Post on 11-Jan-2023
FUTILE BENEVOLENCE IN THREE VONNEGUT NOVELS:
THE SIRENS OF_ TITAN, CAT'S CRADLE, AND
. GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER
by
Steven B. Swartzel
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the
College of Humanities
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida
April 1983
FUTILE BENEVOLENCE IN THREE VONNEGUT NOVELS:
THE SIRENS OF TITAN, CAT'S CRADLE, AND
GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER
by
Steven B. Swartzel
This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. William Coyle, Department of English, and has been approved by the members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the College of Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.
Chai~son, Engli'sh"
.• / .I/.
/ /-·.
// D
SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:
Studies
ii
Author:
Title:
Institution:
Degree:
Year:
ABSTRACT
Steven B. Swartzel
Futile Benevolence in Three Vonnegut Novels: The Sirens of Titan, eat's Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Florida Atlantic University
Master of Arts
1982
Many of Kurt Vonnegut's central characters are benevolent
advocates of positive human change. Because of the
absurdities of their world, these efforts are futile and
doomed to failure. Rumfoord attempts "to do good for
my native earth" in The Sirens of Titan, on a cosmic
scale. Lionel Boyd Johnson, Bokonon, in eat's Cradle,
creates a religion based on lies to lessen the awful
truth. Eliot Rosewater in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
attempts to love the "discarded" Americans of Rosewater,
Indiana, on a one-to-one basis. The conflicts inherent
in. Vonnegut's world cloud the motivation of these ef-
forts but they are still sincere efforts within their
pluralistic framework. The results are a mixture of
positive and negative; the most positive exist on a
small human scale; the most negative on a collective or
institutional scale.
iii
•
ABSTRACT
Chapter I.
II.
III.
IV.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE UNIVERSE OF KURT VONNEGUT
OUTER SPACE
SAN LORENZO
ROSEWATER, INDIANA
CONCLUSION • .
BIBLIOGRAPHY .
iv
iii
1
24
52
73
98
100
CHAPTER I
THE UNIVERSE OF KURT VONNEGUT
Any analysis of Kurt Vonnegut's works must first
deal with the universe that he has created. It is a
universe defined by the absurd. There is no logical
order to it, no religious hierarchy, and no absolutes.
Attempts to describe it systematically fail because of
the imbalances and contradictions within it. Vonnegut's
universe is consistent only in its inconsistency. FO.r
almost every piece of evidence that the universe is
structured in some identifiable way, there is evidence
that all is chaos. Similar conflicts are present between
the concepts of free will and predestination, reality
and illusion, chronological time and time travel, truth
and deceit, and a host of others.
To better understand Vonnegut's work, it is necessary
to review his life. So much of his personal life is
woven into his novels that the two are inseparable.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born in 1922 into an upper class
family in Indianapolis, Indiana. He had a normal mid
western upbringing. Although both his parents were
German, he was not taught the language or cultural
1
traditions of his ancestors. He considers Indianapolis
cultureless. In Breakfast of Champions he declares,
"I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I
can't live without a culture anymore." 1 In Palm Sunday
he adds:
As I have said in other books, the antiGermanism in this country during the First World War so shamed and dismayed my parents that they resolved to raise me without acquainting me with the language or the literature or the music or the oral family histories which my ancestors had loved. T~ey volunteered to make me ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism. This was done with surprising meekness by many, many German-American families in Indianapolis, it seems to me. Uncle John almost seems to boast of this dismantling and quiet burial of a culture, a culture which surely would have been of use to me today.2
He attended Shortridge High School, where he began
2
his writing career working for the Shortridge Daily Echo,
one of the few high school daily newspapers in the
country at that time. Vonnegut later agreed with a high
school friend who said,
You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school. You make a fool of yourself in high school, then you go to college and learn how you should have acted in high school, and then you get out into real life and that turns out to be high school all over again - class officers, cheerleaders, and all.3
Vonnegut was given no formal religious training.
His parents and grandparents were atheists.
3
~y ancestors, who came to the United States a little before the Civil War, were atheists. So I'm not rebelling against organized religion. I never had any. I learned my outrageous opinions about organized religions at · my mother's knee. My family has always had those ~ They came here absolutely crazy about the United States Constitution and about the possibility of prosperity and the brotherhood of man here. They were willing to work very hard, and they were atheists.4
Vonnegut also descended from pacifists. t:Ieither
his father nor grandfather fought in any wars.
America was an idealistic, pacifistic nation at that time. I was taught in the sixth grade to be proud that we had a standing army of over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington.S
He further commented, "Everything that I believe was
taught in junior civics during the Great Depression." 6
The family fortune was lost during the Great
Depression. Both his father and grandfather were
Indianapolis architects who found little work during
Vonnegut's childhood. His mother committed suicide by
overdosing on sleeping pills because "she could no
longer be what she had been at the time of her marriage -
one of the richest women in town." 7
In 1940, Vonnegut left Indianapolis to attend
Cornell University as a chemistry major.
I left Indianapolis where my ancestors had prepared so many comforts and privileges for me, because those comforts and privileges were finally based on money, and the money was gone.
I might have stayed if I had done what my father had done, which was to marry one of the richest women in town. But I married a poor one instead. I might have stayed if my father had not told me this: be anything but an architect. He and my older brother, who had become a chemist, urged me to study chemistry instead. I would have liked to be an architect, and an architect in Indianapolis at that. I would have become a third-generation Indianapolis architect. There can't be very many of those around.
But father was so full of anger and sorrow about having· had no work as an architect during the Great Depression that he persuaded me that I too, would be that unhappy if I studied architecture.8
He was not a good chemistry student, wound up on
academic probation, and eventually left Cornell without
a degree. In 1943, despite his pacifistic views, he
enlisted in the Army, where he was sent to Carnegie
4
Tech and the University of Tennessee to _study mechanical
engineering. He was eventually shipped overseas where
he became a prisoner of war after being captured by the
Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was assigned
to a prison camp just south of Dresden, Germany. He and
his fellow prisoners were put to work in a factory that
made a vitamin malt syrup for pregnant women.
On February 13, 1945, he became a miraculous
survivor of the Allied fire bombing of Dresden. Dresden
was supposed to be an open city, one highly unlikely to
be attacked, because of its lack of military importance.
An estimated 130 , ·000 people died during the bombing and
in the firestorrn that followed. Vonnegut survived by
staying in an undergro1,1nd meat storage area beneath a
slaughterhouse. He heard the bombs dropping but ironi-
5
cally, as a prisoner, he was protected from the inferno.
When his group did venture out again they found the
results of the largest massacre in European history.
In Vonnegut's words:
We were living in a slaughterhouse, in a nice new cement-block hog barn. They put bunks and straw mattresses in the barn, and we went to work every morning as contract labor in a malt syrup factory. The syrup was for pregnant women. The damned sirens would go off and we'd hear some other city getting it - whurnp a whurnp a whurnpa whurnp. We never expected to get it. There were very few air raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories. Then a siren went off - it was February 13, 1945 - and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we carne up the city was gone.9
Not only was he a witness to this massacre, but Vonnegut,
by virtue of being a prisoner of war, was forced to
participate in the aftermath.
Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who'd simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A
fire storm is an amazing thing. It doesn't occur in nature. It's fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there
6
isn't a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large open areas in the city which weren't filled with rubble. The Germans · got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. 130,000 corpses were hidden underground. It was a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt.lO
Much of Vonnegut's attitude toward life and death can be
traced to the Dresden experience.
After the war, he enrolled in the University of
Chicago and began the study of anthropology, where he
was taught that "there was absolutely no difference
between anybody." 11 In 1947, when his master's thesis
was rejected "because it was too simple and looked like
12 too much fun," he moved to Schenectady, New York, to
become a public relations man for the General Electric
Company. He was also a volunteer fireman in the nearby
village of Alplaus, where he lived. Because of his
modest background in science, he worked in the industrial
research laboratory where he saw firsthand the types of
scientists he was later to write so strongly about.
After three years at General Electric, he quit to
devote full time to his writing. Vonnegut's first novel,
Player Piano, was published in 1952, and he has published
nine more during the last three decades.
7
Vonnegut's first marriage, to Jane Cox, lasted
twenty-five years. Together they raised six children;
three of their own and three of his sister Alice's.
Alice and her husband, James Adams, died within two days
of one another. She died of cancer at the age of forty;
he died in the crash of a commuter train bound for New
York City.
His first marriage ended partly because Jane and
his two daughters became born-again Christians.
' Toward the end of our marriage, it
was mainly religion in a broad sense that Jane and I fought about. She came to devote herself more and more to making alliances with the supernatural in her need to increase her strength and understanding -- and happiness and health. This was painful to me. She could not understand and cannot understand why that should have been painful to me, or why it should be any of my business at all.l3
Vonnegut's personal life, then, has had its share
of twists and turns, conflicts, and absurdities. From
his foundation of idealism, pacifism and atheism come
novels full of skepticism, grotesque wars, and cynical
new religions. What happened to him was best summed up
by Vonnegut himself during a speech to the Bennington
College graduating class of 1970.
"I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have
taken a color photograph of God Almighty -and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine.
"Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.
"What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima. We killed everybody there. And I had just come home from being a prisoner of war in Dresden, which I'd seen burned to the ground. And the world was just then learning how ghastly the German extermination camps had been. So I had a heart-to-heart talk with myself.
"Hey, Corporal Vonnegut," I said to myself, "maybe you were wrong to be an optimist. Maybe pessimism is the thing."l4
Vonnegut reached adulthood without salvaging a
foundation on which to base his life. His beliefs were
shattered in a short period of time. He was raised to
believe in the glories of democracy, free enterprise,
science, order, education and truth. After the war, he
had to reconsider these beliefs and prepare for the
future.
The Dresden experience symbolized the absurdities
8
of a world gone mad. It provided a large portion of the
themes for many of his novels, especially through
Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut, a German-American
pacifist, enlisted in the army to fight against Germans.
He was captured by the enemy and then miraculously,
ironically, survived the destruction of Dresden, an act
perpetrated by his adopted country. The act was even
9
more senseless because Dresden was not a military city.
In an introduction to Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut
views the event in an even more absurd way:
Atrocities celebrate meaningless, surely. • • • The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is.
One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.lS
As noted before, when Vonnegut returned home he
studied anthropology, not science, and then ironically
became a public relations man for a research laboratory,
probably not unlike the ones which hatched the ideas of
the Hiroshima bomb. When he quit his job at General
Electric, he began to write the novels that portrayed
the universe he lived in, not the one he was born into.
Vonnegut set out to examine the absurd world he
lived in and attempted to build order and sense into it.
His previous set of values had to be conditioned to
fit the possibility that all the old ideas were totally
useless. As John Somer puts it:
He returned with determination to rebuild his dream, a dream that would enable him to go on living as a pacifist, as a humane and compassionate man. But this time the dream would have to be large enough to encompass Dresden and its horrible realities.
It would have to be founded on the world as he now saw it, insane and brutal, but it would have to transcend its foundation and point the way to his father's brave new world.l6
10
Vonnegut's novels are stuffed with events and ideas
easily traced to his personal life. They show a writer
experimenting with ideas, many of them confusing, con-
flicting, and absurd. Vonnegut, the atheist, experiments
with religion in The Sirens of Titan and eat's Cradle.
Messiah figures are found throughout his works: Paul
Proteus in Player Piano; Winston Niles Rurnfoord in The
Sirens of Titan; Bokonon, in Cat's Cradle; Eliob
Rosewater in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Kilgore
Trout in several novels.
Senseless mass kill~ngs occur with alarming fre-
quency. In Player Piano, the revolution is crushed; in
The Sirens of Titan, the Martian army is destroyed; in
eat's Cradle, the world is ended by ice-nine; in God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Eliot envisions the fire that
destroyed Dresden; in Slaughterhouse Five, the Dresden
massacre is dealt with directly; in Slapstick, the
"green death" destroys millions of people; and in
Jaiibird, fourteen people are killed during the worst
labor dispute in history.
An understanding and yet a distrust of science and
technology are also major themes in Player Piano,
11
eat's Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, and Slapstick, and
they play a significant role in others. Scientists are
portrayed in a negative but not in an evil way.
Dr. Felix Hoenikker, in eat's Cradle, is a man totally
uninterested in people, and a man who helped create the
atomic bomb, and ice-nine which ends the world. He
also experiments innocently with turtles. Vonnegut can
see benefits of science but only if juxtaposed against
its evils. John Somer traces this feeling back to
Dresden.
His early heritage was reinforced when he studied chemistry in college, where he was taught to believe in the predictability of the material universe. He was brought up to believe that science and technology would ennoble man and advance civilization, but in the war Vonnegut discovered that the opposite could also be true. He watched science and technology debase man, saw it magnify his brutishness, not his compassion. He watched science and technology destroy, in fourteen hours, a thousand-year-old city, a symbol of man's cooperation, a monument to his nobility.l7
The absurdity of the scientific destruction of
Dresden and all its implications almost always are
present in Vonnegut's works. Critics agree that he has
created an absurd, meaningless universe in which people
are victims of its indiscriminate madness. David H.
Goldsmith calls Vonnegut's universe "a hostile and
ridiculous one in which a sense of humor and eye for the
12
18 absurd are necessary." Jerome Klinkowi tz writes that
Kurt Vonnegut "has crafted for _his readers an exceed
ingly mad world." 19 Otto Friedrich agrees, saying that
"Vonnegut's universe, which may or may not resemble our . 20
own, is largely governed by the laws of madness." The
first law is that "life in this technological time and
1 • • • 1 • l.e 1121 p ace 1s 1ncreas1ng y mean1ng ss. Peter J. Reed
concludes that "the world according to Vonnegut appears
absurd and life within it generally seems ultimately
meaningless. Space, time travel, war, and madness be-
come appropriate vehicles for describing such a condi-
t. ..22 1on.
