In “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” (1965), Prospero and the boob have merged; the very prosperous Eliot Rosewater, after exercising the powers of the rich rather inchoately in the isolation of Rosewater County, Indiana, stands to full stature when threatened by a usurper, whom he smites down with a surprising disposition, both regal and cunning, of his fortune. In “Slaughterhouse-Five” (1969), Billy Pilgrim, like Winston Rumfoord, communicates with the Tralfamadorians and sees future and past as parts of a single panorama—”All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.” But his prescience is impotent to change the sad course of Earthly events; planes crash, bombs fall, though he knows they will. His access to Tralfamadore merely gives him the wonderful accessory bubble of the second life he lives there, more Ferdinand than Prospero, mated with the gorgeous Montana Whitlock in a transparent dome in a Tralfamadorian zoo. “Breakfast of Champions” reveals the author himself as Prospero, “on a par with the Creator of the Universe,” sitting in the cocktail lounge of a Holiday Inn wearing mirroring sunglasses, surrounded by characters of his own creation, whom he frees in the end: “I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally, during my writing career.” (Nevertheless, “Slapstick” revives the obnoxious lawyer Norman Mushari from “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater;” Vonnegut’s ongoing puppet show is irrepressibly self-cherishing.)

**{: .break one} ** Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint. . . **

“Slapstick” gives us the Prospero of Shakespeare’s epilogue, his powers surrendered, his island Manhattan, his Miranda his granddaughter Melody. Vonnegut dreamed the book, he tells us, while flying to a funeral. “It is about desolated cities and spiritual cannibalism and incest and loneliness and lovelessness and death, and so on. It depicts myself and my beautiful sister as monsters, and so on.” It is about what happens after the end of the world. The end of the world is not an idea to Vonnegut, it is a reality he experienced, in Dresden, as a prisoner of war, during the holocaustal air raid of February 13, 1945. He has described this repeatedly, most directly in the introduction to “Mother Night” added in 1966:

**{: .break one} ** We didn’t get to see the fire storm. We were in a cool meat-locker under a slaughterhouse with our six guards and ranks and ranks of dressed cadavers of cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep. We heard the bombs walking around up there. Now and then there would be a gentle shower of calcimine. If we had gone above to take a look, we would have been turned into artifacts characteristic of fire storms: seeming pieces of charred firewood two or three feet long—ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will. **

Vonnegut’s come-as-you-are prose always dons a terrible beauty when he pictures vast destruction.

**{: .break one} ** Eliot, rising from his seat in the bus, beheld the fire storm of Indianapolis. He was awed by the majesty of the column of fire, which was at least eight miles in diameter and fifty miles high. The boundaries of the column seemed absolutely sharp and unwavering, as though made of glass. Within the boundaries, helixes of dull red embers turned in stately harmony about an inner core of white. The white seemed holy. **

The end of the world can come by fire, as in the quotation above, from “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” or by ice, as in “Cat’s Cradle”:

**{: .break one} ** There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes—and all the sea was ice-nine. The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl. **

The New York of “Slapstick” has been destroyed several times over. Gravity has pulled down its elevators and its bridges, plague has devoured its population. An ailanthus forest has grown up, and a rooster crowing in Turtle Bay can be heard on West Thirty-fourth Street. Amid collapse, the fabulous is reborn. Wilbur Swain’s nearest neighbor, Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, arrives at his hundred-and-first birthday party encrusted with diamonds, in a sedan chair. “She had a collection of precious stones which would have been worth millions of dollars in olden times. People gave her all the jewels they found, just as they gave me all the candlesticks.” Swain has become the King of Candlesticks, the possessor of a thousand. For a birthday present Vera Zappa gives him a thousand candles she and her slaves have made from a Colonial mold. They set them about on the floor of the Empire State Building lobby and light them. Swain’s last written words are “Standing among all those tiny, wavering lights, I felt as though I were God, up to my knees in the Milky Way.” He dies, happy, but the narrative carries on, relating how Melody arrived in New York, fleeing the seraglio of the King of Michigan, helped along the way by her fellow-Orioles.

**{: .break one} ** One would give her a raincoat. . . . Another would give her a needle and thread, and a gold thimble, too. Another would row her across the Harlem River to the Island of Death, at the risk of his own life. **

The novel ends “Das Ende,” reminding us of German fairy tales and of Vonnegut’s pride in his German ancestry; in “Mother Night” he even dared to be a poet in the German language. In “Slapstick” he transmutes science fiction into something like medieval myth, and suggests the halo of process, of metamorphosis and recycling, that to an extent redeems the destructiveness in human history to which he is so sensitive. The end of the world is just a Dark Age. Through a succession of diminishingly potent Properos, the malevolent complexities of “The Sirens of Titan” have yielded to a more amiable confusion.

“Slapstick” enjoys a first printing of a cool one hundred thousand copies, and Vonnegut’s popularity, which has grown even as his literary manner becomes more truculent and whimsical, has attracted comment from many reviewers, who usually find it discreditable to author and audience alike. But there need be no scandal in Vonnegut’s wide appeal, based, as I believe it is, on the generosity of his imagination and the honesty of his pain. Who of his writing contemporaries strikes us as an imaginer, as distinguished from a reporter or a self-dramatizer? There is a fine disdain in Vonnegut of the merely personal. His prologue to “Slapstick” says, “I find it natural to discuss life without ever mentioning love,” and his fiction, stoic in an epicurean time, does have a pre-sexual, pre-social freshness; he worries about the sort of things—the future, injustice, science, destiny—that twelve-year-old boys worry about, and if most boys move on, it is not necessarily into more significant worries. Vonnegut began as a published writer with the so-called slick magazines—the credits for the stories in “Welcome to the Monkey House” feature Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Rereading such exercises as “D.P.,” “Deer in the Works,” and “The Kid Nobody Could Handle” is a lesson in what slickness, fifties vintage, was: it was a verbal mechanism that raised the spectre of pain and then too easily delivered us from it. Yet the pain in Vonnegut was always real. Through the transpositions of science fiction, he found a way, instead of turning pain aside, to vaporize it, to scatter it on the plane of the cosmic and the comic. His terse flat sentences, jumpy chapters, interleaved placards, collages of stray texts and messages, and nervous grim refrains like “So it goes” and (in “Slapstick”) “Hi ho” are a new way of stacking pain, as his fictional ice-nine is a new way of stacking the molecules of water. Such an invention looks easy only in retrospect. ♦