CHAPTER ONE

KURT VONNEGUT AND THE CREATION OF KILGORE TROUT

In order to understand Kurt Vonnegut’s authorial stance, a conscientious reader must look beyond the outrageous plots, lack of heroes and villains, missing love stories, and didactic social commentary to understand the many messages that Vonnegut is transmitting to a willing audience. To be able to comprehend Vonnegut’s inside jokes and connected themes, the reader needs to examine not only his novels but also his short stories, non-fiction, interviews, speeches, and critical essays. One common thread found in all of these different medias is the theme of technology and the effects that it has on even un-scientific people. Technology is constantly advancing and the artist who notices these achievements and comments on them is not only doing a great service to scientists, who should always continue to search out new and enterprising ideas, but also to a public that is so enamored of modern innovations. To satisfy both of these dynamic forces, Kurt Vonnegut created a character that could bring about scientific revelations in short, choppy prose able to be understood by even basic readers while showing scientists new directions to take in their studies. To guarantee that the reader does not feel overwhelmed and alienated, Vonnegut had to find a way to show these technological ideologies without distancing himself from his audience.

Thirteen years after the publication of his first novel, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. invented the imaginary character Kilgore Trout—the inspiration behind many of Vonnegut’s most creative short stories and scenarios—who appears in his novels beginning with God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater. In 1977, critic James Lundquist called Kilgore Trout the “alter ego of Kurt Vonnegut” (41) and Vonnegut himself admits this to be true in Timequake, his final novel. In addition, Vonnegut essayist Peter J. Reed, points out, “Trout represents a kind of alter ego for Vonnegut, a combination of a self-mocking parody of himself, an embodiment of his worst fears of becoming a degenerated science-fiction writer, and a voice for some of his most impish ideas” (Leeds and Reed 67). Despite this scholarship, some questions still need to be explored. What occurred in Vonnegut’s first four novels to make him feel the need to create Kilgore Trout? How is Trout’s biographical background relevant and how did his life parallel Kurt Vonnegut’s life? What are the functions of Trout’s short stories in the Vonnegut novels in which he appears and does not appear? How did Kilgore Trout almost break out of the confines of Vonnegut’s mind and pen by becoming “real”?

In spite of all the critical attention paid to Kurt Vonnegut, little of Kilgore Trout’s role in Kurt Vonnegut’s world has been analyzed. This thesis will refer to Peter J. Reed, who has made a career out of studying the Vonnegut canon but who has still only scratched the surface of Kurt Vonnegut’s science-fiction guru, and the secondary works of Donald E. Morse, Leslie A. Fiedler, Mark Leeds, and Lawrence R. Broer. While each of these critics provides excellent analysis, a complete critique of Kilgore Trout’s purpose is still missing from their works and needs to be explored in order to reveal why he was imagined in the first place. Despite Vonnegut’s religious reservations, he cast himself as a god to Kilgore Trout. Maybe not the God, but since he is creator of the universe that Trout inhabits he therefore gets to controls all aspects of his ‘Frankenstein Monster’s’ life. In Vonnegut’s words, “Trout was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken of this possibility several times to his parakeet” (Breakfast 240). Believing that Trout is not real becomes difficult because of the character’s heightened sense of individualism. How could a writer, even an atheist like Kurt Vonnegut, not feel godlike since the continuation of civilizations relies on his creative process and men die at the tap of his typewriter? One of the hardest tasks for any writer is to get other people to buy into an imagined world, like a preacher trying to get his flock to believe and obey in God’s word. Since Vonnegut never prescribed to any known religion, he is able to objectively see the positives and negatives of organized worship.

“Religion is a frequent concern for Vonnegut. He often mentions his family’s legacy of German Freethinking, and his first marriage began to unravel when his wife became a born-again Christian” (Leeds The Vonnegut Encyclopedia 477). Religion is never far out of reach for Vonnegut, and even when he describes Kilgore Trout he gives him Christ-like features. However, this paper is not about Vonnegut’s heavenly concerns, but on the earthly Kilgore Trout, who in many of Vonnegut’s novels is doomed to die as a desolate and unknown ‘hack writer’ (God Bless 19). Vonnegut has always had a soft spot for gifted artisans who never make it in the public eye. In the forward to At Millennium’s End, Vonnegut states, “I do feel lousy, however, about the many passionate and gifted artists I know or knew, writers, painters and composers, dancers and comedians, actors and actresses, singers and cartoonists, who died or are dying in obscurity, more often than not in poverty” (Boon vii). Arthur Garvey Ulm, an impoverished writer living in the world of God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater, is an excellent example of this type of artist. Ulm “wanted to be free to tell the truth, regardless of the economic consequences” (66). With a tremendous check in hand, Ulm was free to write whatever he wanted, but first he had to find out what his patron [Eliot Rosewater] wanted him to write about. Sometimes a free ride comes with a price. The price for Arthur Garvey Ulm was that there were no conditions for Eliot’s donation, and some men can’t function without someone else leading them in a certain direction. Trout was usually led in a certain direction by his creator; however Trout sometimes surprised not only the reader but also the almighty Vonnegut himself.

Becoming a famous artist is often like becoming a famous television star: being in the right place at the right time is crucial. Two equal artists might come to very different ends just because one happened to get the endorsement from a wealthy patron while the other was never noticed by anyone. Who is the ultimate judge on which of these imaginary artists work is better? And who determines the answer to that philosophical question: what is art?

Often, especially in Literature, the tastes of the majority determine what is art and what is not, what is masterful and what is not, who remains [to the undoubted misery of many critics], and who is discarded into a drawer labeled science-fiction or even pornography. Without the support of the people, discerning what is art and what is crap, a very crudely drawn line confuses the shoddiness of the huge seller with the genius of an undiscovered author or artist who might never show his work for fear of rejection or the public eye. Picasso barely made a dime from his art while alive and possibly rendered some of the greatest masterpieces of all time. Emily Dickinson was too apprehensive or possibly embarrassed to let others read her poems and only achieved fame because her brother published her work upon her demise. Thousands of others might have achieved phenomenal success had only their artistic endeavors been discovered or merely appreciated.

Which is more important: creating one of the greatest works of art [but never receiving any credit while alive and possibly seeing your creation destroyed], or affecting millions through drab and mundane writing? Stephen King felt this conundrum after making more money for his first three books then most authors make in their entire career. “In 1974 King's first novel, Carrie, was published. It is about a woman who exacts deadly revenge on her high school classmates by using her powers of telekinesis, the ability to move objects without touching them. Carrie had first only a moderate success and sold 13 000 copies in hardcover. However, Signet paid $400,000 for its paperback rights” (Books of the World). While these figures are not incredibly huge, Vonnegut’s fourth and first successful book only sold six thousand copies in hardback (Reed Dictionary 13)Perplexed by his popularity, King created the pseudonym Richard Bachman as an experiment to see if the public would be attracted to his words without the name ‘Stephen King’ attached to them. After four novels and little recognition for the ghost writer, the cat was let out of the bag and Thinner (Bachman’s fifth and supposedly final novel) sold well over one million copies. King may not have gotten the results that he imagined, but he obviously enjoyed writing from the viewpoint of another writer and the freedom to stray from his sudden fame. Richard Bachman was resurrected in 1996 to write the book The Regulators twelve years after Thinner, thus showing King’s dedication to his ‘alter ego’.

Vonnegut’s first three novels did not sell anywhere near as well as King’s, and so he was not worried about the reasons why people read his works; in fact he feared that he might never be taken seriously as a novelist. After finishing university and not receiving a degree in Anthropology on the rejection of his thesis, Vonnegut took on many jobs to try and support his growing family. Alongside jobs in public relations, journalism, and sales, he also sent short stories in to many slick magazines that were accepting stories about anything and by anyone in order to appease a hungry public. In Vonnegut’s preface to Welcome to the Monkey House [a collection of short stories], Vonnegut writes, “The contents of this book are samples of work I sold in order to finance the writing of the novels. Here one finds the fruits of Free Enterprise” (11). Despite this offhanded dismissal, the short fiction of Vonnegut is crucial to understanding the genius of his later novels. The themes continued to reappear throughout his literary career, either as pivotal plot devices or complimentary stories attributed to Trout: Utopia, dystopia, man versus machine, scientific responsibility, space travel, time travel, alien interaction, and ‘the day the world ended’ scenarios. “While Kurt Vonnegut has been at pains to characterize the writing of short stories and of novels as very different activities, th [sic] fact must remain that the two come out of the same creative genius and that, just as the apprenticeship in journalism sometimes manifests itself in the short stories, so the short fiction writer’s education shows itself in the novels” (Reed, The Short 111). Essentially, without journalism, the short stories of Vonnegut would not have been as direct and to the point, without short fiction, the novels would not have been so easily readable, and without the novels we never would have had the pleasure to meet the incorrigible Kilgore Trout.

Not only did the themes reoccur, but examples and synopses of short fiction continually resurfaced in his full length works reinforcing the major ideas of his novels. The coincidence here is too obvious to miss. Short stories, brief abstracts, and Vonnegut compliment each other and the relationship becomes even clearer as the reader notices the devices that Vonnegut uses to distance himself from the ideas presented while at the same time directly commenting on the situation. Atypically, Vonnegut used recipes, calypsos, theatrical scenes, drawings, alien [earthling and Tralfamadorian] interpretations of American activities, and of course short stories. These devices allowed Vonnegut an outside voice in his novels to reinforce a theme or let the reader perceive the situation from the opposite end of the spectrum. As Peter J. Reed pointed out, “They enable Vonnegut to have another voice, in effect. He can say things in a different manner or from a different perspective from that established in the novel’s narrative voice. And importantly for a writer who reaches far in his social commentary, they enable him to get at other topics that may lay beyond the compass of his setting” (The Short 125). This outside observer is especially important in letting the audience step inside a different pair of shoes in order to see how others might view the exact same situation. Nowhere was this as evident or important as the work that Vonnegut achieved with the consistent use of short fiction, especially in the capable hands of Kilgore Trout.

After the critical failure of Vonnegut’s first two books and the monetary failure of his second two books, Vonnegut decided to write a novel with less science-fiction and more realism. By adding Kilgore Trout he was able to feel that he had not completely sold out since Vonnegut created a character that championed his own ideas so effectively. Player Piano was originally considered science-fiction because it dealt with technology and possible futuristic agendas based on a very real place: General Electric; while The Sirens of Titan was such an exact replica of scientific fantasy and jargon that it alienated readers by not being realistic enough. Unfortunately, because Vonnegut’s first two books were never reviewed, getting a sense of how people in the 1950s felt about these two books is difficult to determine. One of the main things that changed once Vonnegut began writing full time was to alter the voice that he used to dictate his novels as he moved from conventionality to a new autobiographical style.

Vonnegut’s narration changed drastically after the first two books, which were completely told in the third person. Beginning with Mother Night and Cats Cradle (third and fourth respectively), Vonnegut experimented with employing the first person in his novels. Mother Night is the autobiographical tale of Howard Campbell Jr., edited by Kurt Vonnegut, while Cats Cradle uses three authors: John or Jonah, Vonnegut himself through allusions, and Bokonon (holy man and inventor of religions) to advance the tragic story of the end of the world.