Vonnegut's novels pile absurdity on top of absurd-
ity. Player Piano, his first and most conventional
novel, involves a world where the average man has been
totally replaced by machines, a world where a Ph.D. is
the minimal requirement for any job requiring more skill
than barbering. In The Sirens of Titan, the entire
·history of the planet Earth exists simply to deliver a
spare part to a disabled space ship from Tralfamadore.
In Mother Night, Howard W. Campbell, a schizophrenic . -
American spy/Nazi propagandist, at one point receives a
note from Adolph Eichmann, the murderer of millions of
Jews during World War II, "Do you think a literary
agent is absolutely necessary?" The answer: "For book
club and movie sales in the United States of America,
absolutely.'' 23
13
Campbell's supporters after the war include
Reverend Doctor Lionel Jason David Jones, D.D.S., D.D.,
who published a pro-Nazi newsletter, The White Christian
Minuteman; the Black Fuehrer of Harlem, Robert Sterling
Wilson, who was imprisoned in 1942 as a Japanese spy;
a seventy-three-year-old, drunken, unfrocked Paulist
Father named Patrick Keeley who chaplained a Detroit gun
club interested in hunting Jews; and August Krapptauer,
former Vice-Bundesfuehrer of the German-American Bund
who believes that "the Pope was a Jew and that the. Jews
held a fifteen million dollar mortgage on the Vatican." 24
Vonnegut's next novel, eat's Cradle, involves an
improbable, shipwrecked, black man named Lionel Boyd
Johnson who starts a religion based on lies on the
worthless island of San Lorenzo. Also included are an
unfeeling scientist, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, who, among
other things, absent-mindedly tips his wife.after break
fast, and invents ice-nine, a molecular alteration of
water which ultimately kills him and destroys the earth.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater traces the scandalous
financial history of an American fortune as it is managed
by a fat, drunken, messiah figure who organizes fly
hunts and prescribes aspirin and wine for the totally
useless people of his hometown of Rosewater, Indiana.
14
Slaughterhous-e Five. includes the time-tripping
messiah figure of Billy Pilgrim who travels into the
future and back into the past. Among other things., he
is mated with a "blue movie" starlet in a zoo on, once ·
again, the planet Tralfamadore.
Breakfast of Champions is largely a list of absurd
story lines for novels written by Kilgore Trout, the
prolific science fiction writer, whose books are found
only in pornographic bookstores. Vonnegut himself
enters this novel and announces to Kilgore Trout that
he was Trout's creator and that he was freeing him
because he had no more uses for him. Trout chases
Vonnegut down the street begging to be made young again.
Slapstick is the story of Wilbur and Eliza Swain,
brother and sister neanderthaloids born to normal
parents, who fake being retarded in order to preserve
their happiness. Wilbur eventually becomes President
of the United States and implements a plan to create
large, happy, extended families by giving government
issue middle names to all citizens.
Jailbird is the story of Starbuck, who was jailed
for his part in the political absurdity known as
"Watergate." Walter tells the story which, among other
oddities, deals with a New York City shopping bag lady
who is really the controlling force of the RAMJAC
15
Corporation, a large organization that owns most of the
country.
Almost anything can and does happen in the universe
as Vonnegut sees it. Jerome Klinkowitz points out that
Vonnegut's universe is not simply meaningless and
absurd, but that:
He surpasses Terry Southern by striking all limits from human absurdity: destruction by nuclear fission is for Vonnegut the most passe of apocalypses. Moreover, he teases us with a Mod Yoknapatawpha County; "Frank Wirtanen" and "Bernard B. O'Hare" (originally characters in his third novel, Mother Night) and others appear again and again, always (as befits the modern county) in a maddening metamorphosis of roles.25
Klinkowitz adds that "Vonnegut's is a spiraling, madly
rebounding absurdity. . . . Absurdity to the third
26 power rules the world." He offers the following
examples from Mother Night:
Arndt Klopfer, official Reich Chancellery portrait photographer, turns up in Mexico City as the country's greatest brewer. But not for lo~g; he's really a Russian spy. We are teased with the knowledge that one of the world's greatest admirers of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is Paul Joseph Goebbels. But the greatest admirer, literally brought to tears by the document, is Adolph Hitler. Triple turn: the most gleeful fan of Campbell's antiSemitic broadcasts is Franklin Delano Roosevelt.27
Campbell's wartime buddy Heinz Schildknecht is not merely comically robbed of his dearer-than-life motorcycle; on the second turn Heinz shows up as a gardener for
a rich expatriate Nazi in Ireland, courting fame as an authority on the death of Hitler • • . and on the third is revealed to have been a secret Israeli agent all the time, gathering evidence for Campbell's prosecution. 28
16
An absurd universe is not ruled by logic or any set
system. In such a place there can be no absolutes, only
a constant conflict between illusion and reality with no
apparent winner. The universe is pluralistic. The
definition of chrono-synchastic infundibula from The
Sirens of Titan symbolizes Vonnegut's system of multiple,
conflicting truths. It is from A Child's Cyclopedia of
Wonders and Things to Do:
CHRONO-SYNCLASTIC INFUNDIBULA -- Just imagine that your Daddy is the smartest man who ever lived on Earth, and he knows everything there is to find out, and he is exactly right about everything, and he can prove he is right about everything. Now imagine another little child on some nice world a million light years away, and that little child's Daddy is the smartest man who ever lived on that nice world so far away. And he is just as smart and just as right as your Daddy is. Both Daddies are smart, and both Daddies are right.
Only if they ever met each other they would get into a terrible argument, because they wouldn't agree on anything. Now, you can say that your Daddy is right and the other little child's Daddy is wrong, but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.
The reason both Daddies can be right and still get into terrible fights is because there are so many different ways of being right. There are places in the Universe, though, where each Daddy could finally catch
17
on to what the other Daddy was talking about. These places are where all the different kinds of truths fit together as nicely as the parts of your Daddy's solar watch. We call these places chrono-synclastic infundibula.29
Chrono-synclastic infundibula is a reality in Vonnegut's
world. In other words, there are no absolutes because
there are many realities. It appears, then, that the
conflict between illusion and reality in Vonnegut's
novels cannot be resolved.
Because there is no way to be ab~olutely right,
there must be no way to be absolutely wrong. Therefore,
there can be no absolute heroes or villains, good or
evil. Vonnegut's father confronted him with that
information: "'You know, you never wrote a story with
a villain in it.' I told -him that was one of the
things I learned after the war." 30 Vonnegut ~as refer-
ring to his anthropology studies at the University of
Chicago. This attitude results in an equalizing of
events no matter how apparently significant or insig-
nificant they may be. For example, the Tralfamadorian
response to death, the refrain "So it goes" is used with
equal weight following the death of the novel, the death
of the bubbles in champagne, and the death of 130,000
people in Dresden.
18
Kurt Vonnegut is not an intellectual philosopher
with a balanced system of values and meanings. He iden-
tifies the absurdity and meaninglessness of the universe.
Many of his characters are keenly aware that something
incomprehensible is going on and that they have no hope
of understanding what it is. Yet they struggle on,
making determined efforts to adapt. Peter Reed feels
that Vonnegut's "greatest service in terms of a workaday
philosophy may be his insistence on facing the anxieties
of the inexplicable and the incongruous." 31
Vonnegut's characters face a world where the old
theories of time, order, reality, and predictability are
examined and rejected. However, he does not replace the
old theories with new ones. To Vonnegut, the universe
as he defines it can simply be recognized, not under-
stood. Karen and Charles Wood, in discussing The Sirens
of Titan, suggest a conclusion which applies to
Vonnegut's other works as well.
We must wipe out the irrelevant answers, and at this point, we have no new ones. The school of the absurd, the styles of black humor and pop art, and even the existence of our empty technocratic society, all combine to demonstrate abundantly that on a real plane, man at this point on his way toward his ultimate destiny doesn't know what that destiny is. Herein lies the idea of The Sirens of Titan - and herein lies seed of Kurt Vonnegut's importance in modern literature. For a relativistic world, he sees no need for absolute answers. Irresolution
19
needs no resolution, but should rather b~ appreciated as the ultimate reality. This penetration of man's bewilderment adds a dimension to Vonnegut's work which is missing in most of our previous literature.32
Many of Vonnegut's central characters do directly
face the absurdity of the world, attempting to improve
the human condition. Two comments by Vonnegut concern-
ing the movies of Laurel and Hardy and a cartoon by
Shel Silverstein best summarize what many of his char-
acters are up to in their respective novels. Vonnegut
was a big fan of Laurel and Hardy because of their
attitude toward life.
The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that they did their best with every test.
They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies, and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account.33
Sot too, must Vonnegut's protagonists bargain in
good faith with their destinies. Often their destinies
place them in situations of incredible hopelessness.
Yet, "There are no Lear-like heroic ragings against the
blind indifference of this universe." 34 Vonnegut's
characters keep going.
One of my favorite cartoons - I think it was by Shel Silverstein - shows a couple of guys chained to an eighteen foot cell wall, hung by their wrists, and their ankles are chained, too. Above them is a tiny· barred window that a mouse couldn't crawl
20
through. And one of the guys is saying to the other, 'Now here's my plan ... •35
The following chapters will analyze the efforts
and results of the efforts of three of Vonnegut's central
protagonists to improve their world: Winston Niles
Rurnfoord in The Sirens of Titan; Lionel Boyd Johnson,
Bokonon, in eat's Cradle; and Eliot Rosewater, in God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. All three are participants
in, possibly designers of, systems through which they
attempt to improve the world. Against the backdrop of
Vonnegut's universe, the three represent futile messiah
figures doomed to ultimate failure, but whose efforts at
benevolence, although cynical at times, are sincere.
The three are selected because they show Vonnegut
experimenting with benevolence on a diminishing scale,
from the cosmic scale of Rurnfoord to the more localized
scale of Bokonon, to the one-to-one scale of Eliot
Rosewater. Analysis goes from the symbols and showman-
ship of Rurnfoord, through the cynical ritualism of
Bokonon, to the practical adaptations of Rosewater. That
the endeavors of all three messiah figures are futile,
even destructive, reflects Vonnegut's conviction that
human life is essentially absurd. Vonnegut's ideas are
so contradictory and ambiguous that they can not be
abstracted from the novels and formulated into a logical
21
system. They can best be examined in fairly detailed
summaries of the narratives that embody them. The
analysis of these three efforts shows that the most
positive results are achieved on a simple human level
and that the most negative results occur on the collec
tive and institutional level.
ENDNOTES
1 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Breakfast of Champions (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1973), p. 5.
2 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Palm Sunday (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1981), p. 21.
3 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons (New York: Dell Publishing Company, ·Inc., 1965), p. 104.
4 Vonnegut, Wampeters, p. 240.
5 Vonnegut, Wampeters, pp. 274-275.
6 Vonnegut, Wampeters, p. 274.
7 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Jailbird (New York: Delacourt Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1979), p. xi.
8 Vonnegut, Palm Sunda:t, 61-62. pp.
9 Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 89. p.
10 Vonnegut, Palm Sunda:t, 90. p.
11 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse Five (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1969), p. 8.
12 Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, p. 312.
13 Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 192. p.
14 Vonnegut, WamEeters, 161-162. pp.
15 Vonnegut, Palm Sunday, 302. p.
16 John Somer, "Geodesic Vonnegut; ·or, If Buckminster Fuller Wrote Novels," in The Vonnegut Statement, ed. Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer (New York: Delacorte/ Seymour Lawrence, 1973), p. 223.
17 John Somer, "Geodesic Vonnegut," The Vonnegut Statement, p. 222.
22
23
18 David Goldsmith, Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist ' of Fire and Ice, Popular Writers Series Pamphlet #2 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), p. 1. ·
19 Jerome Klinkowitz, "Mother Night, Cat's Cradle and the Crimes of Our Time," in The Vonnegut Statement, p. 15 8.
20 Otto Friedrich, "The Novel: Very Warm for May," Time Magazine, May 1973, p. 66.
21 Friedrich, "The Nove," p. 66.
22 Peter J. Reed, Writers for the Seventies - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Wanner Books, Inc., 1972), p. 206.
23 Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1981), p. 125.
24 Vonnegut, Mother Night, p. 63.
25 Klinkowitz and Somer, Statement, 158-159. pp.
26 Klinkowitz and Somer, Statement, 161. p.
27 .Kl' k . l.n OWl.tZ and Somer, Statement, p. 162.
28 Klinkowitz and Somer, Statement, 161. p.
29 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1959), p. 14.
30 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, p. 8.
31 Reed, Vonnegut, pp. 205-206.
32 Charles and Karen Wood, "The Vonnegut Effect: Science Fiction and Beyond," in The Vonnegut Statement, p. 149.
33 Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick (New York: Delacorte/ Seymour Lawrence, 1966), p. 1.
34 Reed, Vonnegut, p. 209.
35 Vonnegut, Wampeters, p. 258.
CHAPTER II
OUTER SPACE
In The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut examines man's
quest for answers to the basic questions concerning the
meaning and purpose of the human experience. He does
so by describing the exploration of the universe through
the science fiction mode which allows him to use space
travel, creatures from other planets, and time warps.
The entire solar system is the setting of the novel.
The action takes place in the future, in the "nightmare
ages, falling roughly, give or take a few years, be~ween
. . 1 the Second World War and the Third Great Depression."
The quest involved is a general and a collective
one, involving all mankind - not individuals. The
story takes place before the time that man discovered
"how to find the meaning of life within himself" (p. 7).
"Gimcrack" (p. 7) religions were commonplace.
The narrator tells us that "Mankind, ignorant of
the truths that lie within every human being, looked
outward - pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to
learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge
of all creation, and what creation was all about" (p. 7).
24
25
The universe Vonnegut creates in The Sirens of Titan is
a most hostile and negative one. Mankind, t~rough space
exploration, finds "a nightmare of meaninglessness with-
out end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness,
were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless
death" ( p. 7) .
