琥珀里的虫子
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摘要
库尔特·冯内古特(1922-2007)是当代美国文学领域中公认的一位重要人物。其代表作《五号屠场》(1969)的发表引起了广泛的影响,也是冯内古特在小说创作上第一部获得大众及评论界广泛称赞的作品。而《五号屠场》及其创作前后的《上帝保佑你,罗斯瓦特先生》(1965)、《冠军的早餐》(1973)成为了冯内古特文学创作生涯中重要标识。
本文旨在分析冯内古特在其不惑之年创作的这三部作品中主人公的疯癫,通过主题研究,探讨冯内古特的文学创作目的及其欲反映的社会现实。论文由五章组成。
第一章简要介绍了冯内古特的《上帝保佑你,罗斯瓦特先生》、《五号屠场》和《冠军的早餐》中的疯癫,并分析了国外对这三部作品中疯癫的研究现状。
第二章讨论了《上帝保佑你,罗斯瓦特先生》中爱略特·罗斯瓦特的疯癫。文章指出爱略特的疯癫成为了躲避金本位社会价值观的藏身处,而作者冯内古特则通过爱略特的疯癫展示了他关于社会的资本体系的思考。这也是他身为一位作家所背负的使命。
第三章中分析了《五号屠场》和比利·皮尔格里姆的创作实际出自于作者对二战的感受。小说中比利凭借星球Tralfamadore的世界观来逃避战争记忆——也是作者本人欲摆脱的梦魇。比利的疯癫实际上是冯内古特表达的对战争机器的一种反叛,也是作者就其职责所做的一份社会贡献。
《冠军的早餐》中的杜维·胡佛的疯癫及特劳特对其作品的反思是第四章主要论述的内容。本文指出特劳特作为作者的第二自我实际上影射了冯内古特在文学创作上的彷徨。
即成模式的金本位、战争机器和语言结构分别成为了爱略特、比利和杜维疯癫的前因。而三个主人公以疯癫来达到反叛社会机器的目的。本文以研究三部作品中主人公疯癫的共性及由疯癫引出的特劳特对自己作品的反思作为切入点,认为不惑之年的作者冯内古特欲通过对这三位主人公来表达自己创作的动机、目的和一位作家背负的社会责任感,从而坚定自己继续作为一位作家的信念。
通过对冯内古特这三部作品中疯癫的分析,本文作者认为,冯内古特在小说中利用所创作人物对自己的创作生涯进行了内省。而这一内省过程,从某种程度来说,表达了冯内古特作为作家的一种独特人文思想。
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.(1922-2007) is an important yet disputed author in the contemporary American literature.Rising to fame with the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five(1969),Vonnegut became a well-known and widely read writer.In some schools,Slaughterhouse-Five has even become one of the compulsory reading materials.Yet after this achievement,in his 40s,Vonnegut came to his crossroad of literary creation.
The present thesis focuses on the madness in God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater(1965), Slaughterhouse-Five(1969),and Breakfast of Champions(1973),which were written in Vonnegut's 40s,trying to explore the motivation and purpose of Vonnegut's literary creation during the first decade of fame he has gained after war.The thesis includes five chapters.
The first chapter is an introduction of Vonnegut and his novels God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five,and Breakfast of Champions.A general survey of the previous research on madness of the three novels is also included.
Chapter two surveys the reasons of Eliot Rosewater's madness in God Bless You,Mr. Rosewater and how his madness acts as a refuge from sanity.The impact of money,of different values father and son holds,compels Eliot to take madness as a cave of his identity.And the inquiry about the social injustice of economic systems has been one of Vonnegut's concerns on both society and his own early profession as a writer.
The third part studies Vonnegut's trauma in WWII,definitely a motivation that causes his writing of Billy Pilgrim and Slaughterhouse-Five,in which Billy constantly evades the war machine utilizing the Tralfamadorian whimsy.Until Vonnegut has found some way to achieve an "equilibrium" based on the belief that people can successfully resist becoming appendages to machines,can Billy traps his way out from his haunted memory for the author himself.
