Your Final Project

Like all good things, our quarter with Vonnegut has come to an end, but not unlike the "cleaning-up" that Billy Pilgrim and his fellow POWs find themselves doing in Dresden as World War II, we (well, you) have a little more grim and dirty work ahead of you.

It's a final essay, but it's not . . .

We've gone over the details of the final project more than once in class, but here's a more detailed breakdown of what I'd like to see from you.  In a literature class like this, one would expect to be asked to write a scholarly essay making some sort of critical argument that's supported by (con)textual evidence from the quarter's readings (all of which is properly cited in MLA format).  Vonnegut's work, however, doesn't necessarily call for the same response as other authors and so instead of a straightforward essay, I'd like you to produce a creative piece that — for all intents and purposes — achieves all of those same goals.  

Let's leave form aside for a second and focus on function instead.  Vonnegut's been dead for five years now, though he was as fiery a social commentator in his final years as he'd ever been . . . even more fierce, perhaps.  What I'd like you to do in your final project is to pick up his gauntlet and carry on in his stead.  Choose a contemporary issue that's important to you and write a creative piece that aims to capture your best estimation of what Vonnegut's stance on the topic would have been, in his style, and using anecdotes, examples, characters, etc. from the eight novels you've read this quarter as evidence to support that position.

How about some examples?

So how do you get the creative and the critical components working together?  First, pay attention to some of the hybrid writing the Vonnegut's doing in the latter years of his life.  As we've already discussed in our last class, the epilogue to Jailbird is an excellent model for your work, as are Vonnegut's bookend chapters (nos. 1 & 10) of Slaughterhouse-Five, Jonah's more meta-narrational moments in Cat's Cradle and the majority of Timequake.  This part fiction/part nonfiction approach will serve you well.  Remember that you don't need to tell a fully-formed story with a beginning, middle and end — think of it more in the mode of occasional storytelling, as if you happened to sit down next to a stranger at a bar and struck up a conversation, and don't forget Vonnegut's very helpful writing tip of having one particular person in mind when you're writing (he often wrote to his sister Alice).

The most useful tactic at your disposal, and a very Vonnegut-ian one, is to make extensive use of allegory in your work.  Of course, not only is Vonnegut an agnostic humanist who can see the value of faith for others and quote extensively from the bible, but he's also a big believer in one of Christ's favorite literary devices: parable.  There's perhaps no better (and more commonly used) example of this in Vonnegut's writing than Kilgore Trout, whose stories serve to make points in a more vivid way than mere explication ever could.  Likewise, think of the tangential characters who aren't directly connected to a storyline but serve an important purpose furthering the ideas behind the novels — like Powers Hapgood and Sacco and Vanzetti in Jailbird, or the brief mention of RFK and MLK in Slaughterhouse-Five.  Use Vonnegut the way he uses Kilgore Trout, or use Trout the way Vonnegut uses Trout, or use Vonnegut's other characters in the same fashion.

In terms of the argument you're going to make, you'll have to work through precedent — points of view expressed in the works we've read that you feel are applicable to the issue you're addressing.  Vonnegut's certainly opinionated and not at all shy about sharing his ideas, so you should have plenty of material to make use of in your piece.

Aside from all of the texts mentioned above, here — to give you a taste of Vonnegut's most pointed writing in a political mode — are a few superlative selections from Vonnegut's last published book, A Man Without a Country (2005), which collected a number of essays he penned for the news magazine, In These Times:

• "State of the Asylum," which includes a dialogue between Vonnegut and Trout
• "Cold Turkey," perhaps the most famous of Vonnegut's ITT pieces
• "Requiem for a Dreamer," the final dialogue between Vonnegut and Trout, who committed suicide soon thereafter (disregard the fact that he died in Timequake)
• "American Xmas Card 2004"

Additionally, if you're looking for tips on how to write like Vonnegut, why not take a look at his own advice about writing?


Anything else I should know?

Here are a few important guidelines for your final projects — fail to meet these requirements and, well, you'll fail(!):

• Length: 6-8 double-spaced pages — that's full pages, and not counting your works cited list, so to be safe, make sure your piece goes on to page 7.  If the spirit moves you and you find yourself writing a longer piece, please don't feel constrained by the 8 pg. limit (that's just a general ballpark length to aim for).  On the other hand, if you hand in a paper that's less than 6 full pages, you'll automatically receive an F (so don't do that).