It is in such a universe that Winston Niles Rumfoord
built his own private spaceship for exploration purposes.
Prior to this, official government attempts at space
exploration had all been abandoned, after the discovery
of chrono-synclastic infundibula, a natural phenomenon
which made further space exploration too unpredictable.
The discovery "said to mankind in effect: 'what makes
you think you're going anywhere?'" (p. 11).
Winston Niles Rumfoord was part of what the nar-
rator calls the "one true Ainerican class."
The class was a true one because its limits had been clearly defined for at least two centuries - clearly defined for anyone with an eye for definitions. From Rumfoord's small class had come a tenth of America's presidents, a quarter of its explorers, a third of its Eastern Seaboard governors, a half of its full-time ornithologists, three-quarters of its great yachtsmen, and virtually all of its underwriters of the deficits of grand opera (p. 26).
The class was characterized by tight knit family in-
breeding in order to produce proper children. Love had
nothing to do with it. "Rumfoord and his wife, for
26
instance, were third counsins and detested each other"
(p. 27). Money was no problem. He and his wife,
Beatrice, lived on the huge Rumfoord family estate in
Newport, Rhode Island. They were childless; Beatrice
was a virgin.
Rumfoord had what the narrator called "pure cour
age;" (p. 28) he was absolutely fearless. His private
spaceship cost him fifty-eight million dollars to build.
When he took off he was headed to Mars with his loyal
dog, Kazak, at his side. En route, he opted to fly his
craft straight into chrono-synclastic infundibula, even
though the effects of such an action were unknown. The
results, as Rumfoord explained, were that "it came to
me in a flash that everything that ever has been always
will be, and everything that ever will be always has
Been" (pp. 25-26). Rumfoord physically became catapulted
back and forth across the universe, "as wave phenomena -
apparently pulsing in a distorted spiral with its origin
in the sun and its terminal in Betelgeuse" {p. 26). He
appeared on Earth only every fifty-nine days when Earth
would intercept the wave.
For nine years Rumfoord materialized at the Rumfoord
estate. Beatrice saw him only once; the shock was too
much for her. Earl Moncrief, the servant, normally
received him. On one visit, Rumfoord asked that
27
Malachi Constant, the richest man in America, be present
at the next materialization. The arrangements were made,
and Constant came.
During the meeting with Constant, Rumfoord made a
specific series of predictions, telling him that he
would breed with Beatrice on Mars, produce a son, Chrono,
then travel to Mercury, Earth, and finally Titan, a moon.
of Saturn. Rumfoord explained that he had also told
Beatrice a little of her future but that she did not
want to hear it all. "I tell you, Mr. Constant,
it's a thankless job, telling people it's a hard, hard
universe they're in."
Malachi Constant immediately announced that he
was not going. Almost ignoring Constant's refusal,
Rumfoord told him to pay particular attention to Chrono's
good-luck piece that will be found on Mars. Giving his
enlightened view of the universe to Constant, he said,
Things fly this way and that, my boy . with or without messages. It's chaos, and no mistake, for•the universe is just being born. It's the great becoming that makes the light and the heat and the motion, and bangs you from hither to yon (p. 39).
He closed by saying, with a grin, "See you on Titan"
(p. 39).
At that point, Malachi Constant "became the bottom-
most point in a whirlpool of fate" (p. 42) . A short
28
biography of Constant is necessary to fully develop the
symbol that he becomes for Rurnfoord. Malachi Constant
was the illegitimate son of Noel Constant, a traveling
cookware salesman from New Bedford, Massachusetts, and
the grandson of an anarchist loan shark, named Sylvanus.
One evening, in room 223 of the Wilburhampton Hotel,
Neal created a simple scheme which, when followed,
netted him millions of dollars. Noel used the Gideon
Bible as an investment guide and began speculating in
the stock market. His scheme was as follows:
He took the Gideon Bible that was in his room, and he started with the first sentence in Genesis.
The first sentence in Genesis, as some people may know, is: 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.' Noel Constant wrote the sentence in capital letters, put periods between the letters, divided the letters into pairs, rendering the sentence as follows: "I.N., T.H., E.B., E.G., I.N., N.I., N.G., G.O., D.C. I R.E. I A.T. I E.D.' T.H. I E.H.' E.A.' V.E., N.A., N.D., T.H., E.E., A.R., T.H."
And then he looked for corporations with those initials, and bought shares in them (pp. 73-74).
Noel became extremely wealthy, but continued to
live in the modest room at the Wilburhampton. Every
ten days he bought the services of Florence Whitehill,
a chambermaid, who eventually became pregnant with
Malachi. Noel hired his only other visitor to room 223,
a former Internal Revenue Agent and graduate of the
Harvard Business School, named Ransom K. Fern, to
manage his money. Fern showed him how to increase his
fortune even more by "doing violence to the spirit of
thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so
much as a city ordinance" (p. 78).
On Malachi Constant's twenty-first birthday, he
29
met his father for the first and only time, at the
Wilburharnpton. Noel explained the Biblical system to
Malachi and gave him two other pieces of advice: "Don't
touch the principal" (p. 82) and ''Keep the liquor bottle
out of the bedroom" (p. 81). Five years later Noel died
and Malachi picked up where his father had left off.
Malachi Constant did not lead the quiet life that
his father had. Malachi moved to Hollywood, California,
where his fortune grew to three billion dollars. He
was a "notorious rakehell" (p. 11). Constant did every
thing "aggressively, loudly, childishly, wastefully -
making himself and mankind look bad" (p. 29). This was
the Malachi Constant that Winston Niles Rurnfoord had
summoned to hear the future.
Constant and Beatrice did everything possible to
keep Rumfoord's detailed predictions from corning true;
they were unsuccessful. Both Constant and Beatrice were
wiped out during a major collapse of the stock market.
30
During one materialization, Beatrice begged her husband
to do something. "You could have spared me what I'm
going through now" (p. 55), she told him. Rumfoord
replied,
I just wish we could go out to the Chronosynclastic infundibula together. . . . All I can say is that my failure to warn you about the stock market crash is as much a part of the natural order as Halley's Comet - and it makes an equal amount of sense to rage against either one" (p. 55).
Later, he compared Beatrice's life to a roller coaster
ride:
I can see the whole roller coaster you're on, and sure--r could give you a piece of paper that would tell you about every dip and turn, warn you about every bogeyman that was going to pop out at you in the tunnels. But that wouldn't help you any ... because you'd still have to take the roller coaster ride. . . . I didn't design -the roller coaster, I don't own it, and I don't say who rides and who doesn't. I just know what it's shaped like" (pp. 57-58).
Then Rumfoord tells a comforting lie to Beatrice about
how she will board the spaceship to Mars. The narrator
tells us that is one of the few instances of Rumfoord
telling lies to anyone.
Malachi Constant was told of a letter to read by
Ransom K. Fern after fantastically bad luck wiped out
the Constant fortune. As Fern tendered his resignation,
he asked for a phone call if the letter "seems to cast
31
the vaguest light on what life might be about" (p. 85).
Constant found the letter under his father's pillow at
the Wilburhampton Hotel. It was a letter from his dead
father, designed to be read only if something terrible
happened to the family fortune. The letter produced an
insight into Noel Constant not revealed by his humble .
lifestyle. Noel was extremely curious about his wealth.
It looked as though somebody or something wanted me to own the whole planet even though I was as good as dead. I kept my eye open ~or some kind of signal that would tell me what it was all about but there wasn't any signal. I just went on getting richer and richer" (p. 91).
What Noel wanted to know was "Is there anything special
going on or is it all just as crazy as it looked to
me?" (p~ 90).
Noel speculated that maybe Malachi was what his
wealth was all about and hoped that Malachi would be
able to make sense of it all. "I tell you even a half-
dead man hates to be alive and not be able to see any
sense to it" (p. 91), he wrote. Noel's only advice to
Malachi was to listen to any crazy propositions that
came along; his only conclusion was "that some people are
lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of
the Harvard Business School can say why" (p. 92).
Malachi Constant accepted his father's advice and
when approached by two agents from Mars in the lobby of
32
the Wilburhampton, _he enlisted in the Martian army.
Beatl:'ice was tr.icke"d into entering the spaceship by the
same Martian agents. En route to Mars, another of
Rumfoord's predictions came true. After a drinking
party, Malachi raped Beatrice as his answer to a chal
lenge from other Martian army recruits to make love to
the most "beautiful woman ever taken to Mars" (p. 160)!
The remainder of the novel focuses on two events,
the Martian invasion of earth and the establishment of
the church of God, the Utterly Indifferent. Winston
Niles Rumfoord appears to be the organizer of both. The
narrator tells us that he was "the mastermind behind the
Martian suicide" (p. 172).
Since Rumfoord was able to see into the future, it
was _easy for him to make money through investment op
portunities. Earl Moncrief, his butler, managed the
Martian investment program for Rumfoord and kept the
money in Swiss bank accounts. Greedy manufacturers
made the necessary components for the Martian military
without asking any questions. They were interested only
in profit.
The technology required to develop the Martian
military hardware came from Rumfoord's friend Salo, a
machine from the planet Tralfamadore, temporarily
stranded in the solar system. Salo also provided the
33
energy source for the Martian invasion, UWTB, -the uni-
versal will to become.
The Martian army consisted entirely of earthlings
who had their minds cleaned out once they reached Mars
so that they would be at the total mercy of whoever
controlled the antennas implanted in their heads. Con-
stant became known as Unk once his mind was cleaned out.
Periodically, minds needed to be cleaned out a second
time. · Dr. Morris N. Castle, the Director of Mental
Health on Mars, explained the problem:
We make the center of a man's memory virtually as sterile as a scalpel fresh from the autoclave. But grains of new experience begin to accumulate on it at once. These grains in turn form themselves into patterns not necessarily favorable to military thinking. Unfortunately, this problem of recontamination seems insoluble {p. 106).
Constant (Unk) made one friend on Mars, Stony
Stevenson, whom Martian army superiors forced him to
stran~le to death. Constant (Unk) did not realize that
it was his friend because his brain had recently been
cleaned out.
Because Rumfoord appeared on Mars only every one
hundred and eleven days, he needed a lot of help with
preparing the invasion of Earth. The antennas were a
very effective device, as was the brain cleansing.
Rumfoord needed control of the Martian army because he
intended for it to lose the war with Earth. Rumfoord
"wished to change the world for the better by means of
the great and unforgettable suicide of Mars" (p. 174).
The Martian army succeeded in losing the war. In his
book, Pocket History of Mars, Rumfoord describes ·the
results:
The war between Mars and Earth lasted 67 Earthling days.
Every nation on Earth was attacked. Earth's casualties were 461 killed,
223 wounded, none captured, and 216 missing. Mar's casualties were 149,315 killed,
446 wounded, none captured, and 46,634 · missing.
At the end of the war, every Martian had been killed, wounded, captured, or been found missing.
Not a soul was left on Mars. Not a building was left standing on Mars.
The last waves of Martians to attack Earth were, to the horror of the Earthlings who pot-shotted them, old men, women, and a few little children (p. 166).
He wanted the people of Earth to see not a glorious
34
victory over an attacking army, but "a tawdry butchering
of virtually unarmed saints, saints who had waged l
feeble war on Earth in order to weld the people of that
planet into a monolithic Brotherhood of Man" (p. 175).
Constant and Beatrice and Chrono did not die in the war.
As predicted, Constant traveled to Mercury with his
superior, Boaz, and spent two years exploring. Beatrice
and Chrono crashed in the Amazon Rain Forest and sur-
vived by guile.
35
On Earth, after the war ended, "Shame, as Rurnfoord
had planned it, began to set in" (p. 75). His general
plan was revealed in his Pocket History of Mars. He
was to create a new religion following the shameful
destruction of the pitiful Martian army.
He started the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent
with the motto, "Take Care of the People and God
Almighty Will Take Care of Himself" (p. 186). Its two
main philosophies were that "Puny man can do nothing at
all to help or please God Almighty and luck is not the
hand of God" (p. 180). His new religion was announced
to the people of Earth during his materialization im
mediately after the war. Rumfoord announced that his
religion was plausible because he, as its leader, could
make predictions that would absolutely come true. He
made fifty of them to prove it; naturally, they even
tually all carne true. In declaring himself as the
leader of his new church, Rurnfoord did not declare him
self God. He was simply someone whose prophesies carne
true.
Rurnfoord's religion did become popular on Earth.
Followers eagerly awaited the return of the Space
Wanderer, the most elaborate of the fifty promised
miracles. The real identity of the Sapce Wanderer would
be announced by Rurnfoord himself once the wanderer ap
peared.
36
The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent was char
acterized by an elaborate system of handicaps, designed
to make everyone on Earth equal. Beautiful people were
forced to wear uncomplimentary clothes and slouch.
Those with good eyesight wore glasses that lessened it.
Intelligent people married those who only read comic
books. People carried bags of lead shot on various
parts of their bodies; the stronger carried more weight
than the weaker. "The weakest and meekest were bound to
admit, at last, that the race of life was fair" (p. 221).
It was an artificial, practical system of equality.
Malachi Constant was the symbol of evil in Rumfoord's
new religion. He became a symbol because he "used the
fantastic fruits of his fantastic good luck to finance an
unending demonstration that man is a pig" (p. 251) and
because "he did nothing to deserve his billions and he
did nothing unselfish or imaginative with his billions"
(p. 251). The worst sin a member of Rumfoord's church
could do was to believe "that luck, good or bad, is the
hand of God" (p. 252). Rumfoord called luck, "the way
the wind whirls and the dust settles eons after God has
passed by" (p. 252). Malachi Constant had once believed
that his good luck was because "somebody up there likes
me" (p. 20). Romfoord's religion was designed to dis
prove that theory.