The machine of words printed as the idea to be planted in readers goes to be the major concern of chapter four,in which Kilgore Trout is viewed as an alter-ego of Vonnegut,who,in his late 40s,comes across his major crises in spiritual evolution.Apparently,Dwayne Hoover's madness in Breakfast of Champions is an alarm to warn Trout of his career—to be a responsible author for the world.So does Vonnegut contemplate his purpose of literary creation.
Hence there comes the conclusion as the last chapter of the thesis:the exercise of madness in the novels Vonnegut wrote in his 40s represents the author's plight in his writing career;and madness of the protagonists in these three novels represents his progress of surpassing his past and looking forward to the future.
By analyzing madness of these three novels,the thesis proves that taking the responsibility as a writer,Vonnegut introspects his work via his characters' madness,which,to some extent,shows Vonnegut's humanism.
本文旨在分析冯内古特在其不惑之年创作的这三部作品中主人公的疯癫,通过主题研究,探讨冯内古特的文学创作目的及其欲反映的社会现实。论文由五章组成。
第一章简要介绍了冯内古特的《上帝保佑你,罗斯瓦特先生》、《五号屠场》和《冠军的早餐》中的疯癫,并分析了国外对这三部作品中疯癫的研究现状。
第二章讨论了《上帝保佑你,罗斯瓦特先生》中爱略特·罗斯瓦特的疯癫。文章指出爱略特的疯癫成为了躲避金本位社会价值观的藏身处,而作者冯内古特则通过爱略特的疯癫展示了他关于社会的资本体系的思考。这也是他身为一位作家所背负的使命。
第三章中分析了《五号屠场》和比利·皮尔格里姆的创作实际出自于作者对二战的感受。小说中比利凭借星球Tralfamadore的世界观来逃避战争记忆——也是作者本人欲摆脱的梦魇。比利的疯癫实际上是冯内古特表达的对战争机器的一种反叛,也是作者就其职责所做的一份社会贡献。
《冠军的早餐》中的杜维·胡佛的疯癫及特劳特对其作品的反思是第四章主要论述的内容。本文指出特劳特作为作者的第二自我实际上影射了冯内古特在文学创作上的彷徨。
即成模式的金本位、战争机器和语言结构分别成为了爱略特、比利和杜维疯癫的前因。而三个主人公以疯癫来达到反叛社会机器的目的。本文以研究三部作品中主人公疯癫的共性及由疯癫引出的特劳特对自己作品的反思作为切入点,认为不惑之年的作者冯内古特欲通过对这三位主人公来表达自己创作的动机、目的和一位作家背负的社会责任感,从而坚定自己继续作为一位作家的信念。
通过对冯内古特这三部作品中疯癫的分析,本文作者认为,冯内古特在小说中利用所创作人物对自己的创作生涯进行了内省。而这一内省过程,从某种程度来说,表达了冯内古特作为作家的一种独特人文思想。
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.(1922-2007) is an important yet disputed author in the contemporary American literature.Rising to fame with the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five(1969),Vonnegut became a well-known and widely read writer.In some schools,Slaughterhouse-Five has even become one of the compulsory reading materials.Yet after this achievement,in his 40s,Vonnegut came to his crossroad of literary creation.
The present thesis focuses on the madness in God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater(1965), Slaughterhouse-Five(1969),and Breakfast of Champions(1973),which were written in Vonnegut's 40s,trying to explore the motivation and purpose of Vonnegut's literary creation during the first decade of fame he has gained after war.The thesis includes five chapters.
The first chapter is an introduction of Vonnegut and his novels God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five,and Breakfast of Champions.A general survey of the previous research on madness of the three novels is also included.
Chapter two surveys the reasons of Eliot Rosewater's madness in God Bless You,Mr. Rosewater and how his madness acts as a refuge from sanity.The impact of money,of different values father and son holds,compels Eliot to take madness as a cave of his identity.And the inquiry about the social injustice of economic systems has been one of Vonnegut's concerns on both society and his own early profession as a writer.
