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Breakfast of Champions: The Direction of Kurt Vonnegut's Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Peter B. Messent
Peter B. Messent
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
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Extract

In his autobiographical introduction to Slaughterhouse Five, looking back on the novel as completed process, Kurt Vonnegut writes, ‘I've finished my war book now. The next I write is going to be fun.’ This ‘war book’ marked, in many ways, though, the culmination of Vonnegut's fiction up to that point of time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , April 1974 , pp. 101 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 Slaughterhouse Five (London, Panther Books Ltd., 1970), p. 22Google Scholar. Subsequent page references follow quotations.

2 Advertisements For Myself (New York, Putnam's Sons, 1959), p. 338.Google Scholar

3 Slaughterhouse Five, p. 14.Google Scholar

4 ‘Society, Morality, and the Novel’, The Living Novel: A Symposium, ed. Hicks, Granville (New York, Macmillan Co., 1957), pp. 75, 90.Google Scholar

5 ‘Up is better than down’, Peace News, June 1971, no. 1822, p. 7.Google Scholar

6 Set Mother Night (London, Panther Books Ltd., 1973), pp. vii–viii.Google Scholar

7 Lewis Mumford, quoted by Hoffman, F. J. in The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagination (Princeton, 1964), p. 156.Google Scholar

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9 ‘Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: The Canary in a Cathouse’ in The Vonnegul Statement, ed. by Klinkowitz, J. and Somer, J. (New York, Delacorte Press, 1973), p. 16Google Scholar. It is worth mentioning the very full Vonnegut bibliography which concludes this book.

10 (New York, Delacorte 1970), p. vii.

11 The Vonnegut Playboy Interview, Playboy, July 1973, p. 216.Google Scholar

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20 One is reminded of Mark Twain's thesis in What is Man? Indeed Slaughterhouse Five's lesson of quietistic determinism is very close to Twain's later beliefs.

21 The French Lieutenant's Woman (London, Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 387.Google Scholar

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23 Bellamy, J. D.; ‘Kurt Vonnegut for President: The Making of an Academic Reputation’ The Vonnegut Statement, p. 81.Google Scholar

24 Mother Night (London, Panther Books Ltd., 1973), p. 119.Google Scholar

25 ‘The Modes of Vonnegut's Fiction: Or, Player Piano ousts Mechanical Bride and The Sirens of Titan invade The Gutenberg Galaxy’, The Vonnegut Statement, p. 190.Google Scholar