37
As prophesied, the Space Wanderer final l y arrived
and announced to the waiting crowd that "I was a victim
of a series of accidents as are we all" (p. 229). The
elated congregation went wild as he said that, dancing
and cheering. The . bewildered Space Wanderer was honored
in many towns with parades and flowers. But tension
existed, as the crowds knew Rumfoord had a "penchant for
realism. When Rumfoord staged a passion play, he used
nothing but real people in real hells" (p. 239).
Rumfoord then identified the honored Space Wanderer
as really being Malachi Constant, the symbol of evil to
all. The crowd reacted accordingly. Rumfoord explained
to the Space Wanderer, "It's the contrast they like.
The order of events doesn't make any different to them.
It's the thrill of the fast reverse" (p. 247). As part
of the ritual of the Church of God the Utterly Indiffer
ent, Rumfoord was to exile Constant from Earth with
Beatrice and Chrono, who were also exposed. Beatrice
was damned "for refusing to risk her imagined purity in
living as we damn Malachi Constant for wallowing in
filth" (p. 261). Beatrice and Chrono were exiled with
out regrets. Malachi was given one last chance to avoid
the exile. When asked to name one good thing about his
life~ Malachi said that he once had a friend named Stony
Stevenson. Rumfoord then reduced Malachi to tears by
telling him that he, Malachi, had strangled his only
friend to death.
38
In the grand finale of Rumfoord's production, the
three were formally exiled from Earth and Rumfoord de
materialized. All four wound up living on Titan, one
of Saturn's nine moons. Also living on Titan was Salo,
the stranded Tralfamadorian who had assisted Rumfoord
with the Martian suicide.
Salo's mission when he left Tralfamadore was to
carry a secret message across the universe, as far as he
could trav~l. A breakdown of his spaceship temorarily
delayed him in his mission, and he sent word back to
Tralfamadore that a replacement part was needed. While
he waited for an answer from home, Salo developed hob
bies on Titan, one of which was to sculpt statues out of
Titanic peat. Another was to watch the activities on
Earth. Tralfamadore somehow controlled the activities
on Earth and used various structures to deliver messages
to Salo. For example, Stonehenge was really a message:
"replacement part being rushed with all possible speed"
(p. 271), and the Great Wall of China mean, "Be patient.
We haven't forgotten you" (p. 271). Other similar
messages were found in the Golden House of the Roman
Emperor Nero, the Moscow Kremlin, and the Palace of the
League of Nations. Bitterly, Rumfoord demanded that
39
Salo tell him at least the contents of the message that
controlled Earth's activities for two hundred thousand
years. Salo, being a machine, could not disobey orders
and refused. Rumfoord then explained to Halachi
Constant, Beatrice, and Chrono, the real meaning of all
of their trials:
"There is something you should know about life in the Solar System. Being chrono~ synclastic infundibulated, I've known about it all along. It is, none the less, such a sickening thing that I've thought about it as little as possible.
"The sickening thing is this: Everything that every Earthling has ever done has been warped by creatures on a planet one-hundred- . and-fifty thousand light years away. The name of the planet is Tralfamadore.
"How the Tralfamadorians controlled us, I don't know. But I know to what end they controlled us. They controlled us in such a way as to make us deliver a replacement part to a Tralfamadorian mes-senger who was grounded right here in Titan.
" ... You young man ... you have it - in your pocket. In your pocket is the culmin
ation of all Earthling history. In your pocket is the mysterious something that every Earthling was trying so desparately, so earnestly, so gropingly, so exhaustingly to produce and deliver. . . . The thing you call your good-luck piece, ... is the replacement part for which the Tralfamadorian messenger has been waiting so long" (pp. 296-297).
Rumfoord bitterly commented that Tralfamadore
"reached into the Solar System and picked me up and used
me like a handy-dandy potato peeler" (p. 285). Just
before being catapulted out of the Solar System, Rumfoord
expressed hope that Tralfamadore would now leave Earth
40
alone, and allow them to "be free to develop and follow
their own inclinations, as they have not been free to do
for thousands of years" (p. 298). Rumfoord then "dis
appeared with a pft" (p. 298).
Sale, having second thoughts, rushed back to
Rumfoord's home to prove his friendship by revealing the
secret message. When he found Rumfoord gone, he was
crushed, but he read the message himself. The message
revealed was a single dot which in Tralfamadorian meant
simply, "Greetings" (p. 301). Sale then dismantled him
self, committing suicide.
Chrono adjusted well to life on Titan, eventually
leaving home to live in freedom with the Titanic blue
birds, "the noblest, most beautiful creatures in sight"
(p. 306). He was able to say at the end of the novel,
"Thank you, Mother and Father, for the gift of life" -
(p. 312) .
Beatrice also adjusted well, although she did
spend her days writing a book called The True Purpose of
Life in the Solar System, a book that was to reject
Rumfoord's statements about Sale's plight being the
entire purpose of life on Earth. She was not bitter
about being used. "The worst thing that could ~ossibly
happen to anybody . . . would be to not be used for any
thing by anybody" (p. 310). Eventually she thanked
41
Constant for using her, "even though I didn't want to be
used by anybody" (p. 311). Beatrice died peacefully and
was buried on Titan.
Constant spent his time on Titan trying to reas
semble Salo, tidying up after his son, and comforting
Beatrice when necessary. He was not bitter but resigned.
Eventually he succeeded in reconstructing Salo, who
thanked him for doing so. He told Salo that he missed
Beatrice and that they haq fallen in love before her
death. It · took them an Earthling year to "realize that
a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it,
is to love whoever is around to be loved" (p. 313).
Salo decided to continue his mission and agreed
that he would drop Constant off on Earth on his way.
Consta~t wanted to be dropped off in Indianapolis,
Indiana, "the first place in the United States of America
where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian"
(p. 315). Salo delivered Constant to a snowy bus stop
bench and hypnotized him so t~at the last few seconds of
his life would be pleasant. Constant died on the bench
under the illusion that his only friend, Stony Stevenson,
was picking him up in a spaceship, ready to take him to
Paradise, where Beatrice was waiting for him.
Salo then continued his journey declaring that,
"anybody who has traveled this far on a fool's errand
42
. . . has no choice but to uphold the honor of fools by
completing the errand" (p. 313).
The Sirens of Titan shows Vonnegut experimenting
with collective answers to mankind's condition in the
universe. Winston Niles Rumfoord and his plans come to
symbolize the pluralism, chaos, and absurdity of the
universe that he lives in. Through Rumfoord, Vonnegut
explores and rejects the use of war and religion as the
answer to man's plight.
Rumfoord was the commander of a pitiful Martian
army whose "whole purpose was to destroy itself in
uniting the people of Earth" (p. 204). The failed inva
sion of Earth was part of Rumfoord's plan to "change
the world for the better." He was also the creator of a
new religion, The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent,
that would soothe the shame that Earthlings would feel
at the war's end. Although his ends seemed sincere, his
means were unacceptable. His attempt to make the results
of a ridiculous war and of a ludicrous religion, answers
to mankind's problems, ultimately failed.
In Rumfoord's Pocket History of Mars, he wrote that
"any man who would change the World in a significant way
must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed
other people's blood, and a plausible new religion"
(p. 174). He added, "Enough of these fizzles of
leadership, in which millions die for nothing or less"
(p. 174). Rumfoord failed to change the world despite
the use of all three.
Although the Martian army succeeded in losing the
war, Rumfoord misrepresented the true nature of the
43
event. Rumfoord declared to the people of Earth during
a materialization that the "saints were Earthlings like
yourselves. They went to Mars, mounted their hopless
attacks, and died gladly, in order that Earthlings might
at last become one people - joyful, fraternal, and proud"
(p. 180). This was all a lie.
The Martian army was made up of Earthling rejects
who were kidnapped or tricked into going to Mars. Most
of them had no idea what was going on because their
minds had been cleansed. They fully intended to win the
war with Earth, and had no feelings at all for the
brotherhood of mankind. Their war chant was:
Terror, grief, and desolationHut, tup, thrup, fo! Come to every Earthling nation: Hut, tup, thrup, fo! Earth eat fire! Earth wear chains! Hut, tup, thrup, fo! Break Earth's spirit, spill Earth's brains: Hut, tup, trup, fo! Scream, Tup, trup, fo! Bleed! Tup, thrup, fo! Die! Tup, thrup fo! Doooooooooommmmmmmmm (p. 135).
44
Rumfoord's war represents Vonnegut's satire on the
folly of seeking meanings in the senseless slaughter of
human beings. The war with Mars ends with 149,315 dead
Martians, a number comparable to the approximately
130,000 killed at Dresden. Rumfoord tried to make posi-
tive symbols out of the atrocities of war and failed.
In Vonnegut's universe, people do not make positive
changes as symbols of a collective venture. When they
cease to be people, they no longer contribute at all.
When Rumfoord states that the Martian army was the first
army to die in a good cause, he lied even to himself
because he had seen the real purpose through his time
travels, to assist in the delivery of a spare part to
Sale's spaceship. Vonnegut leaves no doubt about his
feelings for war; his description of Earth's reaction to
the attack seems possible, in light of the Dresden
massacre:
The official estimate of the n~mber of thermo-nuclear anti-aircraft rockets fired at the Martian armada is 2,542,670. The actual number of rockets fired is of little interest when one can express the power of that barrage in another way, in a way that happens to be both poetry and truth. The barrage turned the skies of Earth from heavenly blue to a hellish burnt orange. The skies remained burnt orange for a year and a half (p. 169).
Rumfoord's "reasons" for the war are no more acceptable
than any actual war. All wars have people who supposedly
45
die in a good cause with purpose and honor. Vonnegut,
through Rurnfoord, rejects the idea. The only consola-
tion of the Martian war was expressed by Beatrice.
"We're all used up. We'll never be of use to him
(Rurnfoord) again" (p. 242).
Rurnfoord's attempt to do good while killing one-
hundred and fifty thousand misled Martian soldiers is
contrasted by the actions of Boaz, Unk's (Constant's)
partner on Mercury. Boaz befriended the "harmoniums,"
the cave-dwelling, gracious, creatures found in the
caves of Mercury. They were diamond-shaped, a foot high
and translucent. They were designed so that it was
impossible for them to harm one another. They became
addicted to the vibrations of the tape recorded music
that Boaz played for them. When Boaz decided not to
return to Earth with Unk, he explained that
"I found me a place where I can do good without doing any harm, and I can see I'm doing good, and them I'm doing good for they know it, and they love me, Unk, as best they can. I found me a home
"And when I die down here some day . . . I'm going to be able to say to myself, 'Boaz -you made millions of lives worth living. Ain't nobody ever spread more joy. You ain't got an enemy in the Universe'" (pp. 213-214).
But in Vonnegut' s uni vers.e, there is no way to do good
without doing any harm. Boaz accidentally left the
recording on too long, killing thousands of harmoniums,
creatures incapable of harming themselves.
46
Vonnegut's second experiment involves the possible
uses of religion as a collective answer to the human
condition. Winston Niles Rurnfoord created the Church of
God the Utterly Indifferent based on the foundation that
luck was not the hand of God. Rumfoord even created a
revision of the Bible to supplement his teachings. Be
lievers were taught that what happens in this world is a
series of accidents and not the hand of God. The reli
gion, like the war, was based on lies. Rumfoord knew
that the events of this world were not accidents but were
part of the Tralfamadorian plan to assist Salo.
As with the Martian war, Rurnfoord used people as
symbols: "He wasn't interested in the Space Wanderer as
a person - hardly looked at him. Neither did he seem
very excited about the Space Wanderer's wife and child"
(p. 246). He combined his showmanship with the religion,
using Constant, Beatrice, and Chrono as the symbols.
Constant became the symbol of evil who went into volun
tary exile, taking all his mistaken ideas, misused wealth,
and disgusting pastimes with him. Rurnfoord tells
Constant, "You are going to do this voluntarily, Mr.
Constant, so that the Church of God the Utterly Indiffer
ent can have a drama of dignified self-sacrifice to
remember and ponder through all time" (p. 255).
47
The religion was embraced by the people of the
E~rth, but what they embraced were false symbols and
ideas and an absurd attempt to equalize everyone. There
is no evidence that the people were changed for the
better by it. It was simply one more "gimcrack" reli-
gion. David H. Goldsmith concludes that:
Rumfoord's religion is, finally, spurious; the three people most intimately involved with its ception, Malachi, his wife Beatrice and son Chrono, are not believers. Beatrice spends her last days on Titan writing 'a book called The True Purpose of Life in the Solar System,' refuting Rumfoord's claims, and Chrono flits about the satellite making miniature Stonehenges in true primitive fashion. Malachi, manipulated as he was by Rumfoord, least of all believes the tenets of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. More important than all this, of course, is the fact that Rumfoord discovers he is an unwitting agent of Tralfamadore, making any success he might have had meaningless in the larger scheme of things. All that he has actually accomplished is the death of thousands of people.2
Conflicts between free will, time, and reality,
make Rumfoord a typical Vonnegut "messiah" figure. Al-
though Rumfoord seems to enjoy the manipulation of
Constant and Beatrice, the preparation for the invasion
of Earth, and the elaborate staging of the rituals and
prophesies of his new religion, it is entirely possible
that he was simply making the best of a bad situation.
If it is true that "everything that ever has been always
will be, and everything that ever will be always has
48
been" (p. 26), then Rumfoord is just playing his as-
signed role in a pre-designed orderly univers~. However,
when he tells Constant that the Universe is just being
born and that all is chaos, the opposite becomes pos-
sible. Further, if Rumfoord has no free will, his
statement that he was trying "to do good for my native
Earth while serving the irresistible wishes of
Tralfamadore" (p. 298), becomes an empty one. If
Tralfamadore's wishes were irresistible, then resistance
is impossible. If Rumfoord has no free will, then his
bitter statement to Beatrice that "it will be revealed
to you just how ruthlessly I've been used, and by whom,
and to what disgustingly paltry ends" (p. 64) makes him
a sympathetic character. · In her book, The True Purpose
of Life in the Solar System, Beatrice rejects the pos-
sibility that no free will exists and apparently con-
demns Rumfoord's efforts:
I would be the last to deny . . . that the forces of Tralfamadore have had something to do with the affairs of Earth. However, those persons who have served the interests of Tralfamadore have served them in such highly personalized ways that Tralfamadore can be said to have had practically nothing to do with the case (p. 309).