The third part studies Vonnegut's trauma in WWII,definitely a motivation that causes his writing of Billy Pilgrim and Slaughterhouse-Five,in which Billy constantly evades the war machine utilizing the Tralfamadorian whimsy.Until Vonnegut has found some way to achieve an "equilibrium" based on the belief that people can successfully resist becoming appendages to machines,can Billy traps his way out from his haunted memory for the author himself.
The machine of words printed as the idea to be planted in readers goes to be the major concern of chapter four,in which Kilgore Trout is viewed as an alter-ego of Vonnegut,who,in his late 40s,comes across his major crises in spiritual evolution.Apparently,Dwayne Hoover's madness in Breakfast of Champions is an alarm to warn Trout of his career—to be a responsible author for the world.So does Vonnegut contemplate his purpose of literary creation.
Hence there comes the conclusion as the last chapter of the thesis:the exercise of madness in the novels Vonnegut wrote in his 40s represents the author's plight in his writing career;and madness of the protagonists in these three novels represents his progress of surpassing his past and looking forward to the future.
By analyzing madness of these three novels,the thesis proves that taking the responsibility as a writer,Vonnegut introspects his work via his characters' madness,which,to some extent,shows Vonnegut's humanism.
引文
1 Gary Harmon,"The Scene with Kurt Vonnegut,Jr.:A Conversation." This is a transcript taken from conversation that took place at Stephens College,with Jack Lazebnik as the moderator and a group of students joining in the questioning.
2 In Bluebeard(New York:Delacorte,1987),the protagonist-artist describes his part in a "peculiar membership" with ancient historical roots—people telling stories around a campfire at night or painting pictures on the walls of caves(75,76,199).Its purpose is to cheer people up,inspire fellowship,and open up minds that would go on exactly as before "no matter how painful,unrealistic,unjust,ludicrous,or downright dumb...life may be."
3 Vonnegut's remark to this reference is that "Shaw's optimism in Back to Methuselah was science fiction enough for me." In Wampeters,foma,and Granfalloons(Opinions)(New York:Dell,Delta,1975) 260.
4 The withdrawal from the society and inappropriateness of emotional response in Vonnegut's characters are always followed with the inattention to hygiene and grooming.The withdrawal of a part of ego leads the schizoid to physical decay.
5 Vonnegut's heroes are often far more sane than the society that labels them crazy for renouncing its own inhumane norms."Schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society," The Eden Express(New York:Praeger,1975) 111.
6 Vonnegut does not reject meaning per se,but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another.Referring to Den-ida,Belsey observes that as a dynamic,pluralistic universe of its own,the text necessarily signifies something more,something less,or something other than it claims to(104).Bernard Selinger,in Le Guin andldentity in Contemporary Fiction observes that "the good psychoanalytic critic reads the work with a sense of its ambiguous and latent meanings,and thus can find new meanings and relations that will increase the importance of the work"(10).
7 Laing sees this precisely in terms of Vonnegut's portrayal,as a life and death straggle between a true self and a false self system.In The Harvard Guide to Modern Psychology,Armand Nicholi points out that "Schizophrenia like all psychosis is experienced as a life-and-death struggle for emotional survival," 202.
8 R.D.Laing,The Divided Self(New York:Pantheon Books,1969) 76,79,94.The tendency for the neurotic to hide behind elaborate facades,masks,or false selves,to withdraw into narcissistic fantasies and daydreams that distort or exclude the outside world,may create a perpetually equivocal nature and render the individual unable to participate in real life.The challenge of Vonnegut's God Bless You,Mr Rosewater,Slaughterhouse-Five,and Breakfast of Champions is to strip away of false facades.The cathartic process of Vonnegut's fiction allows the author and his characters to free themselves from neurotic fears and restrictions and to realize themselves in the present.
