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"Unhappy Camper"
Indispensable to Vonnegut’s humane comedy is this informal sense of reader rapport. The first sentence of Slaughterhouse-Five uses the phrase “more or less,” the second, “pretty much.” Before the paragraph is out, we’ll see “And so on.” Precision matters less to Vonnegut than commiseration, the feeling that we’re all in this together and nobody finishes on top, and therefore that sweating every last adverb may not really be for him.
This isn’t laziness. No lazy man spends the two decades on a novel that Vonnegut lavished on Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s the modesty of a man underpraised for his early books and relatively overpraised for the late ones, who knew he was playing with house money from the day he got out of Dresden alive.
http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2012-01/UnhappyCamper.html
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Jan/26/2012, 9:34 am
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Re: "Unhappy Camper"
Thank you, Chris. First Vonnegut critic I ever read who gets the brilliance of his "Mother Night."
Tere
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Jan/28/2012, 10:06 pm
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Re: "Unhappy Camper"
I'm sure I read "Mother Night" but don't recall
much. Seems like to revisit it,
Chris
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Jan/29/2012, 1:16 pm
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