• Formatting — particularly since you're sending your file to me electronically, it would not be wise to play around with margins, get cutesy with font sizes, etc.  12 point Times New Roman is lovely and easy on the eyes, to boot.  Barring that, Cambria or a similar serif typeface (serifs, don't ya know, are those little decorative doohickeys at the ends of the letter) will be fine.  I'm partial to the elegance Goudy Old Style (but that's just me).

• MLA citations and works cited list — you'll find links to MLA resources here.  Don't forget that you need to cite paraphrases and summaries of source texts in addition to direct quotations.

• No block quotes — there is, perhaps, no greater comfort to the unprepared last-minute writer than the block quote — just cram it all in there, making no attempt to trim the text (or disguise the fact that you're cutting and pasting from Wikipedia).  In formal essays of lengths longer than what you're being asked to deliver here, I might allow students to use one block quote in their essay, but there's no reason whatsoever for block quotes in a final project like this.

• Due date — Wednesday, June 6th at midnight.  Please send your final to me at my gmail address (which is my last name [dot] my full first name at gmail.com) as an attachment.  While the registrar's official deadline for grades to be posted is June 13th at 5:00 PM, by then I will be in New York buying too many books and drinking heavily after a long (though lovely) academic year (drinking water, that is . . . it's hot in New York in the summer).  When I get your paper, I'll download it to make sure that it opens without issue and then write you a little note confirming that I've received it.  Don't forget that late assignments lose a full letter grade for each day they're late and also be grateful that I originally set the deadline for the 5th, but in honor of Vonnegut's birthday being 11/11, decided to go with 6/6 (though not with a cut-off of 6pm).

Weeks 7 and 8: "Deadeye Dick" (1982)

In our post for Jailbird, I found myself returning to the opening lines of Slaughterhouse-Five's final chapter as an elegant evocation of 1970s cultural malaise that began with a few violent acts in the late 60s.  Now, as we begin our week with Vonnegut's 1982 novel, Deadeye Dick, we return to it once more — not to memorialize Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King, but rather for the mention of Kurt Vonnegut's father and his gun collection, which factors heavily into the setting of Deadeye Dick.  

As we've discussed in regards to several of the novels we've read this quarter, Vonnegut had issues with both of his parents that made their way into his writing.  Still, it's not until we reach Deadeye Dick that we have Vonnegut's most sustained critique of his upbringing and his parents' failings, mixing thinly-veiled autobiography with fictional inventions to create the KV-analogue, Rudy Waltz.  This frankness was a long time coming — Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. died in 1957, but it's notable Vonnegut kept the "Jr." suffix through Breakfast of Champions (a novel that represents, appropriately, a death-of-the-self).  Conversely, it's fascinating to read the Waltz family against the hypothetical depiction of Vonnegut and his parents in heaven that begins Jailbird (which, though frustrated at times, does start with the touching wish that Vonnegut and his father might be better friends in the afterlife than they were on earth).

Should you be interested in more widely exploring Vonnegut's work at some point in the future, it's worth noting that aside from Midland City itself, a number of characters from books we're not reading this term can be found in Deadeye Dick — chief among them Dwayne and Celia Hoover (protagonists of Breakfast of Champions and Rabo Karabekian, protagonist of Bluebeard).

In a long and lavish review of Deadeye Dick for The New York Times — one marked, appropriately enough, by a retrospective mood  — Benjamin DeMott addresses Vonnegut's detractors and offers a lovely summation of what marvelous gifts he offers to readers of all kinds, along with a prediction of how their (and perhaps your) appreciation for his work might evolve in time:

I know that on some days this very odd writer is good medicine, whatever one's age: on the day when, for instance, you hear that the shelling hasn't stopped, or that the liveliest young mind in your acquaintance can't find work, or that it's been decided, in the newspapers, that the operations mutilating a loved one are no longer regarded as correct procedures. One reason for this is that Vonnegut's inexplicables are admirably plain, homely, abundant, up front; there's no epistemological complication, few philosophical conundrums, just the improbable mess of any probable human week. And the other reason is that there's no cruelty in the man. He is, evidently, playing; take away the ever-present question (namely, How on earth can you explain this?) and his activities might not be easily distinguishable from those of a child setting up and batting down toy soldiers on a rug. But gloating and meanness are excluded from the game, and the observing eyes are sad, humorous, kind.

I predict that many Vonnegutians will grow up and away from their favorite author. I also predict that, a decade or two after they do so, many will grow back. The old rule applies: As soon as you put on weight on this earth, you discover it makes a kind of sense to lose it.

