So it goes…
HUM 2052: Civilization II
Summer 2010
Dr. Perdigao
June 29, 2010
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,
can’t enter war, enlists in Army
1943-1944: Attends Carnegie Institute of Technology and University of
Tennessee as 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 between 135,000-250,000 (more than those killed at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined)
-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 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?
• “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)
• “All time is all time. It does not change.” (86)
• Free will
• 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
• 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 Execution of Private Slovik (45)
Listen
• Plane crash (25)
• “true war story” (42)
• First unstuck—death (43)
• First time unstuck (43)—war: pool, 1944, first unstuck as
chaplain’s assistant (30); 1965, visiting mother (44); 1945 (24);
1967, kidnapped (25)
Intertextuality
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Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (87)
Pirates of Penzance (93)
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)
• 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
• “So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science
fiction was a big help” (101).
• Fourth dimension (104)—William Blake
• “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)
• “Science fiction had led him to expect that” (116).
• “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).
• Professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord of Harvard, official Historian of
the United States Air Force (120)
• “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)
“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).