9 The book reflects many critics of Vonnegut share Hendin's position,viewing Vonnegut as fatalist or nihilist.
10 The following two major studies demonstrate a connection between appreciating Vonnegut as an accomplished practitioner of experimental fiction and understanding his vision as basically affirmative.Scholes asserts that Vonnegut subtly but relentlessly“seeks to make us thoughtful”in Robert Scholes,Fabulation and Metafiction(Urbana:University of Illinois Press,1979) 160.In Fabulation and Metafiction(Urbana:University of Illinois Press.1979),156-62,200-205;Patricia Waugh,Metafiction:The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction(New York:Methuen,1984),8,22,127-29,133.
11 Of critics who defend Vonnegut against charges of escapism,Waugh,Tanner,Hume,Scholes,and Mustazza are particularly incisive about the positive relationship in Vonnegut's work between the actual and the imaginary.Each shows that Vonnegut,as Borges,Barthelme,and Calvino,uses supernatural and superrational structures to express the most profound and serious concerns of the age.These critics show that a measure of Vonnegut's genius has been successfully to fuse the experimental and innovative with the popular and the traditional.
12 The view of Vonnegut's work as thin or facile has been proved superficial in exemplary studies by Jerome Klinkowitz,Peter Reed,Kathryn Hume,Robert Merrill,and Leonard Mustazza,among others.
13 With character projections and repeatedly in the autobiographical prefaces,Vonnegut comments upon the constricted family relationships that produce his own depression and the phobias of his protagonists.The parental morbidity and lovelessness visited upon Vonnegut's protagonists often become the first stage of mental deterioration in schizophrenic patients.
14 Mark Vonnegut describes his personal experience with schizophrenia as“the struggle...between two opposites,good and evil,positive and negative,yes and no”(The Eden Express,79-80).Vonnegut comments directly upon such a division in himself:“I was fascinated by the good and evil in myself and in everyone.”See Kurt Vonnegut,Wampeters,Foma and Granfalloons(Opinions)(New York:Delacorte Press,1974) 212.
15 A term coined in 1973 by the American experimental writer Raymond Federman to designate a new kind of fiction which is now more often referred to as postmodernist.Rather than attempt to mirror some pre-existing reality,surfiction abandons realism in favour of metafiction,self-consciously advertising its own fictional status.Federman proposed that‘the new fiction will not attempt to be meaningful,truthful,or realistic’.He reprinted his 1973 manifesto‘Surfiction—A Position’in a volume of essays,Surfiction:Fiction Now...and Tomorrow(1975).
16 J.H.Van den Berg,The Phenomenological Approach to Psychiatry(London:Routledge and Kegan Paul,1955).Cited in The Divided Self.
17 Fred and Eliot Rosewater are more than blood relatives;they are spiritual twins.Their identities are specifically joined when Fred explains that his greatest satisfaction in life is saving souls through the“miracle of life insurance,”and grateful brides tell him,“God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater.”See Kurt Vonnegut,God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater,1965,(New York:Dial Press,2006) 104.As Eliot's psychological counterpart,Fred is a lonely,sexless,suicidal person whose failed Utopian community undercuts Eliot's own altruistic ventures.Pisquontuit is a community of shithouses,shacks,alcoholism,ignorance,idiocy,and perversion—illustrating that the wastelandic horrors of a brutal,materialistic social system are experienced by rich and poor alike.This mini-tale of Pisquontuit's grotesquely alienated haves and have-nots provides a nightmarish portrait of America's capitalistic Utopia turned“belly up...turned green,bobbled to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited.”Another symbolic climax of the novel would be the image of a fish trap—the“Bowl of Doom”—put out by the godlike character,Harry Pena.see Kurt Vonnegut,God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater,1965,(New York:Dial Press,2006) 128.The Bowl of Doom takes“heartless advantage of the stupidity of fish”trapped by its“purse net,”its false materialistic lure.Human beings wander into such nets believing that God has decreed such a universe.
18 Leonard Mustazza particularly stresses the fact that Eliot is genuinely kind and his message worthwhile,“a man crying in the wilderness,crying against the tide of greed and hypocrisy that has swept over America.”See Kurt Vonnegut,God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater,1965,(New York:Dial Press,2006) 98.
