Chapter 26

Character

The “main character” in the skeletal tale of Vonnegut and his theses is not Kurt Vonnegut. The protagonist is Vonnegut-and-his-theses-on-plot-shapes.

Seems fitting, since Vonnegut, as has been said, cared as passionately about the notions his characters conveyed as he did about them as individuals. In Timequake, his fictional alter ego explains:

“If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Trout said, “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in.”

Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn’t peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction.320

In Breakfast of Champions, the narrator says,

I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout’s novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back.

The librarian asks him why he doesn’t like it, and he says to her, “I already know about human beings.”321

Vonnegut pointed out that Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man gave his characters no love interest, nor did Céline in Journey to the End of the Night. Nor, for similar reasons, he told an interviewer, did he.

I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.322

There’s a priceless, hilarious example of “realistic” marital dialogue in Player Piano, showing the sort of arguments that couples find themselves entangled in. I’d like to reproduce the entire knot of it, because not to do so would be like showing only a fragment of a vase. But it’s too long. See chapter 18.

Despite disclaimers, Vonnegut possessed a marvelous facility for conjuring up characters, profiling them and employing them in the service of a story. Much can be gleaned from him about trafficking in characters by looking keenly at his.

Granted, Vonnegut may have less expertise developing full-blown characters than a masterful writer of realism. He said less about characterization than about plot and beginnings. But he did offer these pointers:

An audience cannot care equally about dozens of characters all at once. It gets confused and then bored, having lost track of who is who. So we give all the important actions and speeches to just a few characters. We create stars. We say in effect to audiences, “Just keep your eyes on the stars, and get to know a little something about them, and you won’t miss anything.”323

Vonnegut’s “Creative Writing 101” Rule #2:

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.324

Here’s an example from The Sirens of Titan:

“Indianapolis, Indiana,” said Constant, “is the first place in the United States of America where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian. The kind of people who’ll hang a white man for murdering an Indian—” said Constant, “that’s the kind of people for me.”

I don’t know about you, but instantly, I’m rooting for a character who likes that kind of place for those kinds of reasons. That’s the kind of character for me.325

Characters take their own shape. They can speak and act in alarmingly revealing ways. Vonnegut comments on this in Breakfast of Champions.

I had created him, after all. I gave him a name: Harold Newcomb Wilbur. I awarded him the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Soldier’s Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and a Purple Heart with two Oak-Leaf Clusters, which made him the second most decorated veteran in Midland City. I put all his medals under his handkerchiefs in a dresser drawer.…

And he went on staring at me, even though I wanted to stop him now. Here was the thing about my control over the characters I created: I could only guide their movements approximately, since they were such big animals [italics mine]. There was inertia to overcome. It wasn’t as though I was connected to them by steel wires. It was more as though I was connected to them by stale rubberbands.326

That’s the most astonishing and rewarding thing about making characters up. They start to make you up, by showing you a thing or two.

You do have control—or you can take control—over your attitude toward them, though.

Since Vonnegut was both “a humorist and a serious novelist,” he’s been likened to Mark Twain, whom he admired enormously. In 1979, he was invited to speak at the one hundredth anniversary of the completion of Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut.

I now quote a previous owner of this house: “When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.”

I submit to you that this is a profoundly Christian statement, an echo of the Beatitudes.327

In the Sermon on the Mount—the Beatitudes—Jesus blesses the multitudes. What Twain meant, Vonnegut goes on to clarify, was that everyone is recognizable, everyone is part of the river.

There’s hardly a character Vonnegut created to whom he, as the author, is mean-spirited. He nails characters’ flaws. He exposes their guises. He employs some to act and think despicably. But the wide anthropological eye he casts over humanity allows each his or her place in the universe, a position never so simple as purely evil or purely good.

He learned such decency early, particularly from an African American woman employed by his parents as a cook, housekeeper, and general handywoman about the house:

I was essentially raised by a woman who was Ida Young.… She was humane and wise and gave me decent moral instruction and was exceedingly nice to me. So she was as great an influence on me as anybody.… The compassionate, forgiving aspects of my beliefs came from Ida Young who was quite intelligent and from my parents, too.328

Roland Weary in Slaughterhouse-Five is “stupid and fat and mean.” Vonnegut demonstrates Weary’s cruel thoughts and actions. “He was always being ditched” by others. He hates being ditched. He wreaks revenge. But Vonnegut tells us Weary is “only eighteen,” “at the end of an unhappy childhood,” and yearns to belong. He fantasizes of bragging to his loser parents about his war pals (of which there are zero) when he gets home. He is also the one who saves the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, whose zombie-like response to the war would have made him dead meat over and over without Weary “cursing him, kicking him, slapping him, making him move.”329

This sort of thing happens over and over in Vonnegut’s work—as fate would have it, a repugnant character becomes the catalyst for life-enhancing developments.

