Re: He shall Purify the sons of Eli...
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Mon, 09 Mar 1998 06:19:28 -0500
> piece of writing. Gimmicks are always gimmicks, but it is a writer's
> job to find the Best way to tell a story. The reader will know if it's
> a gimmick or not. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut didn't *need* to
> write certain things in his own handwriting to conceal the ineptness of
> his writing, but he did because it helped create the atmosphere of a
> WWII prisoner camp outhouse where all the Americans puked like pigs
> while the Brits and Germans looked on, disgusted.
Vonnegut + Slaughterhouse-Five = inept writing? I'm sure I must have
missed something in this logical train of thought, because this is perhaps
Vonnegut's most emotionallly wrenching novel. There's not a day that
passes when I don't see an echo of his story in my daily life (getting
crushed into a subway train, feeling that I'm occasionally the victim of
random circumstances, even imagining how to talk to a Tralfamadorian!).
--tim