One of the main ideas in Mother Night explores the comparison between the author of pornography with the author of science-fiction, inspiring Vonnegut to create a character that blurs the already fuzzy line between sensational literature and sensational sex. The main character of Mother Night, Howard Campbell Jr. is an American playwright living in Germany during World War II. Campbell keeps a daily journal of the love and lovemaking that he and his wife share. Eventually this manuscript is plagiarized and published under a different name which disgusts Campbell as it turns him into possibly the lowest form of writer in the world: a pornographer. “If Campbell responds so extravagantly to having become, inadvertently, a pornographer, this is surely because his author is especially hung up on the subject of porn, the sole Pop form which, in fact, evades him—despite a theoretical dedication to freeing men to lead full sexual lives” (Fiedler 12). The similarities between pornography and science-fiction are reiterated by Vonnegut many times throughout his career, even though the one characteristic that they share is not sex, “but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world” (God Bless 20).

Just because the mainstream public does not read as much science-fiction as mysteries or romance novels does not mean that science-fiction should not be critiqued using the same standards. One reason why Vonnegut resented this stigma so much was that early in his career he usually adapted his writing in order to satiate different publishers, who would sometimes radically edit his short stories. As Reed pointed out in his Dictionary of Literary Biography, “…in Campbell’s coming to be used as pornographer there may be sensitivity to the notion that in some of the short stories Vonnegut has also compromised to write what would sell” (11). Vonnegut must have felt like a peddler of smut since he “had to meet the demands of a market, its audience, its editors” (Reed The Short 1). This might have been a daunting task for a proud man, but certainly well worth the money that he received for his efforts. “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” earned Vonnegut seven hundred and fifty dollars and later short stories earned him as much as nine hundred dollars, making the ninety-two dollars a week that he made working for General Electric seem very meager indeed (Reed, The Short 98). As a whore might feel that they are giving up little [time] but receiving so much [money], so Kurt Vonnegut must have felt about prostituting his early words for easy cash. By becoming independent, Vonnegut was able to write short stories that he believed in (since with popularity comes the power to control one’s writing) as opposed to what magazine publishers imagined their readers believed in.

This link between literature and pornography so intrigued Vonnegut that he created Kilgore Trout to emphasize the point that making a judgment call on what is considered ‘indecent’ is not as easy as seeing dirty pictures in a magazine and calling it smut. Vonnegut, like Campbell, was disgusted with what he had become in many critic’s and conservative’s eyes. “That part of me that wanted to tell the truth got turned into an expert liar! The lover in me got turned into a pornographer! The artist in me got turned into ugliness such as the world has rarely seen before” (Mother Night 143). While these words were spoken by Howard Campbell Jr., they could just have easily been uttered by his creator. One of the main reasons for Vonnegut’s link to obscenity is the scrutiny that had befallen Vonnegut’s own novels which did not fall under society’s standards for what is appropriate to discuss in literature: communism, insanity, and an un-American pessimism for which Vonnegut has often been found guilty, sans trial. In order to show his own personal resentment of critics and moralists, Vonnegut created Trout to let the world see how he felt about obscurity, censorship, and [especially as time kept slipping away] old age. Vonnegut had to find a way to comment on his status in the world of literature without offending the very people that he wanted to read his works.

Vonnegut seemed to be testing the literary waters by giving the public four very different kinds of books, in order to see which type the public might purchase, thus ending his run of unfulfilling jobs and the ability to provide for his family in more substantial ways. Distopia (Player Piano), Science-Fiction (The Sirens of Titan), Spy Novel (Mother Night), and End of the World tale (Cat’s Cradle) all appealed to different audiences, thus clueing Vonnegut into the fact that he needed to combine all of the best elements of these novels together in order to truly appeal to a mass audience. One of the main things that changed once Vonnegut began writing full time was a change in the stylistic voice that he used to narrate his novels as he moved from accepted conventionality to a new autobiographical frontier. “Vonnegut’s stay [at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1965] brought him into contact with other novelists such as Verlin Cassill, Richard Yates, William Murray, and Vance Bourjaily and academic critics such as Robert Scholes” (Reed Dictionary 10). These men led Vonnegut into new and profitable directions with his writing by letting him know that it was not always “wrong to speak directly of himself in his fiction” (Reed Dictionary 10), as many of Vonnegut’s earliest editors had informed him.

Vonnegut’s narration changed drastically after the first two books, which were completely told in omniscient third-person. Beginning with Mother Night and Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut experimented with employing the first person in his novels. Mother Night is the autobiographical tale of Howard Campbell Jr., edited by Kurt Vonnegut, while Cat’s Cradle uses three narrators: John or Jonah, Vonnegut himself, and Bokonon (holy man and inventor of religions) to advance the tragic story of the end of the world. “Bokonon voices some of the most important, yet most cynical, ideas in the novel, allowing both John and the author to remain at some distance from this cynicism and preserve the comic tone of the book” (Reed Dictionary 11). If the audience believes that merely one of the book’s characters is telling ‘shameless lies’ (Cat’s Cradle) then the author of the story can be more believable, a useful tool that Vonnegut employs throughout many future novels. Vonnegut’s first four novels all contained some type of outside voice to comment on society, but none were as believable or solidly configured as the completely realized Kilgore Trout. “This paves the way for the intrusion of himself as narrative voice, commentator, and even character, a hallmark of many of the novels that follow” (Reed Dictionary 10). As Vonnegut reiterated in Wampeters, Foma and Granfaloons, “I find myself turning all my books into one book,” (46) “The big show is inside my own head,” (47) and “I myself am a work of fiction” (48).

Vonnegut so enjoyed the inclusion of himself and others like him, that he created Kilgore Trout to represent himself, Kurt Vonnegut Sr., Theodore Sturgeon, and all other science-fiction writers who were never accepted by the public and mainstream critics. This alter-ego was originally a tool to get ultra-scientific or overtly opinionated ideas into his novels without distancing himself from his audience, but became one of his most recognized creations, who even wrote and published a book of his own (see chapter four). The character of Kilgore Trout was conceived and born in 1965 after Mother Night and Cat’s Cradle to be employed in Vonnegut’s fifth novel as a rationality tool to comment on the ways that man responds to another man’s suffering and also on the hardships of a science-fiction author. Using Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut is able to incorporate far-out ideas and technological advancement without the backdrop of an overly fantastic or scientific book.

CHAPTER TWO

A BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY OF KILGORE TROUT’S FICTIONAL

AND EVER CHANGING EXPLOITS

In order to create the character of Kilgore Trout, Kurt Vonnegut needed traits and features on which to base his life. This chapter, through looks, styles, employment, education, and family, will look at similarities between the lives of Trout and Vonnegut and also emphasize some of the noticeable differences. While Trout’s physical descriptions varied in different novels, a few characteristics always remained the same. The first description of Kilgore Trout appeared in God Bless you Mr. Rosewater: “Trout, the author of eighty-seven paperback books, was a very poor man, and unknown outside the science-fiction field. He was sixty-six years old when Eliot spoke so warmly of him” (19). Later in the same novel, we get a description of the aging Mr. Trout on the back cover of a book that he had written called Venus on the Half-shell along with a short synopsis of the story. The description on the back reads, “There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifixion had been commuted to imprisonment for life” (115). This passage further emphasizes the relationship between Vonnegut and Trout. Vonnegut, in his forties was older then most other writers of the 1960s thus placing him in-between two generations. Most of his work was considered too ‘pop’ for his own WWII generation, and conversely, future baby boomers saw him as belonging to the older establishment.

There is very little biographical information on Trout in Slaughterhouse-Five, almost as if the events that take place in the book are so far-fetched that excessive Trout inclusion would only slow down the already fantastical narrative. Vonnegut introduces Trout: “With regard to the whereabouts of Kilgore Trout: he actually lived in Ilium, Billy’s hometown, friendless and despised. Billy would meet him by and by” (Slaughter 96). Vonnegut also brought back Eliot Rosewater, once again as Kilgore Trout’s greatest fan to educate Billy Pilgrim, the hero of Slaughterhouse Five and conversely the world. Pilgrim commits himself to a mental institution and is lying next to Eliot Rosewater who happens to have a copy of everything Trout has ever written, which he keeps in a trunk underneath his bed (Slaughter 93). Rosewater brings up another similarity between Kilgore Trout and Vonnegut’s writings when he remarks on the fact that too many people in Trout’s stories are Americans (95). This is also a comment on most of the characters of Kurt Vonnegut who all either live in America or are from the United States. Near the end of the novel, when Pilgrim finally meets Trout, Vonnegut points out that “Trout’s paranoid face was terribly familiar to Billy, who had seen it on the jackets of so many books…Trout certainly looked like a prisoner of war” (143). While there is no mention of Kilgore Trout being a P.O.W., Kurt Vonnegut’s wartime misery has been well recorded in this book as well as in many speeches, essays, and interviews. This is also a foreshadowing of Jailbird in which Trout does lose his freedom and must write his short fiction from behind bars. The Kilgore Trout of Slaughterhouse-Five has written seventy-five novels, but not one of them has ever made any money (142). While the number of books changes detrimentally from God Bless you Mr. Rosewater, this difference is explained by the change in year as well as the fact that Kurt Vonnegut had been attempting to write his “famous Dresden novel” ever since participating in World War II (Slaughter 10). Also, seventy-five novels or eighty-seven novels is a neat trick for Trout considering Kurt Vonnegut has only written nineteen books, including plays and anthologies, in his literary career. The numbers of works attributed to Trout only grows as he continues to appear in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels.

The first chapter of Breakfast of Champions begins with these lines as an introduction to the novel and a reminder of who Kilgore Trout is:

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history. (7)

Kurt Vonnegut may not have aspired to those heights, but certainly by the time he was fifty and this book was published, considered himself to be a force in shaping the minds of the younger generation. Vonnegut reminds his readers, many of whom may be reading him for the first time, who Kilgore Trout is: “I do know who invented Kilgore Trout. I did. I made him snaggle-toothed. I gave him hair, but I turned it white. I wouldn’t let him comb it or go to a barber. I made him grow it long and tangled.” (Breakfast 32). This look of Trout’s is reminiscent of the way that Vonnegut looks on the cover of Breakfast of Champions as well as in many other photographs. This early description of Trout is also important since Vonnegut gives Trout his independence at the end of the novel; the relevance of their relationship is crucial to understanding the essence of the book. Vonnegut goes on in Breakfast of Champions to describe Trout’s body, still acting not like the God, but a god none the less, “I gave him the same legs the Creator of the Universe gave to my father when my father was a pitiful old man. They were pale white broomsticks. They were hairless. They were embossed fantastically with varicose veins” (32). Further traits of his father’s are attributed to Trout throughout the rest of the novel. “The linking of Vonnegut’s father with the life-hating Trout portrayed here corroborates the overview of Vonnegut’s work as an autobiographical psychodrama—a career-long process of cleansing and renewal” (Broer 153). Vonnegut’s first descriptions of Trout are created from his father’s likeness, but as Vonnegut slowly turns into his father he begins to look more and more like Trout.