While in Kurt’s workshop, I wrote a story based on three people I used to wait on at Carnation Ice Cream Parlor in San Diego, where I grew up: a fat, timid middle-aged man and his elderly parents. They appeared at the same time every Sunday after church. They sat in the same booth, took the same seats, ordered the same things. They always left a dime.

They drove me crazy. I felt suffocated looking at them, especially the son. In my story, the waitress plays a trick on him. Her intention was to prod him out of his complacency and collusion with his parents in his own suppression.

Kurt didn’t like it. He thought it was mean.

I was rarely mean, even as a kid to other kids. So for me to be so in a story was a stretch and probably a little healthy, psychologically. Nevertheless, dozens of other solutions to release that man could have offered themselves. The effect of Kurt’s gentle disapproval impressed upon me that there were kinder alternatives to jump-starting your characters, other human beings, and even yourself.

There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:

“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”330

contrast

In Sense and Non-sense, Merleau-Ponty says,

Every color we perceive in nature elicits the appearance of its complement; and these complementaries heighten one another. To achieve sunlit colors in a picture… not only must there be a green—if you are painting grass—but also the complementary red which will make it vibrate.331

As in painting, so in storytelling.

The definition of “foil,” according to Webster’s, is “a person or thing that contrasts with and so emphasizes and enhances the qualities of another: the earthy taste of grilled vegetables is a perfect foil for the tart bite of creamy goat cheese.”

Billy Pilgrim is pale, shambling, numb. Roland Weary is offensive, gross, outspoken.

Their contrast heightens each other’s character.

In the first four chapters of Mother Night, prison guards in Israel come on duty successively, all Holocaust survivors. Their divergent responses to that debacle reveal and emphasize their individuality. Collectively, their views depict the horrifying wounds the Nazis inflicted, and the impossibility of escaping those wounds and moral injuries no matter what stance is taken. By juxtaposing these survivors, Vonnegut achieved both an overview and distinct characterization.

In “The Manned Missiles,” a story published during the Cold War’s space race, two men correspond. They are both fathers of downed astronauts. But one is Russian, the other American.

In “Adam,” the tenderest story I believe Kurt ever wrote, two men are in the waiting room of a Chicago lying-in hospital. One, a “gorilla,” complains:

“Seven girls I got now.… I can beat the stuffings out of ten men my own size. But, what do I get? Girls.”…

Sousa turned on Knechtmann. “Some little son of a gun like you, Netman, you want a boy, bing! You got one.”

Knechtmann is a thin, slightly hunched survivor of a displaced persons camp, whose German-Jewish relatives all died, it’s implied, in the camps. He replies,

Boy, girl… it’s all the same, just as long as it lives.332

deception and complexity

Secrets and lies abound in Vonnegut’s work.

The contrasts between what a character hides, what they reveal, and the truth enhances characterization all around. It’s also a superb device to arouse tension and curiosity.

Wait was traveling alone. He was prematurely bald and he was pudgy, and his color was bad, like the crust on a pie in a cheap cafeteria, and he was bespectacled, so that he might plausibly claim to be in his fifties, in case he saw some advantage in making such a claim. He wished to seem harmless and shy.333

What effects will Wait’s deception have? When will this liar be found out?

Secrets and lies can be held by the self without deceiving others purposely. They can be hidden from the self. Partially or completely.

The writer William Harrison, my first creative writing teacher, offered an insight that stayed with me my entire fiction-writing life: “What a character wants and what a character is afraid of are often the same thing.”

Conflict within the same character makes that character more complex and compelling. And believable.

Herbert Foster is a guy who works his fool head off in Vonnegut’s short story “The Foster Portfolio,” even though he’s got plenty of money coming in from his investments. The narrator, who works for the investment firm, can’t figure out why slope-shouldered Foster endures drudgery and pretends poverty. “The man had maybe seventy-five dollars a day coming in from his securities, and he worked three nights a week to make ends meet!” Turns out, it’s in order to act out the surprisingly low-down jazzy side of his personality.334

Howard Campbell, the narrator of Mother Night, is a double agent for Germany and the US during World War II. Talk about complexity! Conflict! Secrets and lies up the wazoo! Where is the self? What is the truth? Foil upon foil.