19 Harry Pena,the God-like character,appears to be the one exception.
20 Lifton's ideas to Vonnegut's text was first used by Donald Greiner.See Donald Greiner's “Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and the Fiction of Atrocity”published in 1973.
21 Chen,Shidan.Kurt Vonnegut's Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Real World and the Fictional World and His Tendency toward New Historicism.Diss.Xiamen U,2002.1 chose this phrase to present what a writer can do to a reader only by the power of his words.Dwayne Hoover is one of the victims who belong to the category of that kind of readers I have mentioned in earlier sections.However,I m not going to explore how Dwayne Hoover is driven far from sanity in this chapter;rather,the other central figure Kilgore Trout,who puts lots of Vonnegut's characters such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater into his coverage by his work,would be the focus of this section instead.
22 Cf.Vonnegut's comment in an interview:“But Ⅰ continue to think that artists—all artists—should be treasured as alarm systems.”See Kurt Vonnegut,Wampeters,Foma and Granfalloons(Opinions)(New York:Delacorte Press,1974) 238.
23 Vonnegut says in Palm Sunday,“As for real death—it has always been a temptation to me,since my mother solved so many problems with it.The child of a suicide naturally think of death....Answer:I think I'll blow my brains out.”See Kurt Vonnegut,Palm Sunday(New York: Delacorte Press,1981) 304.Mind the obvious fallacy of absolute equations between Vonnegut the author and the Vonnegut persona who lives in his novels.Nevertheless,the reference to “hiding,”“void,”and“dematerialization”tends to verify the schizophrenic plight of Vonnegut's protagonists as his own.
24 The subject of Rabo Karabekian's painting,chaos,functions paradoxically as a force of disintegration and a force of renewal.It renders closed systems open and dynamic and thus allows for a creative restructuring of identity.Paradox,contradiction,irony,incongruity are linguistic devices by which Vonnegut achieves the same ends as Rabo's painting.
25 Kathryn Hume explains that Vonnegut uses Trout's fluctuating identity from novel to novel as a means of integrating potentially overwhelming fragments of his own psyche.See Kathryn Hume,“Vonnegut's Self-Projections:Symbolic Characters and Symbolic Fiction,”The Journal of Narrative Technique 12 Fall(1982):186.
26 Vonnegut continues to discuss the source of schizophrenia as both biochemical and rooted in life experience.Hoover's craziness is a combination of“bad chemicals”and bad ideas.
27 Chaos is the subject of Rabo Karabekian's painting,functions paradoxically as a force of disintegration and a force for renewal.
28 As an equilateral triangle,Dwayne,Trout,and Vonnegut exist both as separate and merging identities—as literary characters as well as psychic projections of Vonnegut.
29 As the“ghost”in at the player piano.
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2 In Bluebeard(New York:Delacorte,1987),the protagonist-artist describes his part in a "peculiar membership" with ancient historical roots—people telling stories around a campfire at night or painting pictures on the walls of caves(75,76,199).Its purpose is to cheer people up,inspire fellowship,and open up minds that would go on exactly as before "no matter how painful,unrealistic,unjust,ludicrous,or downright dumb...life may be."
3 Vonnegut's remark to this reference is that "Shaw's optimism in Back to Methuselah was science fiction enough for me." In Wampeters,foma,and Granfalloons(Opinions)(New York:Dell,Delta,1975) 260.
4 The withdrawal from the society and inappropriateness of emotional response in Vonnegut's characters are always followed with the inattention to hygiene and grooming.The withdrawal of a part of ego leads the schizoid to physical decay.
5 Vonnegut's heroes are often far more sane than the society that labels them crazy for renouncing its own inhumane norms."Schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society," The Eden Express(New York:Praeger,1975) 111.
6 Vonnegut does not reject meaning per se,but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another.Referring to Den-ida,Belsey observes that as a dynamic,pluralistic universe of its own,the text necessarily signifies something more,something less,or something other than it claims to(104).Bernard Selinger,in Le Guin andldentity in Contemporary Fiction observes that "the good psychoanalytic critic reads the work with a sense of its ambiguous and latent meanings,and thus can find new meanings and relations that will increase the importance of the work"(10).