Breakfast of Champions shows that Kilgore Trout, despite holding down un-literary full-time jobs, still managed to write 117 novels and about 2000 short stories by the time of his death (17). While quality is usually more important then quality, the sheer spectacle of this achievement is certainly daunting to any aspiring writer. The last lines of the book completely solidify Trout’s role as Kurt Vonnegut Sr., after Vonnegut Jr. had given Trout what he has never gave any other character: freedom. Soon, Kilgore Trout would be more popular and revered than his creator and would receive the Nobel Peace prize in 1979 and supposedly die in 1981 (16, 25). After the incredible power and influence created by Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut believed that his book writing career was complete since he had already reached the peak of national exposure and fame. “All of this relates to Vonnegut’s uncertainties about being taken as a guru and his concerns with the moral responsibilities of writers, of being [like Trout] taken seriously when he is trying to be funny and vice versa” (Reed, Dictionary 18). Breakfast of Champions is a book about Vonnegut’s coming to grips with his own achievements, his mother’s suicide, and Kurt Vonnegut Sr.’s inabilities as a father. Even more importantly, this book is about how ideas have the ability to influence an entire city by becoming “the first germ in an epidemic of mind-poisoning,” (76). If there are people in the world that would try to save their children by burning the books of authors, then the artist must be aware of how far their influence creeps. By extending freedom to Trout, Vonnegut not only forgives his father and makes peace with his mother, but he is able to put aside all of demons that have plagued him since becoming what his family never thought he would, a success.
For the first time in three novels, Kilgore Trout did not appear in Vonnegut’s next novel. This fact did not trouble observant readers since Trout’s epilogue appeared in the last novel; therefore, he was dead in the world of Vonnegut since he had been set free by his creator. But, Vonnegut reported in an interview with Playboy, published in Wampeteers, Foma, and Granfaloons, that “[Kilgore Trout]’s writing a story now about a time when our government understands that it isn’t taking care of the people because it’s too clumsy and slow” (247). While no mention of Kilgore Trout is in Slapstick, Vonnegut’s seventh novel, the book’s premise could easily have been the basis for one of Trout’s stories as it contains apocalyptic catastrophes, miniaturized Chinamen, and communications from beyond the grave. This might have still worked in conjunction with Trout’s death since he could have written the story before he passed on, and Vonnegut was only now getting around to letting the public see the work. Luckily though for the serious reader of Kurt Vonnegut, Kilgore Trout was not really gone but was merely waiting for a more opportune time to reappear.

The death of Kilgore Trout was a cover to cloud the fact that Kurt Vonnegut had released him at the end of Breakfast of Champions. The prologue to Jailbird, Vonnegut’s eighth novel, disputed the claim of his supposed demise by these opening lines, “Yes--Kilgore Trout is back again. He could not make it on the outside. That is no disgrace. A lot of good people can’t make it on the outside” (9). Now Trout became even more like Vonnegut the ex-prisoner of war as he was held in a Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility, outside of Atlanta, Georgia (46). After such a moving introduction, Kilgore Trout appeared not as himself but as an alias; he was introduced as the best friend to Walter F. Starbuck, the author of the story, who was about to be released from jail for his part in the Watergate scandal. Bob Fender aka Trout was in prison for treason, his occupation was as a veterinarian, and of course, he wrote science-fiction while in jail, using the name Frank X. Barlow and Kilgore Trout. Jailbird also offers another comparison between Trout and Vonnegut. In Jailbird, Vonnegut makes Trout a veteran of the Korean War to compliment Vonnegut’s part in World War II. Unfortunately, the reason why Bob Fender is in prison is because he committed treason by sheltering a Japanese imitator of Edith Piaf who turned out to be a North Korean spy. Frank X. Barlowe was published in Playboy, which despite being filled with naked girls would be the most dignified place that Kilgore Trout ever published. The prologue now has two meanings; Trout could not make it on the outside of Vonnegut’s world and he could not make it on the outside, as in not in prison. Trout is portrayed as a large man in this book just as Vonnegut is a large man in real life. Trout is also kind to animals in Jailbird; which Vonnegut has professed more then once his fondness for rolling on the ground with uncritically loving dogs (Slapstick 3). While contemplating his fear of having sex with a Korean spy, Trout speaking as Fender remembers:

I was scared to death, naturally, since I had never made love before. But then I

said to myself, ‘Just wait a minute. Just calm down. You have always been good

with every kind of animal, practically from the minute your were born. Just

keep one thing in mind: You’ve got another nice little animal here.’ (Jailbird 104)

Filling your characters with traits that one has either witnessed or exhibited is the necessary force behind creating believable fiction. In every book that Kilgore Trout appears, the observant reader notices clear Vonnegut characteristics.

Of Vonnegut’s next four books, similar in the fact that they were all written as autobiographical tales, only two featured Kilgore Trout. Galapagos and Hocus Pocus have references to Trout while Bluebeard and Deadeye Dick are completely devoid of the out of print science-fiction author. One of the reasons for this omission might be the fact that Vonnegut was already planning for his final book to be the great send off for Kilgore Trout, and he did not want to ruin his departure with too much exposure.

Like Vonnegut after Breakfast of Champions, Trout will no longer serve as anyone’s puppet, or put on any more puppet shows of his own. Just as Vonnegut had used Trout to dramatize his own view that he was a programmed writing machine, Trout’s miraculous regeneration as Vonnegut’s shaman measures the degree of optimism Vonnegut feels now about the efficacy of free will in the otherwise robot-populated world of Timequake. (Boon 78)

Because of Vonnegut’s popularity and longevity, Kilgore Trout is no longer necessary to pacify readers or provide a shield for revolutionary ideas.

Galapagos is the autobiographical novel of Leon Trout, son of Kilgore Trout. While in Breakfast of Champions, Kilgore Trout’s son is named Leo after Kilgore’s father, in Galapagos, the name had been changed possibly by the son himself in an attempt to disassociate himself from his estranged father. While the history differs from Breakfast of Champions, some facts stay the same. In Galapagos, Leon deserted from the Army, but unlike Leo in Breakfast of Champions, he did not join the Viet Cong. He dies at an early age in Sweden while working in a shipyard. Instead of going to heaven, Leon chooses to stay behind and observe the human race. Kilgore Trout, who in this scenario was dead by the year 1986, calls to his son from the blue tunnel of the afterlife to try and get Leon to follow him into heaven (251). Throughout the novel, Leon refuses time and time again, preferring to witness man’s final stand against nature. Kilgore Trout’s works list again expands in this novel as reported by narrator Leon Trout: “Father had published more than a hundred books and a thousand short stories, but in all my travels I met only one person who had ever heard of him” (256). Vonnegut has raised Trout out of the muck to become famous and revered, but with merely a few pecks on keyboard he reduce Trout back to the obscurity he possessed in God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater., In Hocus Pocus, Vonnegut’s last novel before Timequake, Trout is never mentioned by name, but a story entitled “The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore” appears in Black Garterbelt Magazine which has featured Trout stories in previous novels. Vonnegut’s final book was also Trout’s actual last stand as both writers say goodbye forever in the novel Timequake as a celebration of Vonnegut’s seventy-fourth birthday lurks in the wings.

Vonnegut reflects on Trout’s life in the opening prologue to Timequake, a book which unlike any Vonnegut novel before, actually has a happy, albeit mournful ending. One peculiar aspect of this novel is that it is actually the scraps from an earlier novel which Vonnegut now calls Timequake One. Trout is first reintroduced to Vonnegut’s readers with a simple summation of his life and accomplishments:

Trout doesn’t really exist. He has been my alter ego in several of my other

novels. But most of what I have chosen to preserve from Timequake One has to do with his adventures and opinions. I have salvaged a few of the thousands of stories he wrote between 1931, when he was fourteen, and 2001, when he died at the age of eighty-four. A hobo for much of his life, he died in luxury in the Ernest Hemingway Suite of the writers’ retreat Xanadu in the summer resort village of Point Zion, Rhode Island. That’s nice to know. (xiii)

While this is the third time that Trout has died in a Vonnegut novel, the reader can be assured that this time the death will stick since Vonnegut promised that Timequake would be his last novel, and unfortunately eight years later, his most devoted fans are now starting to believe that this might be true. One interesting dichotomy set up by this early presentation of this ‘fictional’ Trout is that through the rest of Timequake Vonnegut always refers to Trout as if he were a real person, via sentences such as “I asked him”, “Trout might have said”, “I thank Trout”, and “I told Trout”. The entire story is set up not as the meeting of these two men [Vonnegut and Trout], but in the separation of them so that they could both go their individual ways without any type of dependence on one other. Once again, the reader notices that in this next installment of Kilgore Trout’s life, the number of stories that he has written has grown exponentially. In Timequake, Trout no longer even sends his stories into magazines but merely throws them into a trash receptacle located outside of the homeless shelter where he lives (53). Vonnegut speculates “He had been completing a story every ten days, on average, since he was fourteen. That was thirty-six a year, say. This one could have been his twenty-five-hundredth!” (61). Through the use Trout’s short story synopsis’, the novel transplants the reader to the early days when Vonnegut was unknown and writing small stories to eke out a living any way that he could. This parallel through short stories is only one of many resemblances that Vonnegut and Trout share as ‘alter egos’ and creator/created alike.

The parallels that Trout shares with Vonnegut are very compelling, especially in comparing their home life, their occupations, and their early failures coupled with later successes. The strongest connection between Kilgore Trout and Kurt Vonnegut is in their writing. Many of the same themes arise in both of their works, such as the dangers of “automation, free will [sic], religion, human stupidity, greed and obsession with money, sexual lust etc” (Vit 7). Readers tend to draw inferences from a theme if it has been reiterated by the author in different contexts and using different scenarios than if the theme is only explored on one level. Kilgore Trout is one tool used to re-emphasize the most important themes of Vonnegut novels. Through the first four novels, Vonnegut employed outside voices to speak un-pleasantries, break the action, re-enforce a theme, and “[t]he effect of their presence enables Vonnegut to explore the inherent inadequacies of both deploying or resisting traditional narrative strategies” (Leeds and Reed 39). These strategies are what set Vonnegut apart from his contemporaries and make him so popular across college campuses where young people are learning how to formulate their own ideas and opinions. The two authors’ writings also mirror and shadow each other in many unique ways.

One of the differences between the two authors’ writing is genre. While Vonnegut is mostly known for his novels—and his short stories are usually pushed aside—Trout, conversely, is a master of short fiction who despite writing many more novels then Vonnegut, does not receive as much attention for that narrative form. After all, Trout’s novels are quickly read, deciphered and cast aside, (Breakfast 253) whereas Vonnegut’s novels need to be dissected and analyzed in order to be completely understood. Also, in order to summarize a Vonnegut novel, a few paragraphs are necessary to fully explain the intricate weavings of the plot while Trout stories can usually be reiterated with a few choice sentences. The Zen-like catchphrases that Vonnegut is famous for such as, “Hi ho” and “So it goes” are also reflected by Trout in Timequake through the expressions, “Ting-a-ling” and “Life goes on”. While the second is a constant but rhetorical cliché; “Ting-a-ling” is a Trout original and an obvious parallel to Vonnegut’s repetitive nuances. The genre that the authors’ share and the snappy, memorable phrases employed by each further distances the two authors from most other literary icons and sets them apart from their contemporaries. Unfortunately writing in an unusual way also makes getting published by reputable printers more difficult.