The story is told while Campbell’s imprisoned in Israel, after the war. If it unfolded during the time he was acting as a double agent, the story would have to lean on plot. But told in retrospect, and in prison, the story centers on character—one forced to account for himself, his duplicity, and the consequence of his actions.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, creating an “innocent” main character—one ignorant of the lay of the land or the problem to be solved—can be a wonderfully natural way to lead your reader into a story. Mystery novels featuring the detective as protagonist do this all the time. Vonnegut often employs this device. In the story mentioned above for example, “The Foster Portfolio,” the “innocent” narrator investigates the mystery of Foster’s money and work habits. In the novel Cat’s Cradle, as in any narrative featuring a stranger in a strange land, the protagonist ventures along uncovering the who-what-where-when of the culture and place and people, bringing the reader with him on that journey of discovery, seemingly effortlessly.

reactions

The intensity of good or ill fortune is expressed by the tale-teller, in exposition or in the reactions of characters in his tale. If something seemingly bad or good happens in a tale, and neither the tale-teller nor his characters are impressed, then nothing much has really happened.335

In Deadeye Dick, the twelve-year-old narrator has just been arrested for murdering a pregnant woman, and his father beaten up by the police.

“Look at your rotten father,” [the father] said. “What a worthless man I am.” If he was curious about my condition, he gave no sign of it. He was so theatrically absorbed by his own helplessness and worthlessness that I don’t think he even noticed that his own son was all covered with ink. Nor did he ever ask me what I had just been through.336

What if the son were not “impressed” by what his father says, and gave the reader no clue as to how to decipher it? What if there were only the father’s dialogue? “‘Look at your rotten father,’ he said. ‘What a worthless man I am.’”

You wouldn’t understand the complexity of either character or, more importantly, the son’s comprehension of his father and his neglect. But the son reacts to his father’s response. So something has indeed happened.

In the grassroots communal photography project in Manhattan’s SoHo that sprang up in response to the September 11, 2001, attack, “Here is New York: A Democracy of Photographs,” everyone could contribute two photographs, and these were reproduced, pinned up on walls and on thin wires strung across two small rooms. I volunteered there for months, as the exhibition went on far beyond anyone’s expectations. Many, many photographs were of people watching. Many were of people fleeing, crying, numb, people comforting each other. People reacting.

The place was hushed. People looked at the photographs. I looked at the faces of the people looking at the photographs.

Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five doesn’t recall what Dresden looked like after the firebombing. That hell isn’t described.

What Pilgrim finally remembers are the Dresden prison guards’ faces “in their astonishment and grief” after they peeked out at the firebombed devastation that Dresden had become.

The guards drew together instinctively, rolled their eyes. They experimented with one expression and then another, said nothing, though their mouths were often open.337

It is their response that Vonnegut provides. It conveys awe, speechlessness, a vision beyond the describable.

quelling a quibble

Another, albeit minor, use of a character’s or narrator’s response is that it can be used to defuse an objection a reader might have. For instance, in the short story “Adam,” the reader might protest, “Come on, a man’s response to the birth of a seventh child can’t possibly equal the response to a firstborn.”

When the two fathers have a drink at the bar near the hospital, Sousa gives voice to this objection, saying to Knechtmann, so delighted over his firstborn,

Wait’ll you’ve racked up seven, Netman.… Then you come back and tell me about the miracle.338

Now it’s possible for a reader to root fully for Knechtman’s view once again.

In the immensely popular and abominably written 1996 novel The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller, there’s a passage in which the man says that the way the woman draws off her boot is so sexy and appealing that he hasn’t the words to describe it. Or his response.

Well okay, the reader thinks, and lets the writer get away with that laziness.

I was so put off by how badly written the novel was and how taken people were with it that I assigned my fiction-writing students to write a paragraph describing such a thing in the most sensual way possible. In five minutes, all had done that effectively—proven when they read their descriptions aloud and all breaths quickened.

What Waller did do very well, though, was demonstrate this point: if you have a character voice what might be a reader’s objection, you can get away with murder, fictionally speaking.

action

Character and action impinge upon one another, in life as in fiction.

A person’s inherent character shapes his or her choices. The opposite is also true: character rises out of choice and action.

Interaction between a given personality and a situation of conflict that arises, provoking choice and action—consequently revealing, changing, or deepening a character—is what storytelling is all about.

In Mother Night, a woman says to Howard Campbell, the protagonist:

“You’ve changed so.”

“People should be changed by world wars,” I said, “else what are world wars for?”339

Hemingway once counseled his friend Marlene Dietrich, “Never confuse movement for action.”340

Fiction writers shouldn’t either.

Picture a kid in a tantrum, flailing around on the floor. That’s movement.

Cops and robbers in a chase. More movement.

True action combines realization—when a character is “impressed”—and acting on it in a way that makes a difference to the character’s life or others.

conjuring characters

At Iowa, Kurt told us that if we couldn’t summon up a character, to base one on a movie star.

This was such workmanlike advice, we were appalled.

Truth is, you can base a character on anyone. Once the juices get going, and the revisions, your character will become individualized. It just takes work.

