trout’s
unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.”
(110)
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“Science fiction had led him to expect that” (116).
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“He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always
will let him. The moment is structured that way” (117).
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Professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord of Harvard, official Historian of the United
States Air Force (120)
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“EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL, AND NOTHING HURT” (122).
Narratology
“I was there” (67); “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” (125);
“That was I. That was me. The only other city I’d ever seen was Indianapolis,
Indiana” (148).
“There was a drunk on the other end. Billy could almost smell his breath—mustard gas
and roses” (73).
“There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no
effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments
seen all at one time” (88).
“They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen
ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun” (84).
“There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations,
because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of
enormous forces. . . But old Derby was a character now” (164).
“Tell me a story” (178).