Here's our reading schedule for Deadeye Dick:

• Thursday, May 10: Deadeye Dick ch. 1 - 15
• Tuesday, May 15: Deadeye Dick ch. 16 - epilogue

And here are a few supplemental links:

• full text of Benjamin DeMott's New York Times review: [link]
• Impress your friends with your knowledge of dreadful 90s one-hit-wonders — the band Deadeye Dick, best known for their 1994 single "New Age Girl," has obviously read Vonnegut: [link]

Slaughterhouse-Five — Final Observations

Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack in their Tralfamadorian habitat.

Here's our thread for you to post one additional thing — one interesting fact, one astute observation, one cogent comparison, etc. — about Slaughterhouse-Five that we did not discuss during our in-class conversations.

Your final observations don't necessarily need to be long, but they should be substantial and interesting, and rooted in the text itself (or its contexts).  Ideal thoughts should follow from openings like "did you notice . . ." or "isn't it fascinating that . . ." (though you don't need to actually say this).

Please post your observations as comments on this thread and be sure to include your name.  So that we can make a clean break in starting on our next book, and so you can have the weekend to yourself, the window for posting is between the end of Tuesday's class and the start of Thursday's class.  Finally, as is the case with the discussion leaders' posting of their questions on the respective novels' threads, these final observations are also "first come, first served," so you can't repeat what someone else has previously said.  You can, however, use someone else's post as a jumping off point for your own insights.

Weeks 6 and 7: Jailbird (1979)

We jump ahead a full decade from 1969's Slaughterhouse-Five to 1979's Jailbird.  Why?  Well, as we've discussed several times in class, after the disheartening lean years leading up to Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut had a very difficult time dealing with his success, fan's expectations of him and his desires to remain financially solvent (along with the dissolution of his marriage to Jane Marie Cox and his son Mark's institutionalization).  In essence, the author lost touch with himself and his talents, transforming himself into a popular persona à la Mark Twain that was a mere caricature of his former self (to get some sense of this change, along with some of the hypocrisies of this new self, you can read this excerpt from Charles Shields' recent KV bio from the bottom of pg. 297 to 301).  As a result, he followed the critical and popular success of Slaughterhouse-Five with two of his most poorly-received novels: Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday (1973) and Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! (1976).

During this same time, America was undergoing its own identity crisis as the hopeful politics of the 1960s dissolved into hopeless malaise as the 70s unfolded.  The abrupt shocks that destroyed this optimism (cf. Vonnegut's inclusion of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King's assassinations in the final chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five), joined by the long quagmire of the war in Vietnam and fresh wounds inflicted by the Watergate scandal.  Taken together, these internal and external dilemmas form the context for Jailbird, wherein Vonnegut, approaching his sixtieth birthday seeks answers in the lessons and convictions of his past.  Walter F. Starbuck, the novel's protagonist, who's just been released from prison after serving time for minor crimes as part of Watergate, finds himself in the exact same situation, and his (and Vonnegut's) retrospective soul-searching will cross paths with a veritable pantheon of secular American saints cut from the same cloth as Eliot Rosewater, including Eugene V. Debs, Powers Hapgood, Sacco and Vanzetti, and others.

In a 2003 interview with David Barsamian in The Progressive, Vonnegut talks about the strange interplay of socialism and Christianity within his ethics, mentioning some of the historic figures who factor positively into Jailbird:

Vonnegut: It’s perfectly ordinary to be a socialist. It’s perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments. There was a time when I could vote for economic justice, and I can’t anymore. I cast my first vote for a socialist candidate—Norman Thomas, a Christian minister. I had to cast it by absentee ballot. I used to have three socialist parties to choose from—the Socialist Labor Party, Socialist Workers Party, and I forgot what the other one was.

Q: You take pride in being from Indiana, in being a Hoosier.

Vonnegut: For being from the state that gave us Eugene Debs.

Q: Eugene Debs of Terre Haute on the Wabash.

Vonnegut: Where Timothy McVeigh was executed. Eugene Debs said (and this is merely a paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount, which is what so much socialist writing is), “As long as there’s a lower class, I’m in it; as long as there’s a criminal element, I’m of it; as long as there is a soul in prison,” which would include Timothy McVeigh, “I am not free.” What is wrong with that? Of course, Jesus got crucified for saying the same thing.

Q: With two million souls in prison today in the United States, Debs would be very busy.

Vonnegut: Debs would’ve committed suicide, feeling there was nothing he could do about it.

Q: There is another Hoosier you write about who is unknown, Powers Hapgood of Indianapolis. Who was he?

