Vonnegut Faze

I believe that Slaughterhouse Five was my first Vonnegut. I could be wrong about that, but I do not think so. For some incredibly inexplicable reason, I always sort of lump Vonnegut, Kafka, and Faulkner together in my head. This really makes absolutely no sense. It's not like I mix them up or anything, I just lump them together the way I do Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, for example, but at least that lumping makes sense. Vonnegut, Kafka, and Faulkner really have nothing in common. They don't even have a letter in common. Ah, well.

Anyway, stories about war are an interesting genre. This one had several laugh-out-loud moments, but like many war novels, it's focus is the senselessness of war, which isn't exactly a cheery theme. Since it's my first Vonnegut, I can't really make any intelligent remarks about his style or anything. I have no idea if this is an exemplar or an outlier. From a craft perspective, it's method of construction is intriguing. Of course, the problem with telling a story about non-linear time is that we do experience time linearly, more or less at least. Thus, even though the story may be told in chunks with some jumping around, it's not really disorienting or truly non-linear within each chunk. That said, the structure works and brings out the novels themes rather than distracting from them.

The Power and the Glory was my third Greene. Man, this guy thinks about Catholicism all the time! It's sort of exhausting. Not only does he think about Catholicism, it seems to give him a rather high-level of anxiety. I think he needs to calm down a bit. Every novel of his that I have read has taken place in a vastly different geographical context, which is interesting. Many writers essentially settle down in familiar areas. Like the other ones of his that I have read, the ending is not a surprise; the story is on a collision course with the ending and that's obvious from the beginning. That doesn't detract from the story at all, but it's an another intriguing trend of his.

His female characters fascinate me. On the one hand, they are often peripheral to the story in many ways. They move in and out of focus, and aren't ever the leads. However, they drive the story in subtle ways and are as real as the leads. They are neither Madonnas nor whores, instead occupying a more complex space, and some are quite original (the young girl in this one is particularly excellent). This particular novel would be particularly interesting to analyze in juxtaposition with The Scarlet Letter.