Time Quake by Kurt Vonnegut Review - Essay Example

06 December 2007 Analytical Book Review of Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut The book Timequake (1997) by Kurt Vonnegut is a science fiction novel. This novel includes a lot of autobiographical facts and events from a personal life of Vonnegut. It is possible to say that this work reflects anxieties in American life with its depiction of an administered society in which a human life has been made superfluous by advanced technology, resulting in a populace that itself feels superfluous and without purpose. Thesis (argument) A flashback method, cynical and ironical descriptions of the modern world prevents understanding of the plot development and main themes of the novel The book is centered round Kilgore Trout, the eighty-four-year-old man. He depicts his memories and thoughts in short stories which unveil the nature of the universe and the world order. Kilgore Trout describes the nature of the Timequake as "a cosmic charley horse in the sinews of Destiny" (Vonnegut 17) in his unfinished memoir entitled My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot. This cosmic event occurred in the year 2001 when "a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during a past decade . . . a second time" (Vonnegut 1). Trout story reveals the ineptitudes of human awareness. Kilgore becomes a hero through his use of free will. The timequake is a device to unveil the cultural condition of America, in the hope that it might shock readers into an awareness of their careless disregard of human potential and indifference to the ideals of human dignity and unanimity in our society. Vonnegut tells readers: In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters" (Vonnegut 43). To-do so, Vonnegut portrays Kilgore Trout as a cynical man: when he is hauled with other homeless bums to a shelter in upper Manhattan, he makes a habit of dumping every story he writes into a wire waste receptacle in front of the fortified headquarters of the American Academy of Arts and Letters next door to the shelter. The academy's executive secretary is Monica Pepper. Those stories are read with delighted awe by her husband, Zoltan, a man she had paralyzed from the waist down in an accident, and who once plagiarized a Kilgore Trout story when he was a boy. Vonnegut depicts that after "automatic pilot" crash their cars and airplanes, or fall down at the foot of escalators, the only person who seems able to take control of himself again is none other than Kilgore. To mobilize people to put their free will to use and restore order, he shouts out a phrase: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do" (Vonnegut 61). He is killed the instant the timequake is over by a berserk fire truck that smashes his wheelchair into the steel door of the academy headquarters. But with that fortress now blasted open, Kilgore uses the building as a morgue and sets up a triage hospital in the homeless shelter next door, after organizing the bums into rescue teams. Trout is the one who goes into the street to get people back on their feet and functioning with the message. It seems appropriate that this man, whose imagination finds anything possible, should be the one to accept the situation with some alacrity and carry on. His message, "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do," captures something fundamental in the nature of Trout himself. In general, the book negatively and cynically portrays modern society, human values, norms and traditions. Vonnegut uses acute critic to unveil false morals and drawbacks of the modern world order. Cruel jokes can be seen as a characteristic of humor. The loneliness, emptiness, and alienation felt by the characters in Timequake seem familiar to his contemporary audience. Vonnegut criticizes modern technology and the technological developments, sophisticated intellectual work done by machines which making human beings obsolete altogether, may be just around the corner. For instance, one of the stories, "The Sisters B-36" is sarcasm on our own society, where young people kill one another on the streets in extraordinary numbers, and where political bombings and other acts of violence proliferate. It tells of three sisters, two pleasant and one evil, on a matriarchal planet named Booboo. One of the good sisters is a painter, while the other is a writer. The third is a scientist who talks mostly about thermodynamics. People find her boring and shun her. In an obvious parallel to humans, Booboolings' minds are programmed by what they are told in words during their infancy. Booboolings are thus trained how to look at pictures or print, and they develop circuits that Earthlings would call "Imagination." Then Booboolings kill one another other readily, feeling nothing because they had no imaginations. They had lost the ability of their forebears to see a story in the face of another person, to vicariously feel what others might feel. The moral at the end of that story is this: "Men are jerks. Women are psychotic." Chief among manmade epiphanies for me have been stage plays. Trout called them "artificial timequakes." He said, "Before Earthlings knew there were such things as timequakes in Nature, they invented them" (Vonnegut 7). In general, Vonnegut proclaims the dreadful cost to the culture and to the individual of the loss of the imagination and the capacity to recognize and respect the feelings of others. It reiterates Vonnegut's frequent denunciations of the negative impact that television has had