Another parallel that the two writers share are the publishers that tended to print their early works. After finishing university and not receiving a degree in Anthropology upon the rejection of his thesis, Vonnegut took on many jobs to try and support his growing family. As well as non-literary jobs, he also sent short stories in to many slick magazines that were accepting stories about anything and by anyone in order to appease a hungry public. Kilgore Trout was even more unsuccessful as a writer, sending his stories --without carbon copies and thus not preserving his work if rejected-- to any magazine that he read or heard about (Breakfast 20). In the glorious and prosperous years after WWII and before television developed a stronger hold on the American public, many average writers could make a modest living by writing short stories and sending them off to Colliers, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and The Saturday Evening Post, etc. Trout is not so fortunate with his publishers, as reported by Eliot Rosewater in Slaughterhouse-Five, “No two books have the same publisher, and every time I write him in care of a publisher, the letter comes back because the publisher has failed” (95). Trout is usually not even notified when and if he has been printed. As reported in Breakfast of Champions, he had to scour pornographic bookstores to find his works which had sometimes been unjustly edited and which were usually accompanied by pornographic pictures that never depicted the substance of the novel or story (21). Vonnegut’s novels were also treated like pornography when they were burned in a furnace in Drake, North Dakota after the “school board made public statements about the unwholesomeness of the book” (Palm Sunday 4). The only thing worse then a writer having his/her books sold in pornographic bookstores is having them burned for being pornographic in nature. This dilemma could be one reason why Kilgore Trout was employed so much by Vonnegut after Slaughterhouse-Five, and why Trout’s life was constantly changing from prosperous to degrading. After all, Vonnegut’s life shifted from being a successful and enterprising author to being accused of damaging the minds of children. What would Vonnegut’s mother think of him now?

Both Trout and Vonnegut were influenced by their parents’ lives and actions that shaped them into the type of writers into which they evolved. Vonnegut wanted to write short stories because his mother attempted to do the same thing, unfortunately without her son’s success. In Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut discloses that in the 1930’s, during the depression and after his father’s business began to crumble, his mother wrote stories to pad the family budget. In the chapter “Roots” in Palm Sunday, a collection of essays, speeches, and letters by Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut reports that, “It will be noted that my mother attempted to be what I have in fact become—which is a professional writer” (59). In a different account, Vonnegut continues his trip down memory lane, “She was a good writer,” he says, “but she had no talent for the vulgarity the slick magazines required” (Reed, The Short 28). There is little wonder that, with so many Oedipal references in Vonnegut’s work, he attempted to follow in his mother’s footsteps instead of becoming an architect like his father. In an interesting twist though, Vonnegut, marked by his fiftieth birthday, began to add drawings to his novels, as is evident in Breakfast of Champions which features drawings of an asshole, a chicken, a light switch, etc. Years later, Vonnegut has actually become a serious painter, whose paintings have been sold for as much as 600 dollars a print (www.vonnegut.com). Trout followed in neither of his parents footsteps—his father was an ornithologist and studier of the great Bermuda Ern and his mother was barely mentioned at all until Timequake. However, some of Trout’s pessimism was surely caused by being a witness to the extinction of the last of the largest birds in the world by something as simple as a man delivered foot fungus (Breakfast 30). The death of those beautiful creatures caused the loss of his father’s job just as World War I and the reversal of American attitudes towards all things German destroyed the Vonnegut family’s rich heritage.

Kilgore Trout, when he converses with Kurt Vonnegut in Timequake, discloses what really happened to his mother. “My father murdered my mother,” says Kilgore Trout, “when I was twelve years old” (50). This provides another link to Vonnegut and his feelings concerning his mother. “Edith [Vonnegut] died in her sleep in her fifty-sixth year on May 14, 1944. Her death was attributed to an overdose of sleeping tablets taken possibly by mistake” (Palm Sunday 55). In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut made his mother a parallel to Bunny Hoover’s mother who died by swallowing Drano. Edith Vonnegut’s death was, luckily for Vonnegut, not as horrible since she died in her sleep (181). Kurt Vonnegut never said that his father killed his mother, but he does indicate that his father’s failing business and the downward spiral of the Vonnegut Family are major reasons for her early demise. According to Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was on his way home from the war when she passed on, surely making him feel guilty for his absence. According to Peter J. Reed, “His most direct references to this event come in Breakfast of Champions…but there are other indications of its impact in his recurring references to the mental health of this characters and himself and conceivably in his portrayals of women and marriages” (Reed, Dictionary 5). For all of the madness surrounding Vonnegut’s life, Trout always remained reliable, stable, and with his self-respect intact, even when his creator faltered.

Despite knowing that Trout was born in Bermuda, the reader never learns Trout’s nationality or any of his ancestry while the ancestry of Vonnegut has been recorded in many places, such as books, journals, speeches, and letters. Conversely, one aspect not shared by Vonnegut and Trout concerns their children. Vonnegut had three children of his own, and he also adopted the three children of his sister Alice when she died of cancer, and her husband died in a train accident the day before (Reed Dictionary 6). This incident is an example of Kurt Vonnegut’s life being stranger then fiction (Timequake 85). Nothing he ever wrote about Trout or by Trout could match what actually happened to his sister and brother-in-law. After Vonnegut and his wife, Jane Cox, finished raising all six children, they amicably divorced, thus providing the separation parallel between the two novelists. While hitching a ride to an Arts Festival in Midland City, Trout was asked by a truck driver if he was married, “‘Three times,’ said Trout. It was true. Not only that, but each of his wives had been extraordinarily patient and loving and beautiful. Each had been shriveled by his pessimism” (Breakfast 110). The same was the case with Vonnegut’s wife as she and both of his daughters were “born-again Christians now—working white magic through rituals and prayers” (Palm Sunday 235). The newly found religious of his family’s escapades are a far cry from Vonnegut’s stoic, freethinking philosophies. Also, Vonnegut’s only biological son went insane and wrote a book about getting well again called The Eden Express, concerning schizophrenia. Vonnegut calls him the best story- teller in the family when dealing with the relationship between mental health and culture (Timequake 241). Trout was never as respectful concerning his own line. Kilgore Trout’s only son Leon and his book Galapagos was attributed to Kurt Vonnegut and published in 1985. Trout recalled his son in the book Timequake, “In my entire career as a writer…I created only one living, breathing, three-dimensional character. I did it with my ding-dong in a birth canal. Ting-a-ling!” (63). Leon wrote Galapagos as a ghost, continually disgracing his father by not joining him in the blue tunnel of the afterlife because he wanted to see what happened next on earth (257). Vonnegut used Kilgore Trout’s relationship with his son to show how Vonnegut might have been as a father had he continued to pour his pessimism all over life like chocolate on a sundae. Instead, Vonnegut became famous and enlightened thus showering all six of his children with love, affection, and enough money to support them through any enterprise they might wish to undertake.

While the two authors never shared the same job, one parallel in their lives was that they both had to have secondary jobs in order to supplement their writings. Trout, since he received no payment for his art always had to have secondary jobs such as redeeming stamps in Hyannis, Mass (God Bless 19), installing storm windows and screens in Cohoes, NY (Breakfast 20), or leading a crew of newspaper delivery boys in Ilium, NY (Slaughterhouse 166) in order to support his one child and many ex-wives. Vonnegut found himself in the same boat as he worked as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau, as a public relations man for General Electric, as a car salesman for Saab, and as a teacher at Hopefield School (Morse 1) to provide for his extensive family. Vonnegut’s various employments also offered him inspiration for new works of fiction: being a reporter helped with his style and perspective, selling automobiles gave him the confidence and arrogance please the customer, and working for General Electric helped him to imagine a world in which Player Piano could exist. Trout, however, stayed far away from his own occupations, possibly because he wished to remain anonymous and if his life became his work, he would be resting a message of hope on a lifetime of suffering. While Trout did work for a newspaper in Slaughterhouse-Five, he had nothing to do with the reporting, writing, editing or even advertising; he was merely the man in charge of the boys who delivered the Illium Gazette to the people of the city (142). While Trout always remains a science-fiction author, almost everything else about him changes from book to book. His age is inconsistent, his whereabouts are constantly changing, he has a different job in each novel, yet the audience still believes that Trout’s overall image remains constant. Vonnegut is still alive as of this writing in 2004, Trout unfortunately is not. According to Vonnegut in Timequake, “He died at the age of eighty-four. A hobo for much of his life, he died in luxury in the Ernest Hemingway Suite of the writers’ retreat Xanadu in the summer resort village of Point Zion, Rhode Island. That’s nice to know” (xiii). Not only is the biographical information of Trout imperative to the authorial stance of Vonnegut, Trout’s written stories and synopses that pop up in so many novels are essential to understanding the scope of Vonnegut’s major themes and opinions.

CHAPTER THREE

AN ANALYTICAL SUMMARY OF KILGORE TROUT’S TALES

IN KURT VONNEGUT’S NOVELS

Complimenting Kurt Vonnegut’s short and fast paced prose, Kilgore Trout is employed to break up the fiction in such a way that the reader can understand a complicated Vonnegut plot through a simple allegorical story or a parallel story containing a similar theme. Often, Trout is merely another voice to compliment the main idea of a novel, lighten Vonnegut’s serious and sometimes pessimistic tone with humor or irony, or reinforce a major theme or motif. “Vonnegut has consistently used Trout’s quirky, rapid plots to inject vitality and pace. They contribute to tone with their often slapstick humor, their outrageousness, and their naïve but penetrating observations” (Leeds, Images 78). Through the novels God Bless you Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Jailbird, Hocus-Pocus, and Timequake, Vonnegut makes use of over 30 short stories attributed to Kilgore Trout to enhance the rich texture of his novels.

The first story attributed to Kilgore Trout is “2BRO2B”, a title that Vonnegut formerly used in a short story—showcased originally in the magazine Worlds of If (Mayo 38), and later in Bagombo Snuff Box, a compilation of short stories -- and taken from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. According to Vonnegut, “Trout’s favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved” (God Bless 20). “2BRO2B” is an excellent example of this formula. It eventually became like the short story “Welcome to the Monkey House” which was written for Playboy magazine in 1968 (Reed, The Short 98). The similarities between these two stories include overpopulation, cures for all serious diseases, machines taking over for humans, only people with three Ph.D.s finding employment, and Orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s next door to purple-roofed Ethical Suicide Parlors at every intersection (God Bless 20). The Howard Johnson’s are obvious symbols of our world that let the reader imagine that this might be his own society gone terribly wrong. By giving the reader commonplace elements, the reader will more likely take to heart the grim prognosis than if Trout’s action took place in an imaginary land or another world. The title “2BRO2B is important because Hamlet philosophizes on why he is a part of this world and what his possible uses could be. Eliot Rosewater is also a Hamlet-like character as others around him believe him to be insane while the reader is confused about what to think. The fact remains that most people did not feel very useful--according to the story and the novel--since computers and machines ran so much of their lives. In America in the 1960s this was not quite the case, but Vonnegut had the ability to see where things were going and how this possible future might affect the consciousness of the world. By using a Trout story to voice this opinion, the reader does not believe that Vonnegut is anti-technology or unpatriotic, therefore keeping the audience from turning against him.

Venus on the Half-shell is the first book attributed to Kilgore Trout in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. This novel is mentioned to re-emphasize the connection between sex and science-fiction as the back cover describes a space wanderer scene inside with words like, bosom, hips, thighs, husky, perspiring, and fragrant young breasts as a young woman tries to seduce the hero, shades of an impossibly hospitable world indeed (133). The title of the book and the “space wanderer” content are also references to The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut’s second novel, which was not widely read by the public until after God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater came out in paperback. Eventually, Venus on the Half Shell also came to have life outside of Vonnegut’s world, but not beyond the realm of the adaptable Kilgore Trout.