Sometimes they do come out of thin air. Or so it seems. Vonnegut created oodles of outlandish characters and creatures. The Shah of Bratpuhr of the Kolhouri sect, the Harmoniums, the Tralfamadorians, the Koko-bonos. Even machines become characters—EPICAC, Gokubi, and Mandarax.

How did he do it?

I don’t know. But I do know the imagination can be cultivated, by permission and exercise. It’s clear Vonnegut let his out to play all the time.

Most of Vonnegut’s main characters, though, are modeled on someone.

In his first unpublished novel, “Basic Training,” one central character, the General, “is based on Vonnegut’s father’s cousin, who had been a captain in the Rainbow Division during World War I and ran his family and farm in the military fashion,” according to Kurt’s friend Majie Failey.341

When Player Piano was published, his fellow employees at General Electric were all a-twitter about who in the novel was based on whom at the company. Many characters echoed those he knew, especially the main “character,” GM.

His former student, the writer John Casey, asked Vonnegut in an early interview, “Is Winston Niles Rumfoord in Sirens of Titan a verbal portrait of FDR?”

The fact is Roosevelt is the key figure in the book, although the impulse was to write about what FDR had been to me as a young man during the Depression and the Second World War and so forth. Roosevelt took the lead in the book, however, not me.

Roosevelt was President from the time Vonnegut was ten to age twenty-six, and “was one of the biggest figures” in his childhood. The similarity between the character Rumfoord and Roosevelt, Vonnegut told Casey, is that “They both have enormous hope for changing things… childish hopes, too.”342

Here’s a quote from the novel:

[Rumfoord] wished to change the World for the better by means of the great and unforgettable suicide of Mars.343

Pressed about other real-life models, Vonnegut answered:

Well. Eliot Rosewater, for instance, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater—there really is a man who is that kind. Except he’s poor, an accountant over a liquor store. We shared an office, and I could hear him comforting people who had very little income, calling everybody “dear” and giving love and understanding instead of money. And I heard him doing marriage counseling, and I asked him about that, and he said that once people told you how little money they’d made they felt they had to tell you everything. I took this very sweet man and in a book gave him millions and millions to play with.344

Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the absent-minded scientist [in Cat’s Cradle], was a caricature of Dr. Irving Langmuir, the star of the G.E. research laboratory. I knew him some. My brother worked with him. Langmuir was wonderfully absent-minded. He wondered out loud one time whether, when turtles pulled in their heads, their spines buckled or contracted. I put that in the book. One time he left a tip under his plate after his wife served him breakfast at home. I put that in. His most important contribution, though, was the idea for what I called “Ice-9,” a form of frozen water that was stable at room temperature. He didn’t tell it directly to me. It was a legend around the Laboratory… long before my time.345

Billy Pilgrim and other characters in Slaughterhouse-Five were modeled on Vonnegut’s fellow soldiers and prisoners of war. He tells about some of them in the nonfiction first chapter. Another, Gifford Boies Doxsee, imprisoned “in the same Stalag (Stammlager IVB)” as Vonnegut, attests that “The parts of Slaughterhouse-Five which describe the historical events of those days are remarkably accurate in terms of my own personal memories of the time though of course Vonnegut has changed names and juxtaposed personalities.” An early draft of Slaughterhouse-Five uses their actual residence: “We reached Stalag IVB at night.”346

Vonnegut admittedly based Kilgore Trout on the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon:

In fact, it said so in [Sturgeon’s] obituary in the [New York] Times.… I was just delighted that it said in the middle of it that he was the inspiration for the Kurt Vonnegut character of Kilgore Trout.347

In the story “Long Walk to Forever,” Vonnegut uses himself as a model. To anyone who knew him well, it’s an accurate self-portrait, insofar as it goes.

“Could you come for a walk?” he said. He was a shy person, even with Catharine. He covered his shyness by speaking absently, as though what really concerned him were far away—as though he were a secret agent pausing briefly on a mission between beautiful, distant, and sinister points. This manner of speaking had always been Newt’s style, even in matters that concerned him desperately.348

In the preface to Between Time and Timbuktu (the script of a 1972 television production that combined several of his stories), Vonnegut reveals why, after a hiatus of delving into theater and film, he returned to prose:

I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes. Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and the character is me.

I don’t mean that I am a glorious character. I simply mean that, for better or for worse, I have always rigged my stories so as to include myself, and I can’t stop now. And I do this so slyly, as do most novelists, that the author can’t be put on film.349

Whether rigging or not, one’s self and the myriad aspects of oneself show up in one’s characters. The more you are able to encompass and give voice to those aspects, the larger you grow, and the better fiction writer you will be. You’ll meet yourself on the river, as it were.