on society. At a time when, on the one hand, individual human destiny is being seen more and more as determined and when, on the other, many people seek to escape the anguish of an incomprehensible world in chemical dependency, While science fiction helps Vonnegut to observe and comment on such a universe, his painful comic rendering of the form acknowledges not just the suffering existence may impose, but the essential absurdity of the situation in which its randomness and incomprehensibility frequently place us. The cynicism is apperant in the following remark: I wouldn't have missed the Great Depression or my part in World War Two for anything. Trout asserted at the clambake that our war would live forever in show biz, as other wars would not, because of the uniforms of the Nazis" (Vonnegut 8) The negative side of this novel is that Vonnegut sees the funny side of that situation. The irony is that he does not accept the logic of the horrors. Vonnegut ironically depicts the frightening implications of the human condition as he sees it may only be a form of gallows or trench humor. The negative attitude towards history and ironical interpretation of modern discoveries are vividly portrayed in "Dog's Breakfast". This short story tells of a scientist who questions whether the human brain, which he describes as a dog's breakfast or a blood-soaked sponge, is really capable of the greatest human accomplishments. Then he discovers a pink radio receiver in brains taken from extra-intelligent people. He sets about writing up his discovery, convinced he is a cinch for a Nobel Prize. He writes with fluency he has never known before, until he stops to ask himself where his newfound loquacity, or even his discovery, comes from. It has to be from a receiver in his own brain. He is, in Trout's words, "hoist by his own petard!" (Vonnegut 29) The realization causes him to jump to his death. Two others Trout stories where a plot is summarized are "Empire State," about a meteorite the size of the Empire State Building heading toward earth, and "Dr. Schadenfreude," about a psychiatrist who forbids his patients to talk about themselves and who, if they do, will scream, "When will you ever learn that nobody cares anything about you, you, you boring, insignificant piece of poop" (Vonnegut 18). Incidents or phrases from these stories are referred to throughout the novel. Vonnegut uses them to make a joke. The flashback method of portraying the characters adds unique vision of events and themes. For instance, one of the flashbacks reveals how Kilgore's father accidentally became a specialist in ornithology by discovering birds that were making themselves extinct or causing chaos by choosing easier methods of survival than those deterministic instincts of natural selection that had sustained their species for eons. Thus, Vonnegut ironically portrays science and scientific knowledge. The final reward for Kilgore is his role as the provider of sound effects in the last act of the Pembroke Mask and Wig Club's production of Abe Lincoln in Illinois by Robert E. Sherwood. Kilgore is to blow the antique steam whistle that signals Lincoln's departure by train from Illinois to assume the presidency in Washington on the eve of the Civil War. He has acted out that same message for Eliot Rosewater in the earlier novel, and he embodies it in his own resilience throughout his appearances. Perhaps he also embodies that part of his creator's constitution, too, expressing the spirit in Vonnegut that, despite his acknowledged deep depressions, rebounds to write and paint, to laugh and make others laugh, again and again throughout a long career. Trout's message also may come close to defining his function in the novels, to recognize the malaise of the world we inhabit, provide some wisdom and some healing laughter, and set us on our way again. Vonnegut uses Trout's quirky, rapid plots to add vitality and pace. They contribute to tone with their often humor, their outrageousness, and their nave but penetrating observations. Vonnegut includes a lot of chaotic scenes and settings which help the author establish a certain mood. Thus, these scenes prevent and harden understanding and comprehension of the novel. These stories take to their logical conclusions the consequences of social and technological programs, and urge readers to see the ultimate price of their behavior. The main idea of the book can be described as follows; Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world." Most famously, Einstein is reputed to have said, "I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world." (Vonnegut 64). Trout's amusing and sometimes bitter stories become parables that offer wisdom and insights into modern condition of life. In sum, In Timequake Vonnegut proposes unique vision and interpretation of the world order, out place in it and future of science. Thus, a flashback method prevents understanding of the plot and its development of the novel. Timequake addresses a growing fear of future and chaos, and underlines that a modern society is in danger. In general, the book presents a utopian vision of the future and society. Vonnegut addresses a number of utopian motifs as well, including history, politics, culture, sexuality, religion, education. The problem is that the treatment of many of these issues seems extreme that the entire nature of book perceived as unreal. The attitude of this society is strictly experimental; new ideas are continually tested. Works Cited 1. Vonnegut, K. Timequake. Vintage, 198. Read More