The Last Days
Vonnegut, Kurt
The Last Days DEADEYEDICK by Kurt Vonnegut Delacorte Press. 240 pp. $14.95. We are approaching the end of a literary movement, and its decline is evident in Kurt Vonnegut's latest novel,...
...I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly...
...Light and sound poured in...
...Interspersed throughout the novel are recipes "intended as musical interludes for the salivary glands...
...No one is quite sure why, but late in the narrative a group of farmers suggests that "the United States of America was now ruled evidently by a small clique of power brokers who believed that most Americans were so boring and ungifted and small time that they could be slain by the tens of thousands without inspiring any long-term regrets on the part of anyone...
...We are approaching the end of a literary movement, and its decline is evident in Kurt Vonnegut's latest novel, Deadeye Dick...
...Vonnegut seems to be reflecting his personal decline...
...universal stupefaction, a Saturnian, wild, gloomy murderousness, the raging of irritated nerves, and intelligence reduced by metal poison, so that the main ideas of mankind die out, including of course the idea of freedom.' " But Corde sees the material causes as symptomatic of deeper spiritual sources...
...His narrator, Rudy Waltz, a "neutered pharmacist," represents his declining sexuality...
...There are also brief playlets which appear when Rudy Waltz needs to deal with bad memories, such as the time when he accidentally shot a pregnant woman between the eyes while randomly firing a gun from his father's extensive collection...
...I'm not sure that there is a clear and simple answer, but another comparison with Bellow may be helpful...
...Bellow's narrator, Albert Corde, entertains several possibilities for the impending apocalypse, including the speculations of a scientist that the entire society is suffering from lead poisoning: " 'Man's great technical works, looming over him, have coated him with deadly metal...
...In the Preface Vonnegut gives us an explanation ofihe main symbols in the novel: An unused spherical arts center symbolizes his head as Vonnegut's sixtieth birthday approaches...
...Catching life is like catching a cold, and the common cold, as we all know, is incurable...
...That's how he earned the nickname Deadeye Dick...
...All this is presented in Vonnegut's characteristic minimalist style, a banal surface of choppy sentences intended to resonate deeply...
...The other main motif in the novel involves a neutron bomb which has been exploded in the midst of Midland City, Ohio...
...The recurring theme of Bellow's novel is apocalypse, the revelation of the last things for a society whose energy is dissipating into a cold and unfeeling cosmos...
...While Bellow continues to grapple with social issues of our times, Deadeye Dick is a disappointing parable of Vonnegut's waning powers...
...Rudy Waltz, the narrator, relates the incident to "the evergrowing ball of American paranoia, the ball of string a hundred miles in diameter, with the unsolved assassination of John F. Kennedy at its core...
...Rudy Waltz, on the other hand, has only this to offer: "I have caught life...
...we need to come to terms, Corde insists, with what is " 'in us by nature, working on every soul.' " He also acknowledges that we are living in "Lenin's age of wars and revolutions" and need to take social issues seriously...
...There is apparently some connection between the neuter Rudy Waltz and the neutron bomb but it is never explained...
...G E N E BLUESTEIN (Gene Bluestein teaches literature at California State University, Fresno...
...Nothing they said could be appealed...
...It is a portrait of the artist in the 1980s...
...I have come down with life...
...Is it we or Vonnegut who have changed...
...the dust jacket photo shows him fast asleep on a couch with a pet pooch draped over his pelvis...
...The explosion of a neutron bomb in the midst of a city symbolizes the disappearance of people he knew at the beginning of his career ("Indianapolis is there, but the people are gone...
...Voices began to describe my surroundings...
...In the past, this technique has worked well, although there have always been readers impatient with Vonnegut's mannerisms...
...As in the past, Bellow informs this transcendentalism with strong limitations of Calvinism...
...We may not agree with Corde's analysis, but we are engaged by his struggle to understand what is happening to us...
...The mood of that literary generation, whose high point was the 1960s, is aptly expressed by Albert Corde, the narrator of Saul Bellow's latest novel, The Dean's December: "These times we live in," he says, "give us foolish thoughts to think, dead categories of intellect and words that get us nowhere...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 5
