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.

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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

95

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.