Kurt Vonnegut: Player Piano and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

I am sad that I gave my copy of Player Piano away to Belinda before writing this, because there is a passage in it that I would love to quote verbatim. It was to the effect that the protagonist was transfixed by the mechanism of a machine, one he compared to the action of a maypole. Over, then under, and again. I love this, because it gives me the opportunity to do my favorite literary criticism trick: to show how a single passage is a microcosm of the entire book.

In Player Piano, the characters twist over and under each other in a manner that exactly resembles that of a maypole. In fact, he even opens one chapter with . . . dammit, I can't do this without the book in front of me. I'm going to facebook Belinda and ask her for some page numbers . . . never mind. The whole thing is available online, although it would be easier to see the dogeared page. The quote is:

"Out of the corner of his eye, a crazy, spinning movement caught his fancy, and he turned in delight to watch a cluster of miniature maypoles braid bright cloth insulation about a snake of black cable. A thousand little dancers whirled about one another at incredible speeds, pirouetting, dodging one another, unerringly building their snug snare about the cable" (18).

Her Vonnegut gives--perhaps inadvertently--a perfect metaphor for the structure of this and his other books. The characters are little ribbons, wrapped around each other, some never actually meeting, as a pleasing shawl for the information, "the cable", as it were. As the characters are introduced, it is in a way that fits the metaphor nicely: in their first appearances, The Shah of Bratpuhr is "encrusted with gold brocade. . . On the other side of the limousine's rear seat sat Doctor Ewing J. Halyard [a name that even means 'rope'] . . . He wore a flowing sandy mustache, a colored shirt, a boutonniere, and a waistcoat contrasting with his dark suit" (24). Both descriptions are perfectly in keeping with the "bright cloth insulation". Of course between them is the cable, the interpreter, who is appropriately unadorned. The metaphor continues as far as the end of chapter 3, where Paul "twisted free [of the other characters] and hurried out to his car" (35). After this point, Vonnegut wisely lets the idea speak for itself. Aside from a few mentions later in the book, the reader is left to see for her or himself the tangled web that is woven, and perhaps even to become one of the ribbons in the mess.

This structure is seen in later books, and evolves into the eponymous metaphor of Cat's Cradle, but it is not Vonnegut's structure alone which is seen in seminal form in Player Piano. The themes of an absent father to whom one can not measure up, and the question of human purpose--especially in modern idleness--are also seen throughout his oeuvre. One example is, of course, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. As good as Player Piano was, it was at heart unimaginative. In Rosewater, Vonnegut has found his legs and treats the same things, but in the singular way I have come to expect of him. I feel like Rosewater, Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions (and possibly others which I have not read) should be compiled in to one large, Tralfamadorian novel. Vonnegut, Kilgore Trout and--in this novel--Garvey Ulm together have written the perfect treatise on life, meaning, and love. Insofar as it is truly Tralfamadorian, it is not possible to analyze it here, but it is possible to pick out a few nice quotes:

"He had eyes that were standard equipment for rich American fairies--junk jewelry eyes, synthetic star sapphires with winking Christmas-tree lights behind them" (176).

"All persons, living and dead,

Are purely coincidental,

And should not be construed" (epigraph)

"It's dead, it's dead. And that part of that man's life where he had to be a certain crazy way, that's done!" (237).

BTD:44