Peter J. Reed writes that,
Rumfoord is in a rum situation condemned to apparently eternal floating in space, materializing now on this planet, now on that, and subject to nausea and
partial atomization whenever there are sunspots. His knowledge of the future proves the most burdensome of all, since it is the most complete. He knows he will be denied even the comfort of a normal human death on Earth, that his wife will be seduced by a man he despises (though that seems to trouble him little) and that that man will father the son he cannot and find at the end the love he · is forever denied. This knowledge and the glimpses we have of the child "Skip" may tend to soften our judgement.
49
Yet we see enough of his early life, particularly through Beatrice's eyes, to suspect that his post-chrono-synclastic infundibulum condition only exaggerates what he always has been. His impotence remains as a physical manifestation of his incapacity to love.
Perhaps Rumfoord is entitled to feel the most terribly manipulated of all the characters, not just for what he has ·been condemned to live through and foreknow, but also for what he must do to others.3
By ignoring what he knows about the reason for all
his activity, Rumfoord reveals a human side. · When
Rumfoord surprised Salo by telling him that he knew
about Tralfamadore's entire plan, Salo asked why he had
not mentioned it before. Rumfoord replied that,
"Nobody likes to think he's being used. . . . He'll put off admitting it to himself until the last possible instant. . . . It may surprise you to learn that I take a certain pride, no matter how foolishly mistaken that pride may be, in making my own decisions for my own reasons" (p. 285).
The novel does fulfill the prediction of outward
exploration. There are the empty heroics of both the
Martian army and Earth's military might; the low comedy
of the absurdity surrounding both the war and the new
religion; and the pointless death of some 149,000
Martian invaders.
50
Rumfoord's efforts are a sincere but cynical re
sponse to his station in life. Regardless of whether or
not events are predestined, the collective attempts to
improve mankind ~ail. War and religion fail when they
use people as symbols of a larger meaning. Vonnegut's
only positive characterizations occur on an individual
basis. Ironically, it is the three people used so
dramatically and cruelly who find a degree of content
ment: Beatrice, Constant, and Chrono. All three learn
to love and appreciate life and people on an individual
basis. It is significant that this transition does not
take place on Earth, where the absurd lies of the Church
of God the Utterly Indifferent were being practiced.
Even Salo, a machine, learns to love and becomes almost
human in the process. His love of Rumfoord, even after
a series of stinging insults from him, causes Salo to
reject his true nature, violate his instructions, and
open the secret message.
Overall, The Sirens of Titan represents Vonnegut at
his most pessimistic, showing two hundred thousand years
of human experience as existing solely to assist the
movement of the message, "Greetings" from one side of the
cosmos to the other.
•
ENDNOTES
1 Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1959), . p. 8. Hereinafter cited in the text.
2 Goldsmith, Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and Ice, pp. 2-3.
3 Reed, Vonnegut, pp. 72-73 •
51
CHAPTER III
SAN LORENZO
In eat's Cradle Vonnegut experiments with a more
realistic, practical method of making improvements in
the absurdities of the human condition. In The Sirens
of Titan he used the entire universe for a setting and
examined the possibility of a meaning to life on a
cosmic scale. Rumfoord's failed attempts at benevo-
lence included uniting all of the people on Earth
against a Martian invasion, followed by a uniting of the
people under the cynical beliefs of one religion. In
Cat's Cradle, Lionel Boyd Johnson, alias Bokonon, is
a messiah figure who attempts to improve the hopeless
lives of the citizens of the worthless island of San
Lorenzo, first on a conventional basis, then after fail-
ure, by inventing a religion, Bokononism, based on lies . •
~at's Cradle is narrated by an autho r named John
who is gathering data for a book called The Day the
World Ended, the story of August 6, 1945, the day the
atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. In his research,
he uncovers as much as he can about the late Dr. Felix
Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. Much
52
of the information he gets is from information from or
about Hoenikker's three children: Angela, Franklin,
and Newton, the youngest and also a midget.
53
Through this investigation he uncovers an unlikely
project that Dr. Hoenikker worked on, one in which the
melting point of water would be 114°. The project was
suggested to Dr. Hoenikker by a Marine general who was
tired of having his troops bogged down in the mud. Al
though John is assured by Dr. Hoenikker's boss that no
such chemical exist~, it continues to be on John's mind.
The chemical would be called ice-nine ~f it existed.
Coincidentally, John is assigned to a magazine
story on the island of San Lorenzo. En route there by
air, he discovers that Angela and Newton Hoenikker are
also on board. One reason for the magazine story is
that the San Lorenzo Minister of Science and Progress is
Franklin Hoenikker, the third child. John has also
fallen in love with Mona Aamons Monzano whose picture he
saw in a newspaper story about San Lorenzo. Mona is the
adopted daughter of Papa Monzano, the president of
San Lorenzo.
On the flight he borrows a book entitled San
Lorenzo: The Land, The History, The People by Philip
Castle, the son of Julian Castle, the administrator of
the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle, an
54
Albert Schweitzer type of operation. From the book
John learns that San Lorenzo is twenty miles wide by
fifty miles long and has four hundred and fifty thousand
people.
The island was once totally controlled by Philip
Castle's great grandfather, who managed Castle Sugar.
Castle Sugar never showed a profit despite paying nothing
for labor. The island had been controlled by almost
anybody who claimed control since 1519, when Cortez
landed there. The Spanish, the French, the Danish, the
Dutch, the English, and then the Spanish again found the
island to be utterly worthless. Also, through Castle's
book, John is introduced to Lionel Boyd Johnson, Bokonon,
the wanted holy man who roams the island practicing the
outlawed religion, Bokononisrn.
Lionel Boyd Johnson was born in 189} on the British
island of Tobago. He was a Negro and Anglican. He was
born into a wealthy family whose fortune carne from find
ing the buried treasure of Blackbeard, the pirate.
Johnson was a good student, educated in Anglican schools.
At the age of twenty, he sailed alone from Tobago to
London to study economics and political science. During
World War I, he enlisted and fought with honor in the
British Infantry. He was gassed, hospitalized, and then
discharged.
55
En route horne in his sailboat, he was taken
prisoner by a German submarine that was then captured by
a British destroyer. The destroyer foundered and wound
up in the Cap Verde Islands. After spending eight
months there, Johnson hitched a ride on a fishing boat
carrying illegal irnrnigran~s to the United States. The
vessel landed at Newport, Rhode Island, where he found
work as a carpenter on the Rurnfoord estate. At that
time, Johnson began to feel "that something was trying
to get him somewhere for some reason." 1
Johnson then accepted an invitation to sail around
the world with Remington Rurnfoord IV on a steam yacht,
the "Scheherazade. '' About halfway around the world,
Johnson became the only survivor of a boating accident
in Bombay. For two years he stay~d in India and was
jailed as a follower of Mohandas K. Gandhi.
He returned to Tobago, built another sailboat, and
sailed the Carribbean "still seeking the storm that
would drive him ashore on what was unmistakably his
destiny" (p. 77) .
In 1922, in Haiti he teamed up with "a brilliant,
self-educated idealistic marine deserter named Earl
McCabe" (p. 77) who offered Johnson five hundred stolen
dollars for transportation to Miami. A gale forced the
boat off course and it sank just off the coast of San
Lorenzo.
56
Johnson and McCabe found "nothing but diseases"
(p. 87) when they landed on the island. At the time
Castle Sugar owned San Lorenzo. "Th~ form of government
was anarchy, save in limited situations wherein Castle
Sugar wanted to own something or get something done"
(p. 88). So, when Johnson and McCabe decided to take
control of the island, there was no resistance.
Johnson and McCabe tried to make a utopia out of
the poverty of San Lorenzo. McCabe overhauled the
economy and laws; Johnson created a new religion. The
economic reform failed miserably; the people were not
any better off than before. "The truth was that life
was as short and brutish and mean as ever" (p. 119).
For example, when McCabe redistributed the wealth
equally, each person got "between six and seven dollars"
(p. 194).
So the religion of Johnson became the real hope.
The new religion was called "Bokononism," derived from
the name "Johnson" as pronounced in the dialect of San
Lorenzo. The primary concern of Bokononism was that
truth had to become the enemy of the people because
"the truth was so terrible" (p. 118). Johnson became
Bokonon and made it his business to "provide the people
with better and better lies" (p. 118). Bokonon and
Bokononism were outlawed by McCabe to give the
57
"religious life of the people more zest" (p. 118). So
persons practicing Bokononism were outlawed and punish-
able by being hung out for death on the "hook," a giant
fishhook.
Life on San Lorenzo became a drama, a "work of
art" (p. 119). The inhabitants "were all employed full-
time in a play they understood, that any human being
anywhere could understand and applaud" (p. 119). Un-
fortunately, the play changed the playful attitude of
Johnson and McCabe.
The drama was very tough on the souls of the two main actors, McCabe and Bokonon. As young men, they had been pretty much alike, had both been half-angel, half-pirate. • . But the drama demanded that the pirate half of Bokonon and the angel half of McCabe wither away. And McCabe and Bokonon paid a terrible price in Agony for the happiness of the people - McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint. They both became, for all practical purposes, insane (pp. 119-12 0) .
McCabe never went crazy enough that he would
actually capture Bokonon. He and Johnson both realized
that the system required dynamic tension, "a priceless
equilibrium between good and evil" (p. 74), to survive.
Johnson's theory about dynamic tension was based on the
muscle-building techniques of Charles Atlas.
Eventually, McCabe committed suicide, the result of
the "unrelieved villainy" (p. 126) that his life had
become. Papa Monzano, McCabe's major-domo, became
president.
Bokononism continued to thrive as Papa Monzano
played his role as McCabe had done. Bokonon continued
his role by creating a bible of sorts, The Books of
Bokonon,and writing psalm-like poetry called calypsos.
The first sentence of Bokonon reads, "All of the true
things I am about to tell you are shameless lies"
(p. 14) •
58
So John lands on _the island of San Lorenzo with at
least some warning of what he will find there. He is
welcomed to the island by Papa Monzano and observes the
beautiful Mona practicing "Boko-Maru" with a pilot.
"Boko-Maru" is an outlawed Bokonist ritual of two
people rubbing the soles (souls) of their feet together.
It was supposed to make the people feel better.
eat's Cradle moves rapidly at this point through
episodic action. Papa , Monzano collapses and his death
is certain. John has dealings with all of
Dr. Hoenikker's strange children. Angela, who plays her
clarinet, is described as "a case of schizophrenia or
demonic possession" (p. 124), and Newton exhibits his
painting skills by drawing a eat's cradle. The eat's
cradle is an illusion just as the sirens of Titan were.
Newton comments to John,
No wonder kids grow up crazy. A eat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of x's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those x's. . . . No damn cat, and no damn cradle (p. 114).
59
Franklin Hoenikker provides the big surprise by offering
him the presidency· of San Lorenzo after Papa dies, along
with the spoils of the office, marriage to the beautiful
Mona. No one else can take the job because it is against
their religion. John learns that everyone on the island
is a secret Bokononist. He also agrees to accept the
job.
As the novel progresses, John feels a strong push
toward Bokononism himself, through events and through
reading the Books of Bokonon. When he completes the act
of Boko-Maru with Mona he is even moved to write a poem
himself. When John demands that Mona never perform
Boko-Maru with anyone but him, she explains that
"Bokonon tells us it is very wrong not to love everyone
exactly the same" (p. 141), and she refuses to comply.
From Franklin he learns that the only thing sacred to
Bokononists is man. John is also present to witness
the last rites of the Bokononist faith as they are given
to Pap~ Manzano, supposedly the active hunter of the
evil Bokonon.
After his last rites, Papa commits suicide by
swallowing the contents of a cylinder that hangs from
60
his neck. Before he dies, he demands that the people
should kill Bokonon. This time he means it. Rejecting
the idea that the truth should be hidden, he says,
"Bokonon teaches the people lies and lies and lies.
Kill him and teach people the truth" (p. 147). The
contents of the cylinder instantly freeze Papa solid
and John knows immediately that ice-nine really does
exist.
John calls together the three Hoenikker children,
who all have little cylinders of ice-nine themselves.
John tells them that he knows what ice-nine is and
"tries to alarm them about ice-nine's being a means to
ending life on earth" (p. 161). He learns that
Dr. Hoenikker accidentally died of ice-nine at his
cottage on Cape Cod and that the children had distributed
the remainder among themselves.
Before Papa Monzano and the remainder of the ice
ni~e can be burned, a series of accidents causes Papa
to slide into the sea, thereby freezing the entire
world. John and Mona are among a handful of survivors.
Death is everywhere. John and Mona take a walk
and discover a pile of thousands upon thousands of ice
nine suicides. Next to the dead is a penciled note from
Bokonon telling them that God is through using them and
61
that · "they should have the good manners to die" (p. 182) .
Mona then laughingly commits suicide by ice-nine.
During the next six months John and his little band
manage to survive. Food is plentiful as there are tons
of perfectly frozen foods just waiting to be thawed and
eaten. John also writes this book.
Hazel Crosby, one of the survivors, spends her time
making a flag that she feels John wants to plant on top
of Mount McCabe, the highest point on the island. Her
husband, M. Lowe, takes over all the cooking chores and
makes little jokes. "Don't shoot the cook. He's doing
the best he can" (p. 185). Franklin spends his time
studying ants who have achieved a creative way to sur-
vive. Newton returns to painting.