7 Laing sees this precisely in terms of Vonnegut's portrayal,as a life and death straggle between a true self and a false self system.In The Harvard Guide to Modern Psychology,Armand Nicholi points out that "Schizophrenia like all psychosis is experienced as a life-and-death struggle for emotional survival," 202.
8 R.D.Laing,The Divided Self(New York:Pantheon Books,1969) 76,79,94.The tendency for the neurotic to hide behind elaborate facades,masks,or false selves,to withdraw into narcissistic fantasies and daydreams that distort or exclude the outside world,may create a perpetually equivocal nature and render the individual unable to participate in real life.The challenge of Vonnegut's God Bless You,Mr Rosewater,Slaughterhouse-Five,and Breakfast of Champions is to strip away of false facades.The cathartic process of Vonnegut's fiction allows the author and his characters to free themselves from neurotic fears and restrictions and to realize themselves in the present.
9 The book reflects many critics of Vonnegut share Hendin's position,viewing Vonnegut as fatalist or nihilist.
10 The following two major studies demonstrate a connection between appreciating Vonnegut as an accomplished practitioner of experimental fiction and understanding his vision as basically affirmative.Scholes asserts that Vonnegut subtly but relentlessly“seeks to make us thoughtful”in Robert Scholes,Fabulation and Metafiction(Urbana:University of Illinois Press,1979) 160.In Fabulation and Metafiction(Urbana:University of Illinois Press.1979),156-62,200-205;Patricia Waugh,Metafiction:The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction(New York:Methuen,1984),8,22,127-29,133.
11 Of critics who defend Vonnegut against charges of escapism,Waugh,Tanner,Hume,Scholes,and Mustazza are particularly incisive about the positive relationship in Vonnegut's work between the actual and the imaginary.Each shows that Vonnegut,as Borges,Barthelme,and Calvino,uses supernatural and superrational structures to express the most profound and serious concerns of the age.These critics show that a measure of Vonnegut's genius has been successfully to fuse the experimental and innovative with the popular and the traditional.
12 The view of Vonnegut's work as thin or facile has been proved superficial in exemplary studies by Jerome Klinkowitz,Peter Reed,Kathryn Hume,Robert Merrill,and Leonard Mustazza,among others.
13 With character projections and repeatedly in the autobiographical prefaces,Vonnegut comments upon the constricted family relationships that produce his own depression and the phobias of his protagonists.The parental morbidity and lovelessness visited upon Vonnegut's protagonists often become the first stage of mental deterioration in schizophrenic patients.
14 Mark Vonnegut describes his personal experience with schizophrenia as“the struggle...between two opposites,good and evil,positive and negative,yes and no”(The Eden Express,79-80).Vonnegut comments directly upon such a division in himself:“I was fascinated by the good and evil in myself and in everyone.”See Kurt Vonnegut,Wampeters,Foma and Granfalloons(Opinions)(New York:Delacorte Press,1974) 212.
15 A term coined in 1973 by the American experimental writer Raymond Federman to designate a new kind of fiction which is now more often referred to as postmodernist.Rather than attempt to mirror some pre-existing reality,surfiction abandons realism in favour of metafiction,self-consciously advertising its own fictional status.Federman proposed that‘the new fiction will not attempt to be meaningful,truthful,or realistic’.He reprinted his 1973 manifesto‘Surfiction—A Position’in a volume of essays,Surfiction:Fiction Now...and Tomorrow(1975).
16 J.H.Van den Berg,The Phenomenological Approach to Psychiatry(London:Routledge and Kegan Paul,1955).Cited in The Divided Self.