Three other science-fiction tales are attributed to Kilgore Trout in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The first tale is merely the reiteration of the Trout story “Oh Say Can You Smell” by Eliot Rosewater to his father. This synopsis intends to show that sometimes the simplest answer to a problem is not always the easiest or the sanest. Eliot, though a millionaire, can not find the time or the desire to shower on a day to day basis which opens the door for his father to comment on his atrocious smell and causes Eliot to convey one of his favorite Trout stories. The story takes place in a nameless country which had “tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors” (God Bless 156). The point of the research is to find a specific deodorant to mask every odor. Eliot’s father thought that the answer to the country’s problems would be to find one chemical that would eliminate all odors, but (as Eliot informs him) since the country’s ruler is a dictator, “he simply eliminated noses” (God Bless 156). Even though this synopsis is principally employed as a joke, “The story also takes aim at the senior Rosewater’s conservative politics that seek not to eliminate social inequalities but the sufferers’ perceptions of them” (Reed, The Short 129). Only by realizing what this country would be without freedom can we appreciate that democracy means being able to live without fear of dictators. On the flip side to this analysis is that one of the problems of living in a democracy means “never having to say you’re sorry”, which is the subject of Trout’s next story.

The First District Court of Thankyou is a book about ingratitude. The only thing we know about this country is that if you feel that someone was not “properly grateful” then you can take them to court. “If the defendant lost the case, the court gave him a choice between thanking the plaintiff in public, or going into solitary confinement on bread and water for a month. According to Trout, eighty percent of those convicted chose the black hole” (God Bless 163). Trout’s humor tends to involve the absurd or humor in order to emphasize a specific point, in this case that people are sometimes so proud that they can not give others the respect or kindness that they deserve. God Bless you Mr. Rosewater is a book about appreciation and awareness of man’s plight and the ability to make sacrifices even at the risk of hurting others. Vonnegut seems to be saying ‘if the people of earth can not learn to respect and honor each other, how will they ever be receptive of other worldly creatures, should they one day choose to contact us’. This type of humor shows the reader that even though God may not be watching, something even more powerful and more encompassing might be watching our every move.

In Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass absurdity is present to show that the logic of humans is not always the most sound. On an interstellar expedition to the rim of the universe, the Tralfamadorian (Alien) Commander tells the only earthling member that there is bad news from back on earth. The human asks if someone has died. The alien responds, “What’s died, my boy, is the Milky Way” (God Bless 185). This story is re-told just as Eliot is leaving Rosewater County on a bus bound for Indianapolis. Eliot is leaving his job, his adopted family, and his way of life for the past 10 years. In a sense, his whole universe has been shattered. This tale of Kilgore Trout places Eliot’s change of life into perspective and presents the distance that he feels as his universe became dislodged. “Trout’s stories typically contain elements of violence or apocalypse, and their science-fiction dimensions often permit a distancing that reduces the everyday to the absurd” (Leeds and Reed 71). The absurdity of the Milky Way being destroyed provides a link between Eliot leaving his home while, at the same time, slowly losing his mind. This story also uses a typical Tralfamadorian distancing technique to view disasters in the gigantic context of space and time, which would be explained more thoroughly in Slaughterhouse-Five. By alluding to early short fiction and previously written novels, Vonnegut is attempting to catch his readers up on his full canon, thus preparing them for the Magnum Opus to come.

Kilgore Trout returns for Kurt Vonnegut’s next novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and has another cameo near the end of the novel. Five stories by Trout are included in this manuscript and each one makes a different comment on the purposes or uselessness of war. The first story is related by Eliot Rosewater as he lies in a hospital ward and is a direct reference to Billy Pilgrim, the hero of the book. Since many people believe Pilgrim and Rosewater to be crazy, they are reassured by finding information that helps them to rationalize their mental deficiencies. The story Eliot narrates, “Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension,” is about people who cannot be cured of their mental illnesses because the causes are all in the fourth Dimension. The story also explained that “there really were vampires and werewolves and goblins and angels and so on, but that they were in the fourth Dimension” (90). This is also a comment on the Dresden Massacre, the focal point of the novel, which was never publicized or honored as a win for the Allies after World War II thus making Vonnegut feel as if the events were all in his head. The reason Eliot, who introduces Billy to Kilgore Trout, likes the story so much is that he and Billy are both in an insane asylum when this moment in time takes place.

“The Gospel from Outer Space” is a short story related by Rosewater and written by Kilgore Trout. Through this story Vonnegut communicates his feelings about Christianity and how this ‘peaceful’ religion must look to a Tralfamadorian who examines the Gospels for the first time. The Alien finds an inherent flaw in the Gospels being that “Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they normally thought…Oh, boy—they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!”(94). Trout continues, if there are wrong people to lynch, then obviously there must be right people to lynch, negating any peaceful message that one could glean from the Gospel as totally inaccurate. The Alien writes a new Gospel for the people of earth and gives it to them as a present (95). Trout’s story is useful here because it mockingly gives a pardon to anyone who has killed in war with the belief that God is on their side. In the middle of a novel which features the fire-burning of Dresden, the unspeakable terror of the Children’s Crusade, and the persecution of the barefoot, Christ-like Billy Pilgrim, a serious statement about the morals of these actions would become pointless. But, “Trout’s simple, humorous, hyperbolic stories deliver the message effectively without changing the author’s narrative stance in the novel” (Reed, The Short 131).

The following story is a parable, once again commenting on the tragic bombing of Dresden. The main character is a robot that drops burning jelly on human beings from airplanes. Unfortunately, the robot has terrible halitosis. The Robot is terribly unpopular not because he kills millions of people but because he has bad breath. Once his halitosis is cured, he becomes popular despite his job (Slaughterhouse 144). Entitled The Gutless Wonder, it was originally said to be published in 1932, marking the author’s prediction of Napalm as extraordinary (144). Even though the Americans and the British did unspeakable acts to Germany, as long as they presented themselves in a dignified manner, all was forgiven.

The first book attributed to Trout in Slaughterhouse-Five is the science-fiction fantasy entitled The Big Board. The story deals with the kidnapping of an earthling man and woman by aliens to be put on display in a Zircon-212 zoo (174). The most relevant information contained in this story is that it mimics what happens to Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack in the novel. Unfortunately since Billy read about the fantastical situation earlier, the reader is left questioning whether the kidnapping ever took place or if Billy just imagined it all. This was also the question that Vonnegut asked himself in his quest to find out the true history of “the Dresden Massacre” which usually only lead to dead-ends. The last story reiterated in the novel is merely a synopsis without a title:

Another Kilgore Trout book there in the window was about a man who built a

time machine so he could go back and see Jesus. It worked, and he saw Jesus when Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father. (174)

Jesus and his father are employed by Romans to construct a cross for the execution of a criminal to be executed. According to the story, Jesus and his father built the device and they were glad to have the work (175). This is a comment on the many good and honest people who do or have made weapons of mass destruction—sometimes without knowledge—merely because this or that government pays well and, stereotypically and realistically, people always need the money. One of the purposes of the novel is that people are not actually good or evil, but merely the products of “if the accident will” (2). After all, man is only the by-product of a seemingly random series of accidents, fitting snuggly against the accidents of humanity struggling with Mother Nature. The time-traveler’s ultimate purpose is to determine if Jesus was alive or not when the Romans nail him to the cross. He brings a stethoscope with him and he determines that Jesus was not living when he was taken down by his disciples. He also measures Jesus and finds him to be five feet and three and a half inches long (176). This story, along with other Christ tales, shows how Trout is a Jesus-like figure and how he embodied this view through compassion and poverty. He is compassionate for all human beings though he believes them to be foolish and he remains impoverished while writing imaginative pieces of prose. Trout drifts further away from this holy relationship in Breakfast of Champions as his maker—Kurt Vonnegut—finally bestows some good fortune upon Trout’s sunken shoulders and even makes him “fabulously well-to-do” (280).

The Christ imagery continues in Breakfast of Champions as Trout rises from the dregs of society and follows his creator into a life of fame and attention. But, the path to popularity is cluttered and filled with atrocities which Trout must comment on and expose for the betterment of the human race. Trout’s stories serve as rough texture for an already colorful Vonnegut universe. By layering one story on top of the truth and then wrapping it around the tail of a different story, Vonnegut expertly blends emotions, history, and fantasy together in a seamless web of fiction. This mixture comes to a boil in Breakfast of Champions, as Kurt Vonnegut weaves countless Trout stories and daydreams into the narrative flow.

Kilgore Trout’s stories in Breakfast of Champions serve as jokes, warnings, and examples of Vonnegut’s depressive tendencies. These stories combine to emphasize Vonnegut’s main theme: man is made up of chemicals that are responsible for his actions which appear to be mechanistic. According to James Lundquist, “The cosmic view that thus emerges…is based on the idea, hinted at but not very fully explored in the earlier novels, that we are robots or machines made up of rubbery tubes with boiling chemicals inside” (55). The main components of this core idea are contained in a novel written by Kilgore Trout called Now It Can be Told. The premise of the book is:

Everybody on Earth was a robot, with one exception—Dwayne Hoover. Of all the creatures in the Universe, only Dwayne was thinking and feeling and worrying and planning and so on. Nobody else knew what pain was. Nobody else had any choices to make. Everybody else was fully automatic machine, whose purpose was to stimulate Dwayne. Dwayne was a new type of creature being tested by the Creator of the Universe. Only Dwayne had free will. (15)

This meeting is in preparation of the real meeting that would occur between Vonnegut and Trout at the end of the novel. Vonnegut is trying the ideas out on a guinea pig [Dwayne Hoover] before he drops the bomb of free will on his most observant creation—Kilgore Trout. Vonnegut made Trout carry this novel with him as he went from his home to Midland City to participate in the Arts festival. The book is set up by the character/creator Kurt Vonnegut to get Dwayne Hoover—an almost insane automobile salesman—to read Trout’s novel and go on a crazy rampage, thus showing Trout the fruitlessness of losing his mind, when he discovers his newly found freedom. Now it Can be Told is the backbone of this novel and reiterates “Vonnegut’s belief that people are important and should control their own destinies” (Schott 107). To prove this case, Vonnegut cuts the strings of his puppet (Trout) thus giving him mortality accompanying the risk of death, just like everyone else.