John finally comes to the realization that somehow
he is exactly where he is supposed to be, that forces
have compelled him to face exactly the circumstances
that . he now faces. He tells Newton:
I blurted out my dream of climbing Mount McCabe with some magnificent symbol and planting it there. I took my hands from the wheel for an instant to show him how empty of symbols they were. 'But what in hell would the right symbol be, Newt? What in hell would it be?' I grabbed the wheel again. 'Here it is, the end of the · world; and here I am, almost the very last man; and there it is, the highest mountain in sight. I know now what my karass has been up to, Newt. It's been working night and day for maybe half a million years to
62
get me up that mount~in.' I wagged my head and nearly wept. 'But what, for the love of God is supposed t~ be in my hands?' (p. 190).
John experiences the frustration of not knowing what to
do next, of not knowing what is coming.
Finally, John meets Bokonon, who is sitting along
the side of the road with pencil and paper in hand.
John asks Bokonon what his thoughts are. Bokonon re-
plies that he has just written the final sentence of the
Books of Bokonon. In it he says that if he were a
younger man he would write a history of "human stupid-
ity" (p. 191), climb Mt. McCabe, take ice-nine, and
thumb his nose at "you know who" (p. 191). That sen-
tence ends the novel.
Like Winston Niles Rumfoord, Bokonon is concerned
about making man feel better about the world in which he
lives. Unlike Rumfoord, Bokonon does not have knowledge
of the future to guide, comfort, or frighten him.
Bokonon is a more human character, whose cynical and
playful religion provides some temporary relief for the
miserable.
Originally, the new religion was to be coupled with
government and economic reform. However, when these
reforms failed to help, an additional pressure mounted
on the creators of Bok~nonism to produce. Forced to take
their religion seriously, both Bokonon and McCabe assumed
63
the impossible roles of pure evil and pure goodness.
Both were driven insane by the task. Vonnegut again
explores the possibility of doing good without doing
evil, as he did with Boaz in the caves of Mercury. Like
Boaz, Bokonon and McCabe fail.
Bokonon never intends his religion to provide mean
ingful answers to the question of purpose and the
meaningfullness of life. The ambiguities of the first
sentence of the Books of Bokonon set the playful tone:
"All of the true things I am about to tell you are
shameless lies" {p. 14). Life is so bad on San Lorenzo
that the religion is designed around being a diversion
from having to face the awful truth. Organized hunts
for Bokonon by the unemployed become rituals where the
holy man always miraculously escapes. The real irony in
all this is that Bokononism came to have real followers;
the religion became a serious set of values for the
people of San Lorenzo. The people of San Lorenzo em-
braced the sweet lies of Bokononism, finding that it
really did relieve some of the misery. Even John dis-
covers that Boko-Maru with Mona provides a satisfying
unity. The dying at Julian Castle's House of Hope and
Mercy in the Jungle receive the last rites of the
Bokononist church. Castle also proclaims that people who
practice Boko-Maru "really do feel better about each
64
other and the world." He further declared that, "I
couldn't possibly run that hospital of mine if it
weren't for aspirin and Boko-maru" (p. 117).
Making truth the enemy of the people parallels the
theme of science as stated by Felix Hoenikker's boss,
Dr. Breed: "The more truth we have to work with the
richer we become" (p. 36). Vonnegut again shows science
in an extremely negative light. Dr. Felix Hoenikker
was involved in pure research, that is, research without
any goal attached to it. Such research provided the
knowledge for the making of the atom bomb and of ice-
nine. Science, as personified in Dr. Hoenikker, is
evil because it does not treat people as people. As
Newton wrote of his father: "People weren't his spe-
cialty. Science values truth over people" (p. 21).
When Bokonon developed real believers, Bokonon had
to really become the messiah figure he was designed to
be. Born out of the failure of government reforms,
Bokononism, based on lies, had to create better and
better lies. Vonnegut expresses his feelings on the
function of religion in an interview in Playboy
Magazine:
PLAYBOY: ~Do you think organized religion can make anybody happier?"
VONNEGUT: "Oh, of course. Lots of comforting lies are told in church - not enough, but
. 65
some. I wish preachers would lie more convincingly about how honest and brotherly we should be. I've never heard a sermon on the subject of gentleness or restraint; I've never heard a minister say it was wrong to kill. No preacher ever speaks out against cheating in business. There are fi~ty-two Sundays in a year, and somehow none of these subjects comes up."2
In eat's Cradle, as in The Sirens of Titan, we see
Vonnegut, the atheist, exploring the potential of reli-
gion as a source of spiritual good. Both religions
fail.
Both Bokononism and the Church of God the Utterly
Indifferent deal with an absentee God, a cynical form of
Deism. From the Books of Bokonon, we learn that
"In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic lonliness.
"And God said, 'Let us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.' And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as man sat up, look around, and spoke. Man blinked. 'What is the purpose of all this?' he asked politely.
"'Everything must have a purpose?' asked God.
"'Certainly,' said man. "'Then I leave it to you
one for all this,' said God. away" (pp. 214-215).
to think of And He went
Glen Meeter points out that Malachi Constant
"recognizes that God, far from liking him, as he once
supposed, is indifferent to him." 3 It is on this con-
fession that Winston Niles Rumfoord attempts to build
66
his church, "The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent."
In eat's Cradle, the human need for a sense of purpose
and meaning finds an outlet through the belief in one's
membership in a karass, "a team that does God's will"
(p. 14). Both religions have an element of fatalism
that something is in charge of events that occur as they
are meant to occur. In The Sirens of Titan, the peopl~
have Rumfoord and his prophecies to turn to. Rumfoord
can, at least on the surface, enjoy his role as a
prophet. Bokonon does not enjoy the luxury of knowing
the future, even as meaningless as it is in The Sirens
of Titan. As the people of San Lorenzo become more and
more dependent on Bokonon' s teachings-, he begins to
feel used, victimized by a God that would place that
responsibility on him. Papa Monzano apparently realizes
that the role of Bokonon is a brutal and meaningless
one. On his death bed he asks John to find Bokonon and
"tell him I am sorry I did not kill him" (p. 147), and
declares, ironically, tBat "Science is magic that works"
(p. 147).
Ultimately, the truth cannot be hidden. Ice-nine
freezes the entire world and the elusive Bokonon is
cornered by thousands of followers who demand to know
what to do next. The following note shows Bokonon as a
victim of his own invented religion. The fact that it
67
openly consists of lies makes no difference to true
believers facing a universe of horrible realities. They
want answers. Bokonon writes the note in pencil and
leaves it next to thousands of dead Bokononists. It
reads:
To whom it may concern: These people around you are almost all of the survivors on San Lorenzo of the winds that followed the freezing of the sea. These people made a captive of the spurious holy man named Bokonon. They brought him here, placed him at their center, and commanded him to tell them exactly what God Almighty was up to and what they should now do. The mountebank told them that God was surely trying to kill· them, possibly because He was through with them, and that they should have the good manners to die. This, as you can s€e, they did (p. 182).
Bokonon has to face "the cruel paradox of Bononon-
ist thought, the heartbreaking necessity of lying about
reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying
about it" (p. 189).
At the end, Bokonon has run out of lies. His
efforts to improve the people have failed. Through the
collective efforts of science's search for truth, the
world is frozen, and thousands have died by their own
hands at his suggestion. He sits by the side of the
road composing the last sentence of the Books of Bokonon
and of the novel. It reads:
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would
· climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who- (p. 191).
68
Whether Bokonon commits suicide or not is not impor-
tant. What is important is that his false religion has
failed and that he has contempt for "You Know Who" who
had him create it.
When McCabe and Bokonon landed on San Lorenzo, they
were people who sincerely wanted to help the poverty-
stricken natives. ~ihen they quit being people to become
symbols, they were doomed to failure_. The failure came
because the people did not want human frustrations from
Bokonon, they wanted answers, and he said all along he
had no answers. In the fourteenth Book of Bokonon, he
answers the question "What can a thoughtful man hope for
on earth, given the experience of the past million
years?" (p. 164) with one word: "Nothing" (p. 164).
While the natives receive some comfort from Bokononism,
Bokonon never did. He could not hide the truth from
himself.
Although Bokononism fails, there are some positive
aspects of it that are successful, if only on a limited
basis. Remember that Vonnegut's universe allows for only
69
limited success and no · absolutes. As in The Sirens of
Titan, the successes are on a small human scale. Boko-
maru, of course, is practiced by all the islanders on a
one-to-one basis and is far superior to sex as a human
form of communication. It is practiced by anyone with
anyone ~lse and provides temporary good feelings for
the participants.
Bokonon defines a "karass" as a team of people who
"do God's will without ever discovering what they are
doing" (p. 11) , and a "duprass" 1as a karass composed of
only two people. Claire and Harlick Minton are a
duprass who are totally immersed in love of one another.
They do not become bitter despite the loss of their son
at war. During the celebration of the Hundred Martyrs
to Democracy, Harlick Minton makes perhaps the most
ironically positive statement in the book. He says that
the celebration is a proper one providing, "that we, the
celebrants, are working consciously and tirelessly to
reduce the stupidity and viciousness of ourselves and of
all mankind" (p. 170).
The most positive aspect of Bokononism concerns
the belief that only man is sacred. Peter Reed says:
Everything else in Bokononism might be foma (lies), but the sanctity of man rings true. It is, after all, the central concern which leads Bokonon to formulate his religion of foma. And that same concern for
man remains the one constant at the center of the deceptions and dichotomies and verbal diversions of eat's Cradle.4
70 '
H. Lowe CroSQY and his wife, Hazel, show man adap-
ting to his environment under the worst of circumstances.
Although there are no outward statements of love as
with Malachi Constant, Beatrice and Chrono, the Cro~bys
do their best to "bargain in good faith with their
destinies." Living at the edge of the destruction of
life on earth, Hazel can still say happily,
"wa·i t until you see how we live. We've got all kinds of good things to eat. Whenever we want water, we just build a campfire and melt some. The Swiss Family Robinson- that's what we call ourselves" (p. 184).
She attempts to create the simple positive feeling of a
loving family.
More visible than results of love are the results
of a lack of love. Most evident are the three children
of the loveless Dr. Felix Hoeinikker. It is they who
are responsible for the distribution of ice-nine. Reed
again comments that
Refusals of love are invariably hurtful and bring damaging results. All three children suffer psychologically from their father's indifference, and all three end up buying love or a place of belonging with ice-nine. That, of course, has much to do with the final disaster. One could almost say that the world ends because a father could not show his children love.S
The following calypso of Bokonon summarizes man's
human condition:
Tiger got to hunt, Bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, "Why, why, why?" Tiger got to sleep, Bird got to land;
71
Man got to tell himself he understand (p. 124).
life:
The following calypso shows man's assigned role in
We do doodley do, doodley do, doodley do, What we must, muddily must, muddily must,
muddily must; Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
muddily do, Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust,
bodily bust (p. 178).
Through Bokononism, Vonnegut shows that in this
world even a pragmatic religion, based on comforting
lies, is doomed to failure. He is saying that eveh
though man is frustrated by the need to have absolute
answers in a pluralistic world, attempts at collective
efforts do more harm than good.
Religion for Vonnegut is a eat's Cradle, an illu-
sian in which there is "no damn cat, and no damn
cradle."
ENDNOTES
1 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Cat's Cradle (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1963), p. 76; hereafter cited in the text.
2 Vonnegut, Wampeters, p. 240.
3 Glenn Meeter, "Vonnegut's Formal and Moral Otherworldliness: eat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five," The Vonnegut Statement, ed. Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer (New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1973), p. 214.
4 Reed, Vonnegut, p. 128.
5 Reed, Vonnegut, p. 142.
72
CHAPTER IV
ROSEWATER, INDIANA
In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Vonnegut explores
the possibilities of improving the human condition
through the efforts of Eliot Rosewater, who attempts to
love the useless people of Rosewater, Indiana on a one
to-one basis. Having rejected collective and institu-
tional efforts in The Sirens of Titan and eat's Cradle,
Vonnegut turns to a simple, practical approach. Of the
three novels, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is the most
realistic; it develops the story without the trappings
of science fiction and the destruction of the world.
Eliot Rosewater's character is far more developed than
either Rumfoord's or Bokonon's, and that makes his ef-
forts more human. However, like the previous two
messiah figures, Eliot Rosewater fails in the sp~cific
goals of his mission. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is
the most positive of the three novels because, in
Vonnegut's world, people acting as people are the most
positive force around.
As always, Vonnegut provides biographical data on
his central character, but with Eliot Rosewater we learn
73
much more of the cause and effect nature of the events
of his life.
74
Eliot Rosewater was born in 1918 in Washington,
D.C., into an extremely wealthy family with a Rockefeller
and a Morgan as his antecedents. His father~ Senator
Lister Ames Rosewater, was a career politician who,
while representing Indiana, spent very little time
there. On the annual visit "home," Eliot accompanied
his father to Rosewater County, Indiana, where he was
named the mascot of the Rosewater Volunteer Fire Depart
ment. The firemen were heavy drinkers. He was raised
and educated largely on Cape Cod and in Europe. He
became an expert sailor and skier. Loomis and Harvard
and Harvard Law School provided Eliot with a sound edu
cation although he was not an excellent student. On
December 8, 1941, one day after the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, Eliot withdrew from Harvard Law School and
enlisted in the Army. He fought with distinction, earn
ing the Bronze and Silver Stars, a Soldier's Medal and a
Purple Heart, as he rose to the rank of captain.
Near the end of the war, Eliot led his platoon into
a smoke-filled clarinet factory, supposedly occupied by
German S.S. troops. He threw a hand grenade into a
window of the building, climbed through the window and
dutifully bayoneted the first German he saw. This act
75
of blind patriotism soured when Eliot realized that he
had not murdered soldiers, but firemen--two old men and
a boy of about fourteen--not unlike those he knew as a
boy. Ten minutes later, Eliot attempted to commit
suicide by lying down in front of a moving truck. The
truck stopped in time to save his life, but Eliot suf-
fered a total physical and emotional breakdown. He
became stiff as a board and would not eat or drink. He
was sent to Paris for treatment.