Vonnegut: Powers Hapgood was a rich kid. His family owned a successful cannery in Indianapolis. Powers was radicalized. After he graduated from Harvard, he went to work in a coal mine to find out what that was like. He became a labor organizer. He led the pickets against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. I got to know him late in his life when he’d become a local CIO official. There was some sort of dustup on a picket line, enough to bring the cops into play. Hapgood was testifying in court about what was to be done about CIO members who had made trouble. The judge stopped the proceedings at one point and said, “Hapgood, why would a man with your advantages, from a wealthy, respected family, Harvard graduate, lead such a life?” Powers Hapgood replied, “Why, the Sermon on the Mount, sir.” Not bad, huh?

While we're on the topic of Vonnegut's moralists, it's worth noting that good old Kilgore Trout appears in Jailbird as well, however in very different circumstances that we have (or will) see him elsewhere.  Try not to get too hung up on the differences — not unlike the radically differences between the Diana Moon Glampers of "Harrison Bergeron" and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, we can, perhaps, chalk this up to authorial carelessness.

Here's our reading schedule for Jailbird:

• Thursday, May 3: Jailbird ch. 1 - 10
• Tuesday, May 8: Jailbird ch. 11 - epilogue

And here are some supplemental readings:

• John Leonard's New York Times review of Jailbird: [link]
• full text of Vonnegut's 2003 interview with David Barsamian in The Progressive: [link]
• Kirkus Reviews' appraisal of the novel: [link]
• Wikipedia page on the Watergate scandal: [link]

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater — Final Observations

Here's our thread for you to post one additional thing — one interesting fact, one astute observation, one cogent comparison, etc. — about God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater that we did not discuss during our in-class conversations.

Your final observations don't necessarily need to be long, but they should be substantial and interesting, and rooted in the text itself (or its contexts).  Ideal thoughts should follow from openings like "did you notice . . ." or "isn't it fascinating that . . ." (though you don't need to actually say this).

Please post your observations as comments on this thread and be sure to include your name.  So that we can make a clean break in starting on our next book, and so you can have the weekend to yourself, the window for posting is between the end of Thursday's class and 6pm Friday.  Finally, as is the case with the discussion leaders' posting of their questions on the respective novels' threads, these final observations are also "first come, first served," so you can't repeat what someone else has previously said.  You can, however, use someone else's post as a jumping off point for your own insights.

Weeks 5 and 6: Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969)

While Vonnegut identifies Cat's Cradle as his "flagship" (i.e. his favorite of his own books) it's no understatement to call Slaughterhouse-Five his masterpiece — when raking his own books against one another in 1981's Palm Sunday, those two are the only to receive a mark of A+ (though The Sirens of Titans, Mother Night, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Jailbird all get As).  Certainly, it's one of his more formally-inventive novels, and one in which his use of science-fiction tropes and cutting-edge postmodern literary technique meld beautifully to produce a narrative that remains true to the horrors Vonnegut witnessed in Dresden as a POW during WWII.

Always a prolific and dedicated writer — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, for example, came together in a little over a year — Slaughterhouse-Five posed a serious challenge to Vonnegut, who tried (and failed) for the better part of two decades, to find the right way to tell his Dresden story.  This exchange from a composite interview (published by The Paris Review as part of their "Art of Fiction" series in 1977) outlines a very important shift in Vonnegut's approach that granted him the freedom to finish the manuscript (an important anecdote that's also contained in the book itself and gives it its subtitle):

INTERVIEWER

Did you intend to write about [Dresden] as soon as you went through the experience?

VONNEGUT

When the city was demolished I had no idea of the scale of the thing . . . Whether this was what Bremen looked like or Hamburg, Coventry . . . I’d never seen Coventry, so I had no scale except for what I’d seen in movies. When I got home (I was a writer since I had been on the Cornell Sun, except that was the extent of my writing) I thought of writing my war story, too. All my friends were home; they’d had wonderful adventures, too. I went down to the newspaper office, the Indianapolis News, and looked to find out what they had about Dresden. There was an item about half an inch long, which said our planes had been over Dresden and two had been lost. And so I figured, well, this really was the most minor sort of detail in World War II. Others had so much more to write about. I remember envying Andy Rooney, who jumped into print at that time; I didn’t know him, but I think he was the first guy to publish his war story after the war; it was called Air Gunner. Hell, I never had any classy adventure like that. But every so often I would meet a European and we would be talking about the war and I would say I was in Dresden; he’d be astonished that I’d been there, and he’d always want to know more. Then a book by David Irving was published about Dresden, saying it was the largest massacre in European history. I said, By God, I saw something after all! I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.