The rest of Trout’s stories in Breakfast of Champions serve as warnings to a 1973 world against waste, arrogance, and the difficulties of communication. Gilgongo was a story that Trout made up in his head as he was hitching a ride with a trucker across New Jersey (86). After giving a diatribe about the evils of conservation to the truck driver, Trout became bored and came up with an anti-conservation story called “Gilgongo”. This tale “was about a planet which was unpleasant because there was too much creation going on” (86). “Gilgongo” means ‘extinct’ in the language of the planet and the story centers around one man’s quest to rid the world of panda bears. On this planet, Mother Nature was so creative that the people ended up being suffocated by a blanket of animals being created every day (87). If the United States had the same extinction problems as this planet then there might be forgiveness for willful acts of destruction against animals. But our planet (especially in 1973) had already almost completely wiped out the buffalo by this time, thus demonstrating the ignorance of destroying the planet from the outside in. Throughout the book, there are many examples of humans destroying the earth through pollution, greed, and ignorance. Plague on Wheels is an excellent example of the destruction through the pollution of carbon monoxide in the environment. This novel deals with the planet of “Lingo-Three, whose inhabitants resemble American automobiles” (26). This planet’s main problem is that they are becoming extinct because they had destroyed the planet’s resources. While this planet could not be saved, Zeltoldimarians, inch-high aliens who visited the planet before the end, promise to tell others across the galaxy how wonderful the creatures had been. These aliens end up coming to earth and spreading their story of the automobiles to humans, thus condemning Earthlings to follow in Lingo-Three’s footsteps. Here, in Trout’s words, is what happens to people who try to speak up against the atrocities of pollution:

Little Kago himself died long before the planet did. He was attempting to lecture

on the evils of the automobile in a bar in Detroit. But he was so tiny that nobody paid any attention to him. He laid down to rest for a moment and a drunken automobile worker mistook him for a kitchen match. He killed Kago by trying to strike him repeatedly on the underside of a bar. (29)

This sounds a little like banging one’s head against the wall. Trout’s stories rationalize the preposterous ideas that humans share in an attempt to show the ludicrousness of seemingly normal activities like driving or animal preservation.

The other important stories showcased in Breakfast of Champions are Delmore Skag “The Dancing Fool,” The Son of Jimmy Valentine, and How you Doin’?. Delmore Skag is actually not the name of a book or story but merely a main character in one of Trout’s novels. In a time when everyone had huge families, a bachelor found a way to clone himself in chicken soup (21). His purpose was to force the government to make laws preventing people from having large families, instead the government made laws about single people possessing chicken soup. This exaggeration is a comment on the way that the government tends to enforce laws that oppose the Christian or moral fabric of our society. To reduce the number of children people have is unthinkable, but just limiting single people’s access to chicken soup skirts around the issue until there is no space for all the people that are brought into this world. Delmore attempted to communicate with the U.S. Government by making them act to slow down over-population, instead, he was probably [story ends without a conclusion] arrested for breaking yet another pointless and counter-productive law.

Black Garterbelt Magazine features a story of Trout’s called “The Dancing Fool” which introduced aliens from “Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing” (58). When Zog—A Margonian who came to earth—tried to warn some residents of Connecticut that their house was on fire, the owner of the house smashed Zog’s head in with a golf club (58). So often, people do not listen to the messages of others merely because they do not understand the words as they arrive. With a little determination, Trout persists; people could learn so much about their lives, their country and their world if they would simply attempt to understand the ideas and the situations of people different from themselves.

The advancing role of women in 1970’s politics is approached in The Son of Jimmy Valentine. This short book is about a man who could please women so well that he could seduce any woman (151). According to Trout, Jimmy Valentine was a safe cracker who could open up any safe in the country. His son, Ralston, had some of the same skills but he applies them to women’s bodies only. Eventually, he becomes President of the United States thanks mainly to women votes (151). This story either promotes woman’s raising voice in politics through their increasing role and numbers, or degrades women by showing how easily they can be felled by a slick talker with good hands.

The novel, How you Doin’?, describes a planet near Earth that is totally dependent on statistical averages (169). Everyone is so concerned with how they measure up to national averages, that the planet of Earth can easily invade the planet after rigging the averages to be so high that the inhabitants feel inferior. With such low self-confidence, the natives are easily overcome by the earthen army. Not only is this story a denouncement of manifest destiny but also on the inherent problems of statistics and how they can be manipulated to support or condemn any opinion.

A few other Trout stories appear in Breakfast of Champions merely as jokes. Has anyone heard the one about “The Smart Bunny” whose head is so big that she thought she had a tumor? She is actually just incredibly intelligent, but on the way to getting the tumor removed, she is shot and killed by a farmer. The farmer and his wife decide not to eat the bunny because they were afraid that she might carry a disease in her oversized head (232). Or, has anyone heard the joke about the forty rich people who own all the land of the Hawaiian Islands? The government is forced to give the other million inhabitants balloons so that they could hover in the air without taking up room. The name of the story is “This Means You” after the trespassing signs that usually appear on wealthy people’s lawns (73). Wouldn’t it be funny if town planners decide to “tell derelicts where they were and what was about to happen to them by putting up actual street signs like this, “SKID ROW” (184)? An illustration drawn by Vonnegut shows how this sign would look to a person who was unfamiliar with street signs. Whether Trout’s stories are jokes, warnings, or predictions they “comment on the major themes in Breakfast of Champions and thereby tighten the novel’s structure” (Schott 105). Since Vonnegut’s next novel Slapstick contains no short stories, six years passed before the world heard from Kilgore Trout again. Vonnegut grants Trout’s wish momentarily and lets him be young as requested in Breakfast of Champions, but he also has him cooped up and writing stories from a prison cell.

While the character of Kilgore Trout changes more for Jailbird than any other novel, the presence of the science-fiction guru helps mold Jailbird’s narrative form. Only two of Trout’s stories appear in this novel, perhaps showing that while Trout is getting older and thus slowing down, he is not out for the count. The first story is “Asleep at the Switch” written by Bob Fender under the pseudonym Kilgore Trout. The story begins with a large reception area outside the pearly gates “filled with computers and staffed by people who had been certified public accountants or investment counselors or business managers back on earth” (Jailbird 184). In what seems to be a condemnation of the parable of talents, all new arrivals in heaven must sit through an audit to determine if they made the most of their capital transactions while on earth. If the counselor deems that the newly deceased person did not make full advantage of his opportunities, they spout the mantra of, “And there you were, asleep at the switch again” (184). When Einstein dies and passes through the gates, the managers tell him of all the ways that he could have increased his worldly goods for himself and his ancestors. Einstein recognizes what no one else seems to understand, if everyone had taken advantage of every opportunity that had come their way, the paper wealth of the planet would quickly exceed the amount of all the minerals in the universe. Einstein points out this fallacy to God, thinking that the almighty was unaware of the problem. God tells him to keep his mouth closed or he will take away his prized violin. Einstein of course obeys. The placement of this story in a novel concerned with the distribution of wealth and the implications of the few controlling more than the majority fits in nicely with the themes that Vonnegut incorporates into the novel. “Trout becomes one of the ways that Vonnegut keeps alive the mischievous, adolescent irreverence, seen in his earliest writing and manifest again and again in his later work, that questions all assumptions and authorities” (Reed, The Short 133). Trout is Vonnegut’s tool to keep him young and in touch with his pre-popular self.

The next place in Jailbird that a Trout story appears is Playboy Magazine, under the name, Frank X. Barlowe, which are both pseudonyms of Bob Fender. While the title of the story is never mentioned, it is relayed by Walter F. Starbuck (narrator and consummate jailbird) right as he is being released from prison for the first time. The action of Barlowe’s story begins two and a half galaxies from Earth on the planet of Vicuna, a planet that has doomed itself by consuming all time through waste and neglect, where a judge must scour the universe to find a new body to inhabit (Jailbird 61). The judge loses his body and his soul must find a new resting place or be doomed to a lack of society forever. The judge does not realize that once he enters an earthling’s body, he and the body he chooses will become inseparable in much the same way that barnacles come to be attached to boat hulls. The judge ends up flying into the ear of a man in a minimum security prison, which he believes to be some type of philosopher’s meditation center. The judge, according to Frank X. Barlowe, flies into Walter Starbuck’s ear because the judge believes him to be the wisest of all the philosophers when he is actually chanting, “Sally in the garden, Sifting cinders, Lifted up her leg And farted like a man…” (Jailbird 60). Walter Starbuck is about to enter the world again after many years in prison. His wife died right before he was arrested, his son will not talk to him, and most of the world believes that he not only sold out his best friend, but also was an active member of Watergate. For all intent and purposes, he is a man without a body, merely floating here and there and not helping or harming anyone. He soon comes to realize that his actions and words affect all of the people that he encounters and his deeds completely change history. Conversely if Fender’s story is true and the judge truly is in Starbuck’s head, he would be in store for quite an excellent ride as Walter Starbuck’s life is about to become very complicated with people, unexpected trips, but eventually another stint in prison. The imprisonment of the judge inside Starbuck’s head is fitting since when the judge lived in Vicuna he was responsible for many ‘white collar criminal’s’ demise by sentencing them to not only having their ears plugged up so that their souls could not escape, but also “their bodies were put into artificial ponds filled with excrement—up to their necks. Then deputy sheriffs drove high-powered speedboats at their heads” (56). The relevance of the Vicunians burning time (99) is a comment on the way that the people of Earth continue to use up resources to live a comfortable, self-centered life. Earth, like Vicuna, has no thoughts about tomorrow. Tomorrow is creeping up slowly on Kurt Vonnegut and only three more books are left to be written before Indianapolis’s son lays down his pen and ends Trout’s life through silence.

Even though Galapagos is narrated by Kilgore Trout’s son Leon, only one of Trout’s stories is included in the body of the text. While Leon is pondering why people have certain traits such as blindness, cynicism, heartlessness, greed, depression and even furriness, he is reminded of one of his father’s novels entitled The Era of Hopeful Monsters. According to the synopsis, a planet like Earth has ignored “their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment causing many birth defects to occur in the children that were conceived” (83). Even though most children died naturally or were killed by the elders, a few anomalies remained and they were nature’s experiment with creating a humanoid that does not destroy its own planet. Since a major idea in Galapagos is the over-sized human brain, this novel by Trout’s puts Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection to the test as an example of how earth might possibly rid itself of over-population, crime, and pollution. Also, one of the main premises of Galapagos is that the author, the soul of Leon Trout, flew into a Captain’s ear, riding around inside like a passenger. This is similar to a story written by his father earlier in Jailbird, in which a Tramfalmadorian flew into the ear of Walter F. Starbuck and instantly stuck forever (98).

Despite having such a large role in Galapagos, Trout’s tales are not as necessary to this novel thanks to the employment of memorable quotes, which appear every few pages. Vonnegut breaks up the action of the story through Mandarax, a translator/portable computer that knows more languages then anything or anybody. Unfortunately, Mandarax is useless to the last inhabitants of the earth and their offspring since the majority of the people speak Kanka-bono, a language not found in the super-computer (78). These quotes help to show the trivialness of man’s conquest of science and technology if no one is around to appreciate those achievements or even understand basic concepts unless they deal with getting more food.

While Black Garterbelt magazine is featured in Hocus Pocus, Vonnegut’s second to last novel, Kilgore Trout’s name is completely left out. The story could easily be written by him since it features: Tramfalmadorians helping control the destiny of man [in this case Adam and Eve], humans being too stupid to realize that they are being manipulated [shades of The Sirens of Titan], and everyone destroying the planet though physics, math, science, and religion (Hocus Pocus 190). One curious footnote is that while Trout’s name is never mentioned in this text he is constantly referred to by narrator Eugene Hartke as “the nameless author” throughout the summation of the story. By leaving Trout out of the picture, Vonnegut is merely preparing him for his grand finale and a book all his own. Alongside another authorless story in Palm Sunday entitled “The Big Space Fuck” which deals with children divorcing their parents and jizzum being shot into space, the preparation and education of the audience for a book that concentrates on Kilgore Trout is complete (226).