While recovering in Paris, he met his future wife,
Sylvia Du Vrais Zetterling, whose grandparents included
a Rothschild and a Dupont. Sylvia's father, the
greatest living cellist, adored Eliot despite the fact
that Eliot despised art.
He does it in such a way that I can't help loving him for it. What he's saying, I think, is that art has failed him, which I must admit, is a fair thing for a man who has bayoneted a fourteen-year old boy in the line of duty to say.l
For Sylvia, it was love at first sight.
Eliot and Sylvia married and returned to the States
where Eliot completed his studies at Harvard Law School,
taking a doctorate in international law.
In 1947, the Rosewater Foundation and. the Rosewater
Corporation were created in order to avoid paying even
a penny in taxes. The Foundation presidency was to be
76
handed down from generation to ' generation to the oldest
and closest heirs of Senator Rosewater. Eliot became
the first president and was encouraged to spend Founda-
tion income as he pleased. The Rosewater Corporation
managed the Foundation's capital. The two functioned
as a check and balance system. Neither could tell the
other what to do.
Eliot and Sylvia moved into a townhouse in New York
City, and for six years Eliot ran the Foundation
seriously, spending fourteen million dollars of the
Foundation's money. He funded such things as an
El Greco for Tampa, Florida, studies on cancer and mental
illness, and a report on alcoholism in San Diego. Eliot
was a heavy drinker and ironically was too drunk to read
the San Diego report when it arrived. While drinking
that day, Eliot summed up his last six years by creating
the following couplet:
Many, many good things have I bought! Many, many bad things have I fought! (p. 17).
This marked a turning point in Eliot's attitude toward
his work with the Foundation.
Two days later he disappeared for a week, making a
surprise appearance at a science fiction writer's con-
vention in Millford, Pennsylvania. In a speech, Eliot
declared, "I love you sons of bitches" (p. 18), heavily
77
praising unknown author Kilgore Trout as society's
"greatest prophet" (p. 18). Kilgore Trout was the
author of eighty-seven books, all paperback. He was
noted for his vivid imagination. He worked in a trading
stamp redemption center and his books were found mainly
in pornographic book stores. Eliot applauded the
writers for noticing what machines, wars, cities, ideas,
accidents, mistakes, etc., "do to us" (p. 18). He
spoke of his own unbelievable power to spend thousands
of dollars a day, calling it a fantasy. In order to
show how ~owerful he was, Eliot wrote everyone there a
check for $200 and admonished them, especially Kilgore
Trout, to think up better ways for wealth to be dis
tributed.
Eliot hitchhiked to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and
bought rounds of drinks for all volunteer firemen. He
was arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge. Sylvia
picked him up and took him horne.
One month later he wound up drinking and trading
clothes with firemen in Clover Lick, West Virginia,
and in New Egypt, New Jersey.
The narrator at this point tells us that "Eliot
was a flamboyantly sick man even then" (p. 23). Sylvia
just did not have the courage to take the step ~f put
ting him into treatment.
He proceeded to drive all his friends away with
sarcasm and insults. Finally, Eliot entered psycho
analysis, quit drinking, took pride in his appearance,
and supported the arts once again.
Sylvia was understandably stunned when, after one
year of treatments, the analyst declared Eliot "un
treatable" (p. 28) because of "the most massively
defended neurosis I have ever attempted to treat"
78
(p. 28). The analyst explained that Eliot chooses to
discuss American History instead of his tyrannical
father or the accidental death of his mother. Eliot
expressed "amusement" at the doctor's conclusion, say
ing, "It's a cure he doesn't understand, so he refuses
to admit it's a cure" (p. 29). That very evening E~iot
suffered another breakdown during a performance of Aida
at the Metropolitan Opera. He called to the actor
during the final suffocation scene, suggesting that
their air would last longer if they would not sing.
Sylvia led a blank, pale husband from the theatre.
On the way home from the opera, Eliot jumped from
the cab and repeated his past behavior by visiting the
Elsinore, California, Volunteer Fire Department. On
this trip there were letters and a new twist: Eliot had
taken t.~e role of Hamlet to Sylvia's Ophelia. He began
the letter, "Dear Ophelia" {p. 30). A portion of it read:
79
Maybe I flatter myself when I think that I have things in common with Hamlet, that I have an important mission, that I'm temporarily mixed up about how it should be done. Hamlet had one big edge on me. His father's ghost told him exactly what he had to do, while I'm operating without instructions. But from somewhere something is trying to tell me where to go, what to do there, and why to do it (p. 31).
The letter was signed "Love, Hamlet" (p. 32).
From Elsinore he went to Vashti, Texas, where he
spoke at the Vashti firehouse about how the government
should divide the wealth of the country equally. This
concern parallels one of the themes of his Milford
speech: redistribution of wealth. Eliot traveled to
New Vienna, Iowa, where he wrote to Sylvia that he now
knew "where I must go" (p. 32), and that he would tele-
phone her from there.
When Eliot called, he once again was Hamlet calling
his Ophelia. He told her that he was "among the rickety
sons and grandsons of the pioneers" (p. 34) near "the
promised land of Dan'l Boone, now gulched and gashed by
strip mines, some of which are owned by a charitable and
cultural foundation endowed by an interesting old American
family named Rosewater" (p. 34). As always, there was a
firehouse and some drunks. Eliot announced:
I am home. I now know that this has always been home, the Town of Rosewater, the Township of Rosewater, the County of Rosewater, the State of Indiana (p. 35).
80
He explained to Sylvia that, because of automation,
America had no use for the people of Rosewater anymore.
I'm going to love those discarded Americans even though they're useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art (p. 36).
Sylvia and Eliot took up residence in the Rosewater
mansion as Eliot began his new mission. First, he
gleefully insulted the upper class residents of nearby
Avondale by treating them rudely. Then he began throw-
ing lavish diriner parties "for morons, peasants,
starvelings and the unemployed" (p. 40). Their social
life centered around the Rosewater Volunteer Fire
Department. Eliot became a Fire Lieutenant and Sylvia
became the president of the ladies auxiliary. She also
became captain of the auxiliary's bowling team. "Five
years later Sylvia suffered a nervous collapse; burned
the firehouse down" (p. 41) .
She was admitted to Dr. Ed Brown's private mental
hospital in Indianapolis. The diagnosis: Samaritrophia, . the "hysterical indifference to the troubles of those
less fortunate than oneself" (p. 42). Samaritrophia is
characterized by a total shutdown of - ~ formerly active
conscience. The conscience shuts down after noting that
the "outside world has not been even microscopically
changed by the unselfish acts the conscience has
81
demanded" (p. 42). Dr. Brown conceded that he had seen
only one other person with the potential to contract
sarnaritrophi.a, Eliot Rosewater himself.
After treatment, Sylvia retreated to Paris; Eliot
retreated to his office, moving out of the Rosewater
mansion altogether. Eliot's office consisted of a
large attic above a lunchroom and a liquor store. The
following sign was on both this street level door and
on the window above:
ROSEWATER FOUNDATION
HOW CAN WE HELP
YOU? (p. 49)
The office was a mess, cluttered with items that
Eliot found useful in his work: canned goods; medicines;
government forms; pictures of Elizabeth Taylor, Thomas
Jefferson, Socrates, and baby animals. Also present
were Eliot's personal effects: stacks of paper cups;
cigarette butts; empty bottles of Southern Comfort; a
bowl and spoon soaking in the sink, and a box of "Tide." •
Two phones served as the nerve center of the office:
a black phone for Foundation business and a red phone
for fire calls. Eliot would activate "a doomsday bull-
horn" (p. 55) in the event of fire.
It was in this setting that Eliot conducted the
business of his life, creating his work of art. He
issued uncritical love to a host of useless clients,
offering a thoughtful ear, notarizing documents, pre
scribing aspirin and wine, organizing fly hunts, and
baptizing children. Often he provided monetary help.
82
A phone call from his father and conversation with
Sylvia brought an end to Eliot's "work of art."
Senator Rosewater called Eliot, essentially to set up a
meeting to iron out the details of Sylvia's divorce
proceedings. Eliot knew of the pending divorce, which
was mostly a medical decisi?n involving Sylvia's health.
The Senator and Eliot argued about Eliot's personal and
professional actions. The Senator feared that his son
was a communist and was hurt by the fact that Eliot
refused to love him, or even Sylvia, more than the use
less people of Rosewater County. Eliot reiterated his
view that "I think it's a heartless government that
would let one baby be born owning a big piece of the
county" (p. 87), and that "The least a government could
do, it seems to me, is to divide things up fairly among
the babies" (p. 88). Eventually a meeting was arranged
for the Marott Hotel in Indianapolis in three days.
For two days Eliot made elaborate preparations for the
meeting. He bought a new blue suit, a new shirt, and
shoes. He even bought a toothbrush, having not used one
in years.
83
· In the midst of this preparation, Senator Rosewater
arrived on a surprise visit. During the visit, he told
Eliot that Norman Mushari, a young lawyer with the firm
handling the Rosewater business, had been gathering
evidence to prove Eliot insane, thus potentially giving
the control of the Foundation to Fred Rosewater, a
distant relative in Pisquontuit, Rhode Island. The
Senator told him that it would be impossible to defend
Eliot's sanity against the backdrop of his Rosewater,
Indiana operation. Eliot did not realize that his
life-style was that peculiar.
During an argument on the nature of love, Eliot's
father accused him of ruining "the life and health of a
woman whose only fault had been to love him" (p. 160).
This realization concerning his personal destruction of
Sylvia caused Eliot to snap. For the first time when
the black telephone rang, Eliot failed to answer.
Eliot's "work of art" had ended.
As Eliot walked to the bus station, the people of
Rosewater, Indiana, sensed Eliot would not be coming
back. Eliot was oblivious to their needs as he bought
a one-way ticket to Indianapolis.
On the ride to Indianpolis, Eliot "was astonished
to see that the entire city was being consumed by a
fire storm" (p. 175). Eliot had never seen one but had
84
read a book in the office called The Bombing of Germany,
and he had dreamed about fire ;storms. The fire storm
.made the city glow and seem "holy" (p. 176). Eliot
blacked out.
When he awoke, a year had passed and he was trying
to piece together what had happene.d and what was hap
pening. He was dressed for tennis as he spoke with his
father; McAllister, his lawyer; Dr. Brown, the psychia
trist, and Kilgore Trout. Eliot did not know who Trout
was until it was explained to him. He tried his best
to pretend that he knew what was going on, but he really
had no idea. Slowly, Eliot realized that Trout had
been hired to provide some reasons for Eliot's actions
in Rosewater. Trout called it "quite possibly the most
important social experiment of our time" (p. 183) and
other complimentary things.
Throughout the conversation, Eliot tried to recall
an idea that he had on how to solve the whole problem of
proving himself sane. Finally, he remembered that if he
had a child that the Foundation money would go to his
offspring, and not to the Rhode Island Rosewaters, even
if he was insane. Fifty-six women had come forward and
accused Eliot of fathering their children. Rather than
go through with Trout's sanity defense, Eliot chose to
acknowledge all fifty-six as his.
The novel ends with Eliot proclaiming
Let their names be Rosewater from this moment on. And tell them that their father loves them, no matter what they may turn out to be. And tell them -- .
And tell them • • . to be fruitful and multiply (p. 190).
85
Eliot Rosewater is one of the most complex charac-
ters in Vonnegut's works. His actions and philosophies
are impossible to analyze with absolute certainty. As
always with Vonnegut, ambiguities and unresolvable con-
flicts exist as stumbling blocks to both the character
and the reader.
Rosewater sincerely attempts to help the useless
citizens of Rosewater, Indiana, but his reasons for
doing so expose the conflicts in himself. Like Rumfoord
and Bokonon, Eliot Rosewater feels that, somehow, his
life is being arranged by the forces of the universe.
After six years of running the Rosewater Foundation, he
begins wandering the country, seeking answers to the
reason for his life. Thinking of himsel~ as Hamlet,
Eliot eventually finds the answers. He writes to
Sylvia from Vienna, Iowa that:
I know now, .•• where I must go. I am going there with all possible speed! I will telephone from there! Perhaps I'll stay there forever. It isn't clear to me yet what I must do when I get there. But that will become clear, too, I'm sure. The scales are falling from my eyes! (p. 32).
86
In part of Rosewater's mi~d, he had no choice but to go
to Rosewater, Indiana.
Guilt can also be considered as a reason for Eliot's
unselfish attit_ude. Two events trigger the guilt
factor: his wealth and the accidental murder of three
German firemen during the war. Eliot's sealed letter
to his successor at the Foundation shows his attitude
toward his inherited, undeserved wealth. He traces the
history of the Rosewater Foundation from its birth to
the present, showing it to be vulgarization of the
American dream. He suggests that the motto of the
country shoulcl be, "Grab much too much or you'll get
nothing at all" (p. 13). Eliot's obsession with glori
fying volunteer firemen is easily traced to his tragic
murder of the three innocent volunteer firemen. Eliot _
Rosewater may be trying to relieve some guilt by acting
as he does.
Eliot's attitude toward the arts and love also
poses a problem for analysis. In his sealed letter,
Eliot tells his successor "You can safely ignore the
arts and science. They never helped anybody" (p. 15).
If the arts cannot be helpful, then Eliot must have had
some doubts when he calls the attempt to love the use
less people of Rosewater a "work of art" (p. 36) . Per
haps even then he realized his efforts were doomed to
failure.
87
Two poems by William Blake show the basic conflict
between love and reality in Eliot Rosewater and in
Vonnegut's world. One is adopted by Eliot and the other,
expressing an opposing view of love, is adopted by his
father, the Senator.
