On Reading Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without A Country (Part One) 3-11-2013

[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 7/19/2025] 

I read Kurt Vonnegut Jr's A Man Without A Country immediately after reading Marcia Muller's The Butchers Cut Him Down. The Muller book was a pleasant enough detective novel from 1994. As always, Vonnegut provoked me.

Vonnegut dissects stories on a schematic basis (Good Fortune - Bad Fortune vertical axis; Beginning - End horizontal axis). Here, Vonnegut discusses Hamlet:

Neither good news nor bad news. Hamlet didn't get arrested. He's a prince. He can kill anybody he wants. So he goes along, and finally he gets in a duel, and he's killed. Well, did he go to heaven or to hell? Quite a difference. Cinderella or Kafka's cockroach? I don't think Shakespeare believed in a heaven or hell any more than I do. And so we don't know whether it's good news or bad news.

I have just demonstrated to you that Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho.

But there's a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it's that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth... The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

Chapter 3

The first paragraph sums up Sons of Anarchy, and may be a clue to its conclusion. Leave it to Vonnegut to show truth through humor.

Vonnegut's humor reminds me much of my mother's sense of humor: grim, sarcastic, self-deflating. My mother's sister Mary Ellen Finholt, and her husband, knew Kurt and Bernard Vonnegut when the men all worked for General Electric. My mother met them once. She was quite proud of having gotten Kurt's son to sleep. I met Vonnegut at Clowes Hall. I wanted to mention the Finholts, but everyone was dead by then and I did not want to burden him with more dead people. My brush with greatness.

So it goes.

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[7/19/2025: Continued in On Reading Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without A Country (Part Two) 3-11-2013. 

Some things found while translating my handwritten notes to this place:

Interview with Marcia Muller, Author of the Sharon McCone Mystery Series

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