Vonnegut’s last novel is published in 1996, and with it Kilgore Trout receives his epilogue and his obituary all rolled into one. Timequake, narrated by Kurt Vonnegut, finally pays homage to Vonnegut’s consummate alter ego. The story of Timequake actually sounds like a plot conceived by Kilgore Trout:

a timequake, a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum, made everybody and

everything do exactly what they’d done during a past decade, for good or ill, a

second time. It was déjà vu that wouldn’t quit for ten long years. You couldn’t

complain about life’s being nothing but old stuff, or ask if just you were going nuts or if everybody was going nuts. (xii)

While this is actually the process describing Timequake 1 and later adapted into what became of the second novel, the premise remains the same for the published work. In order for Trout to meet his end, Vonnegut must explain his beginning. He constantly refers to Trout throughout the novel and Trout communicates many memories and admonishments as they talk together near the end of Trout’s life. Trout tells Vonnegut about the first story that he ever wrote, a story that took place in Camelot. Merlin casts a spell that allows all of the members of the round table to have submachine guns to vanquish their enemies and therefore let good prevail over evil, but Sir Galahad accidentally shoots the Holy Grail and kills Queen Guinevere (xiii). The advancement of machinery and society needs to work slowly so that humans do not change too rapidly thus placing earth in grave danger. Trout often puts medieval people into modern situations to show what happens when technology makes advances that may sound promising but actually have detrimental effects.

Trout’s next story brings back memories of the Trout of Slaughterhouse-Five and the anti-war stories contained within. “No Laughing Matter” is a story about the ways in which World War II affected everyone in the world. “Joy’s Pride”, the name of the story and the airplane, is preparing to drop a third atomic bomb on Yokohama, Japan to complete the destruction that had already been wrought in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The name of the plane has two meanings since pride can mean either a lion’s family or self respect, thus aligning the crew and the plane with the side of good and right. As the plane is nearing its selected target, Trout points out an A-bomb which is slung underneath the bottom of the hull, “A purple motherfucker as big as a boiler in the basement of a mid-sized junior high school” (8). The bomb is too big to even fit inside the bomb bay. As the crew is nearing the target they begin to muse on the effects that the bomb will have on the city below them and the world around them. Since the plane was named after one of the pilot’s mothers, he began to suspect that his mom would not be proud of the amount of killing achieved by her son. The pilot relays his discontent to the rest of the crew who feel the same way and therefore decide to turn that plane around and return home. A court martial hearing follows to prosecute the young men who had disobeyed orders. The title of the story is due to when the bomber returned to base all of the people on the base acted crazy, peed on themselves, jumped from windows, and crashed their vehicles. When the jurors of the court-martial erupt into guffaws after hearing the prosecutor explain the actions of the base, the judge bangs on his gavel and declares that this is “no laughing matter” (10). In an ironic twist to end the story, “A huge crack opened in the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It swallowed Banalulu, court-martial, Joy’s Pride, unused atom bomb and all” (10). Thirty years after Slaughterhouse-Five and fifty years after the actions that Vonnegut’s most famous book and this short story present, Vonnegut’s views have not changed concerning the pointlessness of war and the ruthlessness of the people who historically come out as winners. Trout’s next story in Timequake also has an anti-war message, although this time the planet is not earth but Planet Booboo in the Crab Nebula. This story is particularly interesting because of the ways in which familiar technologies have affects on people (even aliens) and their relationships with each other.

“The Sisters B-36” takes place in another universe which has never had any contact with earth, therefore the name of the three sisters and an American bomber being the same is merely a coincidence (15). What is not coincidental are the parallels that this world shares with Earth such as language, large brains, love of mind-warping television, and because of television’s influence, an almost complete lack of imagination (20). In an apparent King Lear motif, the three main characters of the book are three sisters who want to be loved by the people of their planet. The first two sisters try to give the people pleasure through wonderful paintings and creative short stories. Since the third sister has no imagination, but still wants the admiration of the people, she invents television so that the people of Booboo will stop adoring her sisters so much. The ‘bad’ sister never becomes popular but she destroys imagination on her planet and invents other atrocities such as “automobiles and computers and barbed wire and flamethrowers and land mines and machine guns and so on. That’s how pissed off she was” (18). Under the influence of television, Booboolings stopped reading fiction thus making them the most merciless creatures in the universe. The people of earth have also stopped reading fiction due to the phenomenon of television, and thanks to abounding ruthless dictators and the public’s zombie resignation, writers like Vonnegut, Salinger, Bradbury, Cheever, O’Connor, and O’Hara can not succeed merely as writers of short stories as they could in the first half of the century.

A brief story called “Dr. Schadenfreude” also appears in Timequake but in very limited form. All that the reader knows about this doctor is that when a patient mentions “I, me, my, or myself” the doctor goes into a frenzy shouting things such as, “When will you ever learn that nobody cares anything about you, you, you, you boring, insignificant piece of poop? Your whole problem is you think you matter!” (61). This story is almost as far from science-fiction as a writer can get since the action does not take place in a far off universe but in St. Paul, Minnesota. This is a reference to many of Vonnegut’s early stories which did not contain any technological information at all but were merely solid stories with engaging plot twists. Unfortunately “Dr. Schadenfreude” has no plot twists and the reader must take the story at face value. The story is a comment about the amount of people who attend therapy and only talk about themselves thus putting them into the center of the universe without regard for other peoples’ thoughts or feelings.

Sometimes, when a great artist creates a masterpiece, he will suddenly step back and admire the view while asking the pivotal question, “How the hell did I do that?” (68). Trout asks this question after re-reading something that he had once thrown away and momentarily forgotten. The story in question is “Bunker Bingo Party,” and the scene which so amazes Trout is this: “A boy and a girl, explaining the rules of Bingo, become the center of the Universe for Nazis in full regalia, including a gaga Adolf Hitler” (65). The simplicity of the most evil dictator to ever almost rule the earth spending the last minutes of his life learning how to play a game so trivial and peaceful not only brings biblical images of lamb lying with the wolves but also of the innocent influencing the guilty no matter how late in the game (World War II). The irony arrives when Hitler wins the game of Bingo, which he believes can only be a miracle a purveyor of hope and surely a good sign. After the bombs began to fall, an un-apologetic Hitler kills himself and speaks his last words, “I never asked to be born in the first place” (70). No matter the cruelties that Hitler inflicted during his lifetime, the fact that he had to be created by something more powerful than himself reinforces his defense of being more a product of his lineage than his upbringing. The message does not try to condone Hitler’s actions, but merely reiterates the Vonnegut theme of no one being absolutely good or absolutely evil. Trout’s next story tries to explain the nature of great ideas and how man advanced fellow man through innovation, thought, philosophy, mathematics, or even writing.

The last story in Timequake besides one play and one short poem is entitled “Dog’s Breakfast” and “it was about a mad scientist named Fleon Sunoco, who was doing research at the national Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Sunoco believed really smart people had little receivers in their heads, and were getting their bright ideas from somewhere else” (91). After all, Trout has been getting his ideas from discarded Kurt Vonnegut stories for the past 40 years so why not tell a story which attributes good ideas to people in areas outside of literature. As most Trout stories tend to focus on the pessimistic, Trout states that computers, or whoever or whatever planted these devises in certain people’s brains, are trying to kill the human race by giving them too much to think about. Using a Frankenstein motif, the mad scientist continually searches out new Mensa-approved brains so that he can dissect them to see if they have anything unusual in them. As Suoco reports in his diary, “There is no way an unassisted brain, which is nothing more than a dog’s breakfast, three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge, could have written ‘Stardust,’ let alone Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony” (93). Sunoco’s big discovery comes when he begins to find little snot colored bumps (possibly a radio) in the inner ears of really smart people and nothing in the ears of stupid people. The twist of the story arrives when Sunoco realizes that in order for him to have discovered this amazing phenomenon, a little radio must be implanted inside of his brain also. The computers, or whatever they are, must have needed him to make this discovery in order to complete their assassination of the human race. Sunoco, with the guidance of his ‘dog’s breakfast’, throws himself off of a building. This story is a final harkening to the original purpose of Kilgore Trout: a reminder that all great ideas have consequences and man is never as alone as he believes himself to be.

A play and a poem also grace the pages of Timequake, probably left over from drafts of earlier Vonnegut books. The poem is a very short Japanese style poem, which deals with the presence of nature. The poem that he wrote is very singular since it is the only poem in his canon and written on the day that he died.

Did Kilgore Trout ever write poems? So far as I know, he wrote only one. He did it on the penultimate day of his life. He was fully aware that the Grim Reaper was coming, and coming soon. It is helpful to know that there was a tupelo tree between the mansion and the carriage house at Xanadu, Wrote Trout

When the tupelo

Goes poop-a-lo,

I’ll come back to youp-a-lo.

This silly little poem illustrates the frailty of human life and how we are linked to the environment through nature. The poem also demonstrates why Vonnegut does not write poetry for publication. Trying something and knowing the result will be sub-par is easier if you attribute the work to someone else. However, one thing that Vonnegut failed at and then attributed to Trout had to do with theatre. Vonnegut wrote a play in1970 accompanying the statement, ‘“I’m though with novels. I’m writing a play. It’s plays from now on”’ (Happy Birthday vii). The play was mostly unsuccessful because, “Actors complained that there were no parts for stars, that everybody got to talk as much as everybody else, that nobody changed or was proved right or wrong at the end” (Happy Birthday ix). The play only ran off-Broadway for 5 and ½ months and soon was merely a footnote in the history of the avant-garde New York theatre scene. Vonnegut was so enamored with drama because it gave him another extended family besides the fictitious ones on the page and the real people at his home in Cape Cod. As reported in Timequake, Trout also completed a play in his lifetime, entitled The Wrinkled Old Family Retainer. The play is about a wedding with the bride being named Mirabile Dictu, Flagrante Delicto, and Scrotum “the eponymous wrinkled old family retainer” (154). This sounds more like an Italian opera then a play by a science-fiction guru. No plot is given by Vonnegut or Trout for this theatrical enterprise, but the reader does learn that Trout had the play copyrighted in the late 1940’s. Vonnegut wrote Happy Birthday Wanda June while he was going through a midlife crisis and it is completely different from any book that he ever published, just like Trout’s play seems nothing like the rest of the fiction that the aging science-fiction anomaly wrote. Vonnegut shows Trout’s diversity and willingness to change in Timequake to represent the ways in which Vonnegut also changed during his long and illustrious career. A writer who is not able to make changes and evolve as an author will become stale in the eyes of the reader and suffer at the desks of the critics.

Timequake is the last novel completed by Kurt Vonnegut and if this is indeed the end, “It makes a fitting coda. It bids farewell to his alter ego Trout, and through Trout’s irreverent tales it looks back to the short stories with which Vonnegut’s career began. And it casts a backward glance at the events and people who have been the making of his life and fiction” (Reed, Dictionary 32). Timequake is a novel that sums up Kilgore Trout’s life and in return lets the reader in on the struggles of Vonnegut of the 1940’s and 1950’s. With so many references in so many novels, Kilgore Trout is easily one of the most fleshed out imaginary characters to ever compliment an author’s life. Even without Vonnegut’s direction, Trout came to life in many ways outside of a Vonnegut novel through newspapers, obituaries, proclamations, and even a published Trout novel.

