198
PARTISAN REVIEW
reduced to mere notation , the action to pure plot, and the plot pro–
liferates to a high degree of complexity, taking amazing twists and
turns which double back on each other. Like most writers attracted
to science fiction, Vonnegut has a precise , logical turn of mind;
he loves to scatter the action in twenty separate strands, some of
them quite fantastic , only to loop them all neatly together at the end .
In this he resembles the genre-writer or the traditional writer of well–
made plots more than a modernist addicted to problematic and
open-ended forms. But Vonnegut crowds the three-decker story into
a book the length of a novella, so that the emphasis on plot and inci–
dent, on Aristotelian changes of fortune, becomes overwhelming.
(This is especially true of
Mother Night
and
Cat 's Cradle ,
his strong–
est books, which both belong to the early sixties .)
The overall effect of this is to alter subtly our sense of reality, at
least as we read the book. Despite the promiscuous mixture of fact
and fantasy, the effect of the flat , declarative manner and the simple–
man persona is to give the narrator a sort of man-to-man reliability in
the mind of the reader. Also, it puts everything in the story on the
same plane: the most bizarre events seem more matter-of-fact, while
flat-out realities take on a slight glow of lunacy that they would gen–
uinely have if we weren't so inured to them. The Jewish writers of the
fifties were drawn to extreme emotional states ; they saw life's prob–
lems and glories as located in the self. Awriter like Vonnegut is drawn
to extreme conditions of reality, so extreme as to have addled our
minds or dulled our capacity for
any
emotional response. Perhaps
under the influence of the deathcamps or the Bomb, Vonnegut and
Heller are drawn to situations in which the arbitrary , the terrible , and
the irrational have been
routinized.
They find it maniacally comic
that men should learn to adjust to insane conditions, cultivate their
private lives, go about their business.
M,-!ch of the comedy of
Catch-22
comes from the effort to
maintain business-as-usual under "insane" conditions . The pains–
taking records the Nazis kept were perhaps rooted in the same im–
pulse. No wonder Vonnegut and Heller became classics of the anti–
Vietnam generation, curious comic bibles of protest, so different
from the protest literature of the thirties, while writers like Malamud ,
who took the fifties posture of stoicism and endurance , or else James–
ian renunciation , gradually lost favor. Vonnegut's zany , cartoonlike
