Changing of the Old Guard: Time Travel and Literary Technique in the Work of Kurt Vonnegut

Abstract

[She joined] hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, middle, and an end.[1] In a sharp double renunciation, the narrator, in this passage from Breakfast of Champions, neatly draws together two commonplace assumptions: that life is meaningful, and that stories are meaningful. Significantly, in rejecting the idea that life is like a story the narrator, who by implication is very close to Vonnegut himself (later in the novel he appears as Kurt Vonnegut), also rejects the idea that teleological development --a beginning, a middle, and an end --is anything more than an illusion in either stories or life. The association between narrative development and meaning ('lessons to be learned') is apposite, for the hackneyed demand that stories have a beginning, middle, and an end is surely founded on the assumption that it is in a traditional sequencing of events that meaning resides: beginning must develop into a recognizably distinct middle, and the end must modify and resolve the issues raised in the middle. When beginning, middle, and end are strung together in one story, a causal and teleological development is implied, and the identification of the cause driving events is what gives meaning to the story. Even where plot development is little more than a sequence of events lacking a coherent linking narrative drive, say in a picaresque tale, meaning might arise from the teleological imposition of meaning upon the tale by the reader: one thinks here, for instance, of Daniel Defoe's prefaces to Roxana and Moll Flanders where the potentially shocking disregard for consequences by the eponymous narrators, is muted by disclaimers that direct the reader, in the words from Roxana, to take 'Instruction and Improvement' from the stories.[2] In order to do this, the flow of succeeding events needs to be divided up, in the process of reading, so each falls into a beginning (a state of innocence), a middle (much the most interesting, the fall from grace, which constitutes most of the stories), or an end (the consequences, or repentance, of the characters' sins). That these early novels are nearly all middle (the end of Roxana in which the protagonist pays for her misdemeanours with a 'dreadful Course of Calamities' (pp. 329-30) is all of six lines long, for instance) is hardly the point; we are asked to extract meaning (bad actions are paid for) by seeing a development over time.[3] The rise in realism over the next hundred and fifty years accentuated this reliance on narrative development. It is indeed realism and narrative development with which Vonnegut seems to be taking issue, not only in the passage from Breakfast of Champions cited as an epigraph above, but throughout his oeuvre. 'Realism' is of course used exclusively here as a term to characterize a certain sort of literature, for Vonnegut would surely claim that his works are realistic in terms of fidelity to lived experience (although it is a very different sort of fidelity from that common in the works of the 'old-fashioned' storytellers from whom he distances himself). One of the foci of this article is the disruption of narrative development in Vonnegut's work and the pertinence of this disruption to the meaning (or indeed lack of meaning) he ascribes to humanity. The place of people in the world is tied up with their place in history, and Vonnegut is acutely aware of this. This is particularly interesting given the way the year 2000 has become such a focus in popular imagination and the cause of so many contradictory impulses, ranging from the apocalyptic (the millennium bug, the film Strange Days) to the futuristic (films and television series such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Space 1999). A year becomes special merely because, unusually, all four constituent figures change together, and this arbitrary notation of time, not even shared universally, has a demonstrable effect (in terms of cultural products) on our sense of who we are, oscillating between a sense of ending (the close of the century and, indeed, of a thousand-year period) and a sense of beginning (a new start, a chance to move on). …