Eliot's poem gives love a benevolent innocence:
The Angel that presided o'er my birth said, "Little creature, form'd of Joy & Mirth, Go Love without the help of any Thing on Earth (p. 51).
Senator Lister Rosewater counters his son's poem
by showing the selfish side of love:
Love seeketh only Self to please, To bind another to Its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite (p. 52).
They portray Vonnegut's universe as one not con-
sistent, where one cannot do good without doing harm.
Stanley Schatt feels that Eliot "sees himself as a noble
unselfish man on a quest singlehandedly to bring love to
his 'clients,'" 2 but that in the Senator's view, "Eliot's
love is actually narcissistic and he revels in the al
most God-like devotion he evokes from the rabble." 3 The
real nature of Rosewater's love cannot be identified.
There is no reason to believe that Eliot had _high
hopes for his efforts in Rosewater. Even though he
makes a tremendous effort to help the people, he still
maintains a distance. Conflicts exist here also.
Through narration, we learn that both Eliot's and his
father's perceptions of Eliot's clients are faulty.
It was the Senator's conceit that Eliot trafficked with criminals. He was mistaken. Most of Eliot's clients weren't brave enough or clever enough for lives of crime. But Eliot, particularly when he argued with his father or bankers or his lawyers, was almost equally mistaken about who his .
88
clients were. He would argue that the people he was trying to help were the same sorts of people who, in generations past, had cleared the forests, drained the swamps, built the bridges, people whose sons formed the backbone of the infantry in time of war - and so on. The people who leaned on Eliot regularly were a lot weaker than that -and dumber, too. When it came time for their sons to go into the Armed Forces, for instance, the sons were generally rejected as being mentally, morally, and physically undesirable (pp. 55-56).
But Eliot does not have a total blind spot in deal-
ing with his clients. He does not give them promises of
a bright future. In his conversation and dealings with
Sherman Wesley Little, Eliot shows a sense of humor and
a balance that exemplify Eliot's attitude toward his
clients. After joking with Little about the Foundation
being a church or the government, Eliot explains to the
potential suicide that he would not tell him "the
89
gorgeous reasons I have discovered for going on liv-
ing" (p. 76), but that he would simply ask him "to
name the rock-bottom price you'd charge to go on living
for just one more week" (p. 76). On another occasion,
Eliot shows that at times he may not be deceived by his
clients at all when he says that Mary Moody's twins
will .be "firebugs, too, no doubt, no doubt" (p. 91).
The Moody family had a history of arson.
Eliot does not see money, but love, as the primary
gift he has to offer. As with Bokononism, the love is
often based on lies. Diana Moon Glarnpers shows that
side of Eliot's operation,
No one had ever loved her. There was no reas6n why anyone should. She was ugly, stupid, and boring (p. 56).
Diana "was a sixty-eight-year-old virgin who, by almost
anybody' s standards, was too dumb to live" (p. 56) .
Yet Eliot comforts her with lies by telling her that
many peopl~ would be upset if she were killed by light-
ning.
Eliot's use of comforting lies to help the useless
is sincere, but his treatment of his father and Sylvia
does not have the same sentimental touch. By refusing
to take equal care in loving them, Eliot appears to be
treating them worse than ·anybody else. The realization
that his time-consuming love for the residents of
90
Rosewater, Indiana, causes Sylvia to go insane, finally
forces Eliot to give up his store front operation.
Guilt, then, appears to be a factor in both the start
and the demise of Eliot's "work of art."
In Vonnegut's universe, the odds against the suc
cess of a benevolent messiah figure who wants to
improve the lives of people are tremendous. To succeed,
Eliot would need a universe where love can conquer all
and where money can be put to positive use. He would
need a universe where the true nature of people was
definable. Lacking that, Eliot's "work of art" was
destined to fail. The people of Rosewater, Indiana,
are not visibly improved when Eliot finally pulls out
for good. Some money has changed hands, but there is
no evidence that the money has made any change at all
other than to prolong the misery of existence for
Eliot's clients. On a long-term basis, Rosewater,
Indiana, was . not changed for the good by Eliot's atten-;-
tions.
Although Eliot's scheme fails, there are many posi
tive episodes. In Vonnegut's work, positive results
occur on a momentary basis and usually on a one-to-one
level. Unlike Rurnfoord and Bokonon, Eliot does not use
an elaborate system to try to improve the people of
Rosewater. Whereas the other two use organized religion
91
to manipulate and define their systems, Eliot sets up a
simple office accessible by foot or_ by phone to virtu
ally anyone. Eliot offers his sympathetic ear and
money to those who require assistance. Instead of dis
tributing help to the poor through the impersonal
formality of the Rosewater Foundation, it is decided
that, as David Goldsmith says, "This time he will spend
its money not from the top down, but from the bottom
up." 4 Eliot's actions are at their most positive when
he, for example, temporarily quiets the fears of Diana
Moon Glampers, stops the suicide of Sherman Wesley
Little, and agrees to fund Arthur Garvey Ulm's quest
for truth. The fact that the recipients of Eliot's
efforts are not changed permanently for the better does
not diminish the temporary comfort he offers. Given
Vonnegut's universe, temporary comforts are perhaps all
that are available. This makes them even more signif-
icant. Eliot's successes are the successes of one human
being trying to help another, without the disguise of
religion or patronism. Eliot's clients love him not
because of the Foundation but in spite of it. As Diana
Moon Glampers declares, "You gave up everything a man is
supposed to want just to help the little people, and the
little people know it. God bless you, Mr. Rosewater"
(p. 61).
92
Finally, like Rumfoord and Bokonon, Eliot sees
that his benevolence has negative as well as positive
consequences. This realization forces him to abandon
his "work of art" to pursue another, if not a better
way.
After a year in a mental institution, Eliot
decides to redistribute his wealth to the fifty-six
children allegedly fathered by him, in order to avoid
a sanity hearing. This final benevolent act is typical
Vonnegut because it can be interpreted many different
ways. Stanley Schatt sees three possibilities:
It is unclear whether Eliot is a saint replet~ with magic wand and Madonna's smile, a madman still recuperating in a hospital after a complete nervous breakdown, or a sane, repentant man who sees the· damage he has done his 'clients' and seeks to rectify it by one last, completely unselfish act.S
There is no evidence that by redistributing his
wealth Eliot will succeed where the Foundation has
failed. Money was never the reason for Eliot's popu-
larity in Rosewater; his uncritical love and accessibil-
ity were. By physically abandoning the people who need
him and by giving them his money, he is really passing
the burden of wealth to those even less capable of
understanding it than he. Also, by giving up the
Foundation money, he no doubt hurts his father more than
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ever before, and leaves little room for a reconcilia-
tion with Sylvia. In fact, Eliot's final act may prove
to have an exact opposite of the desired effect.
Peter J. Reed feels that "Eliot's solution - declaring
heirs children who can be proven not to be his - is, in
effect, nutty enough to substantiate the insanity
charges it was designed to thwart." 6
Eliot's scheme to help the people of Rosewater
worked as long as he was dealing one-on-one but only on
a temporary basis. His failure underscores the fact
that Vonnegut's universe does not lend itself to even
simple plans. That Eliot does not keep up the plan
longer than he did should not diminish it. He was
faced with the conflicts of unsurmountable legal prob-
lems, massive guilt, and questionable sanity. In the
end, he does what he needs to do to survive.
Eliot Rosewater is the most positive and success-
ful of the three Vonnegut messiah figures. Through
Eliot, he experiments with a simple, practical approach
to benevolent existence. John Somer feels that
He has not only been trying to enlighten his heroes to their role in a universe devoid of spiritual values, but he has been trying to def~ne the void in contemporary man's life and trying to create a symbol, a literary device that could manifest an answer to this problem. With Eliot he almost succeeded. He created a hero who understands that the universe
touches man in accidental ways, a hero who responds affirmatively to the insanity epitomized by the Dresden fire-bombing, and a hero who survives his return to the everyday world.7
Eliot survives his return to the everyday world, but
just barely: he certainly is not a conquering hero.
94
The most positive analysis of Eliot's actions comes
from Kilgore Trout~ the failed science fiction writer.
He comments
It was quite possibly the most important social experiment of our time, for it dealt on a very small scale with a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines. The problem is this: How to love people who have no use? (p. 183)
Trout considers, "that the main lesson Eliot learned is
that people can use all the uncritical love they can
get" (p. 186), and that
It's news that a man was able to give that kind of love over a long period of time. If one man can do it, perhaps others can do it, too. It means that our hatred of useless human beings and the cruelties we inflict upon them for their own good need not be parts of human nature. Thanks to the example of Eliot Rosewater, millions upon millions of people may learn to love and help whomever they see (pp. 186-187).
Perhaps ·Vonnegqt is speaking through Trout about
the hope of a positive future thanks to Eliot's efforts.
If so, it is important to examine two factors. First,
both Eliot and his father reject Trout's ideas. Eliot
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rejects them by not allowing them the publicity of a
public hearing by avoiding his sanity hearing; his
father considers Trout only a potentially great public
relations man, "a rascal who could rationalize anything"
(p. 186). Second, Trout was paid fifty thousand
dollars to come up 't'ii th a believable defense plan. In
Vonnegut's world, even if positive theories and plans
could exist, they would go unrecognized. Optimism is
accompanied by some degree of pessimism.
Eliot's conclusions may be summarized by two bits
of advice. The first one is contained in the sealed
letter to the next Foundation's president. In the
letter he advises the new president to "Be kind" (p. 15).
The second, included in Eliot's message to new born
babies, explains that, "There's only one rule that I
know of, babies
kind' " (p. 9 3) .
--· 'God damn it, you've got to be
This movement from kindness to a mixture
of hostility and kindness shows Eliot as recognizing and
understanding that the universe tontains both. Eliot,
like his work of art, is a mixture of pure Vonnegut.
Eliot may most accurately describe himself when he con
fesses to being, "a drunkard, a Utopia dreamer, a tin
horn saint, an aimless fool" (p. 14).
Although it shows moments of success, Eliot's plan
goes the way of Rumfoord's and Bokonon's, not because
96
the plan was .necessarily faulty, but because the sur
rounding universe ultimately proves hostile to any idea
designed to be consistent and kind.
ENDNOTES
1 Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1965), p. 65i hereafter cited in the text.
2 Stanley Schatt, "The World of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.," Critique 12 (1971), p. 63.
3 Schatt, The World of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.," p. 64.
4Goldsmith, Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and Ice, p. 21.
5 Schatt, "The World of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.," p. 64.
6 Reed, Vonnegut, p. 170.
7 Somer, "Geodesic Vonnegut," p. 228.
97
CONCLUSION
Three messiah figures, Winston Niles Rurnfoord,
Bokonon, and Eliot Rosewater, all attempt acts of
benevolence in Vonnegut's absurd world. Because of the
pluralistic nature of the universe, failure of their
systems is guaranteed; their efforts are futile. The
Sirens of Titan shows the meaninglessness of life when
viewed on a cosmic scale. eat's Cradle offers the
failed religion of Bokononism as practiced in the small
island of San Lorenzo. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
exposes the folly of a one-man operation trying to
create "art" from the useless citizens of Rosewater
County, Indiana. Vonnegut's narrowing the scope of his
messiahs' efforts does not, however, suggest that his
view of human life has become more hopeful.
Sincere benevolence, although admirable at times,
cannot produce the desired results. In the universe
that Vonnegut describes, there are always negative by-
products of positive actions. This does not diminish
the efforts; it simply insures no absolute success.
Unresolved conflicts abound: free will versus predestin
ation; reality versus illusion; truth versus lies;
science versus religion; and benevolence versus
98
99
expediency. The three novels describe schemes that are
doomed to fail because their creators do not accept the
nature of the world they live in; they foolishly strive
for order and predictability, ignoring the chaos and
pluralism that surround them.
In Vonnegut's world, the most positive aspects of
the human condition occur for only a short period of
time and on a person-to-person basis. Long term suc
cess and collective efforts fail miserably. It is an
honest, if not an optimistic, view of the human experi
ence. At least Vonnegut allows for fleeting moments of
limited success, even if they occur in an absurd, mean
ingless universe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Novels
Vonnegut Jr., Kurt. Player Piano. New York: Dell Publishing · Company, Inc., 1952 . .
---------- The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1959.
---------- Mother Night. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1961.
---------- Cat's Cradle. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc. , 1963.
---------- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1965.
---------- Slaughterhouse Five. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1969.
---------- Breakfast of Champions. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1973.
---------- Slapstick. New York: Delacourte Press/ Seymour Lawrence, 1976.
---------- Jailbird. New York: Delacourte Press/ Seymour Lawrence, 1979.
---------- Welcome to the Monkey House. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1950.
York: Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons . . New
Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1965.
---------- Palm Sunday. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc.; 1981.
Criticism
Demott, Benjamin. "Vonnegut's Otherworldly Laughter." Saturday Review, 54 (May 1, 1971), pp: 29-32,38.
100
101
Fiedler, Leslie A. "The Divine Stupidity of Kurt Vonnegut." Esquire 74 (September 1970), pp. 195-97, 199-200, 202-04.
Friedrich, Otto. "The Novel: Very Warm for May." Time Magazine, May 1973, p. 6 ..
Goldsmith, David. Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and Ice. Popular Writers Series Pamphlet #2. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972.
Klinkowitz, Jerome and Somer, John. The Vonnegut Statement. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1973.
Palmer, Raymond C. "Vonnegut's Major Concerns." Iowa English Yearbook, No. 14 (Fall.l969), pp. 3-1-0-.--
Reed, Peter J. Writers for the Seventies - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Warner Books, Inc., 1972.
Schatt, Stanley. "The World of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." Critique 12 (1971).
Scholes, Robert. "'Mithridates, He Died Old': Black Humor and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." The Hollins Critic 3 (October 1966), pp. 1-12. Reprinted in The Sounder Few, ed. R. H. W. Dillard, et al. --Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1971, pp. 173-185.