INTERVIEWER

That sort of shifted the whole focus . . .

VONNEGUT

She freed me to write about what infants we really were: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don’t think I had to shave very often. I don’t recall that that was a problem.

Later in the same interview, he speaks about Dresden in comparison to the Holocaust, and attempts (with a combination of survivor's guilt and his trademark black humor) to address the senseless scale of destruction and his place in relation to it:

INTERVIEWER

It was the largest massacre in European history?

VONNEGUT

It was the fastest killing of large numbers of people—one hundred and thirty-five thousand people in a matter of hours. There were slower schemes for killing, of course.

INTERVIEWER

The death camps.

VONNEGUT

Yes—in which millions were eventually killed. Many people see the Dresden massacre as correct and quite minimal revenge for what had been done by the camps. Maybe so. As I say, I never argue that point. I do note in passing that the death penalty was applied to absolutely anybody who happened to be in the undefended city—babies, old people, the zoo animals, and thousands upon thousands of rabid Nazis, of course, and, among others, my best friend Bernard V. O’Hare and me. By all rights, O’Hare and I should have been part of the body count. The more bodies, the more correct the revenge.

INTERVIEWER

The Franklin Library is bringing out a deluxe edition of Slaughterhouse Five, I believe.

VONNEGUT

Yes. I was required to write a new introduction for it.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have any new thoughts?

VONNEGUT

I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defense or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited—not two or five or ten. Just one.

INTERVIEWER

And who was that?

VONNEGUT

Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that.

Slaughterhouse-Five was made into a film in 1972 — an ambitious and faithful adaptation that pleased the author immensely: "I love [director] George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel Slaughterhouse-Five to the silver screen ... I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book."  If we can agree upon a day/time and I can reserve a room somewhere on campus, I'd be willing to screen the film for the class (if enough folks are willing to come out).

Here's our reading schedule for the next three classes:

• Tuesday, April 24: ch. 1 - 4
• Thursday, April 26: ch. 5 - 6
• Tuesday, May 1: ch. 7 - 10

As I mentioned last week, Slaughterhouse-Five is actually one of the shorter books that we'll be reading this term, however as it marks the halfway point of our quarter and a major milestone in Vonnegut's career, it'll also afford us the opportunity to look back over our past four books and regroup our thoughts before we move on to look at the latter phases of Vonnegut's writing.

Additionally, here are a few supplemental links for your enjoyment:

• The aforementioned (and highly-recommended) Paris Review "Art of Fiction" interview: [link]
• The New York Times' review of Slaughterhouse-Five: [link]
• Harlan Ellison's 1969 review of the book in The Los Angeles Times: [link]
• a 2007 NPR tribute to Vonnegut featuring the author reading an excerpt from Slaughterhouse-Five: [link]
• a 2003 NPR interview with Vonnegut about Slaughterhouse-Five: [link]
• Vonnegut's May 1945 letter to his family in Indianapolis from a Red Cross camp in France: [link]
• A 1949 letter of rejection from The Atlantic Monthly, to whom Vonnegut had sent two stories, along with an account of his experiences in Dresden: [link]
• Wikipedia entry on the Dresden bombing: [link]
• Vonnegut speaks in Chicago on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima:

Cat's Cradle — final observations

As I mentioned in class on Tuesday, we'll be following up each of the rest of our novels with a thread where each of you will post one additional thing — one interesting fact, one astute observation, one cogent comparison, etc. — about the book that we did not discuss during our in-class conversations.

Think of this as a) an opportunity to put forward that brilliant insight that you were too terrified to say in front of all of us, b) a chance to share new conclusions that you've come to after ruminating on the book, and c) (perhaps most importantly) yet another (informal) grading opportunity.

Your final observations don't necessarily need to be long, but they should be substantial and interesting, and rooted in the text itself (or its contexts).  Ideal thoughts should follow from openings like "did you notice . . ." or "isn't it fascinating that . . ." (though you don't need to actually say this).

Please post your observations as comments on this thread and be sure to include your name.  So that we can make a clean break in starting on our next book, and so you can have the weekend to yourself, the window for posting is between the end of Thursday's class and 6pm Friday.  Finally, as is the case with the discussion leaders' posting of their questions on the respective novels' threads, these final observations are also "first come, first served," so you can't repeat what someone else has previously said.  You can, however, use someone else's post as a jumping off point for your own insights.