CHAPTER FOUR

HOW KILGORE TROUT FARES IN THE REAL WORLD

As is often the case with memorable characters in great literature, Kilgore Trout seems to fly off of the page and straight into the reader’s imagination; this is evident not only in the ways in which he is depicted by Vonnegut but also in the ways that he comes alive outside of Vonnegut’s fiction. Trout has not only been recognized by the City of New York and newspapers across the world, but he also has written his own novel to separate himself from his creator. While Vonnegut was working on the Cornell Sun back in 1941 he invented the bumbling anti-hero named Peachy Fellow who’s alter ego’s name was Kent Trent , clearly a play on Clark Kent. According to Peter J. Reed, “It is an intriguing coincidence that Vonnegut arrives at the initials “KT” for a pathetic figure of parody, and sets him in a short episode as hyperbolic and satirical as the plots that later are to come from the pen of Kilgore Trout himself” (Leeds, Images 67). The question could be debated; which one of these aging science-fiction writers is supposed to be Superman and which is supposed to merely be a reporter? A case could conceivably be made for both arguments. After all, Trout actually saves the world in Timequake and Breakfast of Champions while Vonnegut merely reports the facts as a narrator. On the flip side, Vonnegut has helped change the world through didactic social commentary and the foreshadowing of pessimistic prophesies while Trout throws his stories away without caring if they are ever read or made applicable to the people who need the inherent guidance. Kilgore Trout broke free from his role as hero/sidekick and soon became acknowledged independently and not merely through the actions of Kurt Vonnegut.

In 1974, after the release of Breakfast of Champions, Greg Mitchell wrote a piece for Crawdaddy Magazine entitled Meeting My Maker: “A Visit with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., by Kilgore Trout”. Many of Trout’s words sound repetitive in the interview because they were lifted from Vonnegut’s first six novels. However, in the early seventies, people could read this interview and feel as if they were part of a family that understood and knew Vonnegut.

In this unusual article, Greg Mitchell took on the persona of Vonnegut’s famous character Kilgore Trout, the down-and-out science-fiction writer. Although he used a fictional framework in this piece, Mitchell actually interviewed Vonnegut, so the responses attributed to the author are authentic. (Allen 133)

While the responses from Vonnegut seem genuine, the Trout words seem hollow and out of place since anyone who has read the novels more then once will recognize them and remember the context in which they were originally written. The best part about the interview is that it is not forced. The questions and answers read more like fiction then a proper interview format making it especially informative to someone who is doing research on Kilgore Trout. The mock interview reiterates many of Trout’s most memorable stories and puts Vonnegut in the same room with Trout, Rosewater, Bokonon, and Howard W. Campbell, Jr. At the end of the article, Mitchell apologizes for telling lies and sets Trout free once again with the words, “I am through with him. Let others use him” (Allen 155). During the same year another author took up the pen of Kilgore Trout and did something unprecedented in the literary world.

Another publication from Kilgore Trout became available in 1974 to some reader’s joy and others consternation. Venus on the Half-Shell, attributed to Kilgore Trout, was actually written by Philip Jose Farmer although his name is nowhere on the cover or contained in the publication information. The premise of the book loosely follows the standard that Vonnegut created in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in which the title and idea were first introduced. Farmer took the paragraph containing the Space Wanderer, Queen Margaret of the planet Shaltoon, and a search for the meaning of life; and stretched the journeys of the Space Wanderer across an entire novel. The strongest parts of the book are the descriptions of the alien planets and the attitudes of the creatures that the Space Wanderer encounters. Another parallel to Vonnegut’s style is the plot of earth being destroyed by a hostile race called Hoonhors. “One thing they can’t stand is seeing a people kill off their own planet. You know, pollution. So they’ve been locating these, and when they do, they clean it up” (Venus 32). Cleaning involves releasing a substance that precipitates moisture, thus flooding the earth.

The unknowing public in 1975, upon seeing a Kilgore Trout book, would automatically assume that it was written by Vonnegut since he is the only writer with a connection to that make-believe author. While Vonnegut did agree to the book, he did have reservations,

I have never met him (Farmer). He kept calling me up, though, and saying ‘Please let me write a Kilgore Trout book.’ He was delighted by the character and, as I say, he was a respected writer himself, so I finally said, ‘Okay, go ahead.’ There was not money involved, by the way; I didn’t get a cent of royalties. (Conversations 213)

When critics learned that Vonnegut had not written Venus on the Half-Shell--Farmer did little to hide the authorship of the novel--but someone else, many readers felt swindled for having bought the book thinking it was by Vonnegut. One conclusion drawn by readers was that Farmer made a great deal of money on the deal. According to Farmer, however, this was not the case.

I will repeat and insist upon the fact that it was not the money I hoped to make from writing as Kilgore Trout that caused me to write the novel. It was a tribute to KV inspired because of my admiration of his works – up through KV’s Breakfast of Champions. I don’t care what KV says…And I thought it’d be a splendid idea if a book by Trout, whom everybody thought was a fictional character, did appear. Fantasy would become reality – at least for a while. (The Official Philip Jose Farmer Home Page)

Originally, Vonnegut gave permission to Farmer to write this book and only later recanted after getting so much criticism for the ways in which the book was marketed. Both authors have claimed that if they could do their lives over again that the book would not be written since it caused so much uproar and awkwardness (Allen 213 and The Official Philip Jose Farmer Home Page). Despite the two dismissals, Venus on the Half-Shell is an enterprising novel which explores not only outer space but the inter-workings of man’s consciousness as well. The book is a testament to the legacy of Trout and the dismay that always seems to shadow the enterprising master of fiction.

Trout received notice in 2001 though and even recognized by the then current mayor of New York City, Michael R. Bloomberg in a proclamation celebrating the eightieth birthday of Kurt Vonnegut. In a comedy roast fashion, Bloomberg makes light of Vonnegut’s age, smoking habits, and inclusion in New York Times Crosswords before truly honoring Vonnegut:

Now therefore, I, Michael R. Bloomberg, Mayor of the City of New York and

Kilgore Trout devotee, in recognition of Kurt’s 80^th Birthday, and for all of his aforementioned contributions to society, do hereby proclaim Monday, November 11, 2002 in the City of New York as: “KURT VONNEGUT, JR. DAY”. (KV Proclamation)

This inclusion of Kilgore Trout further solidifies his right hand placement beside Vonnegut and shows the devotion that true fans not only have for the genius himself, but also for his most completely realized character.

A writer knows when a character he has created begins having life outside of the author’s recorded universe that the character is liked enough by the public to exist without the author’s help. Kilgore Trout not only got to interview his creator, but he garnered recognition by the Mayor of New York City, and was able to have a printed, published book on the shelves without the name Kurt Vonnegut Jr. attached. There is no way that Kurt Vonnegut could have imagined the successes that have not only befallen himself but also his chief creation.

Vonnegut’s first four novels all had outside voices to illustrate a theme or reiterate a major Vonnegut idea. Player Piano used the Shah of Bratpuhr to show Americans how the United States was beginning to look to foreign countries and Salo from The Sirens of Titan demonstrated how earthlings do not even control their own destinies. Ed from Player Piano and Howard Campbell Jr. from Mother Night show the hardships of the writer and the difficulties encountered trying to put thoughts down on a page. Bokonon from Cat’s Cradle tied religion into the plight of the writer/political activist and the dangers that come from people who believe the lies that are inherent in fiction. All of these early characters are combined with the technical side of Kurt Vonnegut’s work to create the ever-evolving Kilgore Trout: science-fiction writer, loner, peasant, rebel, and guru to give the public an example of what Vonnegut would have become without the support and admiration of the younger generations. Vonnegut makes himself feel young writing excerpts from Trout’s sorrowful life and pitiful existence. No matter the hardships that Trout endures though, the ideas that he presents remain constant, humanitarian, and wise. After all, popularity does not determine fine literature, but fine literature usually produces popularity. Trout was never popular, and Vonnegut is possibly the most recognized writer of the 20^th Century. The point is that even if Vonnegut never achieved popularity he would still be a great writer. Even if he had lived his life in shelters and on the streets without ever publishing anything yet still writing such works as Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, would that change the placement of his name with the writers of great literature? Vonnegut commented on this phenomenon in a joint book that he wrote with Lee Stringer in 1999:

One of the last books Twain wrote (Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven?). This

Mississippi River pilot finally dies and, ah, he goes to heaven. He’s given a harp

And…He sits on a cloud. And he says, ‘Well, what’s goin’ on?’ Well, there’s

going to be a parade. And so here the parade comes and these people are marching in order of rank. And there’s Abraham and there’s Jesus and there’s Muhammad, leading. Behind them it’s Shakespeare, and the great writers of all time. Then there’s a little guy marching all by himself. Stormfield was bale to identify the others, but he’s got to ask who the little guy is. And it turns out this guy is the greatest writer who ever lived. He’s a tailor, a Jewish tailor from Tennessee. And he wrote, and threw everything he wrote in a trunk. And one night a bunch of ruffians decided to have fun with this guy. And they tarred and feathered him, rode him out of town on a rail, just for fun, threw him in a ditch, and he died of pneumonia. And his wife hated him, was ashamed of him, and burned the trunk. (Vonnegut and Stringer 74)

While nowhere does Vonnegut say that he believes in heaven, the ideas that people have of heaven often figure into his writing. While Vonnegut has never stated the fact before, the Tailor from Tennessee is possibly where Vonnegut got the inspiration to create Kilgore Trout, the consummate lowly author. Another part of Trout is of course based on Vonnegut himself and is illustrated by something that his son Mark once said when asked what it was like to grow up with a famous father. “When I was growing up, my father was a car salesman who couldn’t get a job teaching at Cape Cod Junior College” (Timequake 14). Trout would not have existed had Vonnegut stayed unpopular and un-noteworthy. On the flip side, Vonnegut’s greatest works might have come out much differently if he had written them from the pessimistic viewpoint of an un-employed writer instead of a wealthy and respected guru.

Like Stephen King did with Richard Bachman, Vonnegut created Trout so that he could have the opportunity to write from a different viewpoint and the freedom to express ideas that they might not approach as themselves, but Kilgore Trout represents much more. The major difference is that while Bachman was a pseudonym, Trout was merely a character that after being mentioned in numerous books began to have life of his own. While Bachman was created because of King’s popularity, Trout was created because of Vonnegut’s unpopularity. As noted earlier, the first Vonnegut book to really make any money or be reviewed was God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the first book that Trout ever appeared. One might argue that he was the spawn of Vonnegut’s success. He completes Vonnegut’s Ying Yang. He provides the necessary balance for Vonnegut to express the ideas that he champions while still remaining humble and all-encompassing to his legion of fans. Vonnegut, like the Tailor from Tennessee, is ready to take his place in the parade of heaven but it seems reasonable that he will be there as two people: himself and Kilgore Trout; after all they are one in the same. Both these men represent a road stretching from the Kurt Vonnegut of 1965 when he created Trout in the first place. While each ended in very different places amongst society, Vonnegut could not have succeeded had he not been able to picture what his life would have been like if he had chosen the other road. Trout stated in Timequake his connection to Vincent Van Gogh and why he sometimes went by that name, “he painted pictures that astounded him with their importance, even though nobody else thought they were worth a damn, and I write stories that astonish me, even though nobody else thinks they’re worth a damn” (92). This once again reiterates the inadequacies of that age-old question: what is art? And also stresses the fact that art like love is truly in the eye of the beholder.

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A Thesis

Presented to

August 2004

By

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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