17 Fred and Eliot Rosewater are more than blood relatives;they are spiritual twins.Their identities are specifically joined when Fred explains that his greatest satisfaction in life is saving souls through the“miracle of life insurance,”and grateful brides tell him,“God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater.”See Kurt Vonnegut,God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater,1965,(New York:Dial Press,2006) 104.As Eliot's psychological counterpart,Fred is a lonely,sexless,suicidal person whose failed Utopian community undercuts Eliot's own altruistic ventures.Pisquontuit is a community of shithouses,shacks,alcoholism,ignorance,idiocy,and perversion—illustrating that the wastelandic horrors of a brutal,materialistic social system are experienced by rich and poor alike.This mini-tale of Pisquontuit's grotesquely alienated haves and have-nots provides a nightmarish portrait of America's capitalistic Utopia turned“belly up...turned green,bobbled to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited.”Another symbolic climax of the novel would be the image of a fish trap—the“Bowl of Doom”—put out by the godlike character,Harry Pena.see Kurt Vonnegut,God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater,1965,(New York:Dial Press,2006) 128.The Bowl of Doom takes“heartless advantage of the stupidity of fish”trapped by its“purse net,”its false materialistic lure.Human beings wander into such nets believing that God has decreed such a universe.
18 Leonard Mustazza particularly stresses the fact that Eliot is genuinely kind and his message worthwhile,“a man crying in the wilderness,crying against the tide of greed and hypocrisy that has swept over America.”See Kurt Vonnegut,God Bless You,Mr.Rosewater,1965,(New York:Dial Press,2006) 98.
19 Harry Pena,the God-like character,appears to be the one exception.
20 Lifton's ideas to Vonnegut's text was first used by Donald Greiner.See Donald Greiner's “Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and the Fiction of Atrocity”published in 1973.
21 Chen,Shidan.Kurt Vonnegut's Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Real World and the Fictional World and His Tendency toward New Historicism.Diss.Xiamen U,2002.1 chose this phrase to present what a writer can do to a reader only by the power of his words.Dwayne Hoover is one of the victims who belong to the category of that kind of readers I have mentioned in earlier sections.However,I m not going to explore how Dwayne Hoover is driven far from sanity in this chapter;rather,the other central figure Kilgore Trout,who puts lots of Vonnegut's characters such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater into his coverage by his work,would be the focus of this section instead.
22 Cf.Vonnegut's comment in an interview:“But Ⅰ continue to think that artists—all artists—should be treasured as alarm systems.”See Kurt Vonnegut,Wampeters,Foma and Granfalloons(Opinions)(New York:Delacorte Press,1974) 238.
23 Vonnegut says in Palm Sunday,“As for real death—it has always been a temptation to me,since my mother solved so many problems with it.The child of a suicide naturally think of death....Answer:I think I'll blow my brains out.”See Kurt Vonnegut,Palm Sunday(New York: Delacorte Press,1981) 304.Mind the obvious fallacy of absolute equations between Vonnegut the author and the Vonnegut persona who lives in his novels.Nevertheless,the reference to “hiding,”“void,”and“dematerialization”tends to verify the schizophrenic plight of Vonnegut's protagonists as his own.
24 The subject of Rabo Karabekian's painting,chaos,functions paradoxically as a force of disintegration and a force of renewal.It renders closed systems open and dynamic and thus allows for a creative restructuring of identity.Paradox,contradiction,irony,incongruity are linguistic devices by which Vonnegut achieves the same ends as Rabo's painting.
25 Kathryn Hume explains that Vonnegut uses Trout's fluctuating identity from novel to novel as a means of integrating potentially overwhelming fragments of his own psyche.See Kathryn Hume,“Vonnegut's Self-Projections:Symbolic Characters and Symbolic Fiction,”The Journal of Narrative Technique 12 Fall(1982):186.
26 Vonnegut continues to discuss the source of schizophrenia as both biochemical and rooted in life experience.Hoover's craziness is a combination of“bad chemicals”and bad ideas.
27 Chaos is the subject of Rabo Karabekian's painting,functions paradoxically as a force of disintegration and a force for renewal.
28 As an equilateral triangle,Dwayne,Trout,and Vonnegut exist both as separate and merging identities—as literary characters as well as psychic projections of Vonnegut.
29 As the“ghost”in at the player piano.
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