Changing of the Old Guard: Time Travel and Literary Technique in the Work of Kurt Vonnegut

Abstract

[She joined] hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, middle, and an end.'In a sharp double renunciation, the narrator, in this passage from Breakfast rif Champions, neatly draws together two commonplace assumptions: that life is meaningful, and that stories are meaningful. Significantly, in rejecting the idea that life is like a story the narrator, who by implication is very dose to Vonnegut himself (later in the novel he appears as Kurt Vonnegut), also rejects the idea that teleological development~a beginning, a middle, and an end -is anything more than an illusion in either stories or life.The association between narrative development and meaning (tlcssons to be learned') is apposite, for the hackneyed demand that stories have a beginning, middle, and an end is surely founded on the assumption that it is in a traditional sequencing of events that meaning resides: beginning must develop into a recognizably distinct middle, and the end must modify and resolve the issues raised in the middle. When beginning, middle, and end are strung together in one story, a causal and teleological development is implied, and the identification of the cause driving events is what gives meaning to the story.Even where plot development is little more than a sequence of events lacking a coherent linking narrative drive, say in a picaresque tale, meaning might arise from the teleological imposition of meaning upon the tale by the reader: one thinks here, for instance, of Daniel Defoe's prefaces to Roxana and Moll Flanders where the potentially shocking disregard for consequences by the eponymous narrators, is muted by disclaimers that direct the reader, in the words from Roxana, to take 'Instruction and Improvement' from the stories." In order to do this, the flow of succeeding events needs to be divided up, in the process of reading, so each falls into a beginning (a state of innocence), a middle (much the most interesting, the fall from grace, which

Da Montanha Mágica Ao Matadouro 5:

“…O erro de críticos, como(BRUFORD, 1986), que decidem privilegiar a dimensão da cultivação, parece residir na confusão entre os requisitos formais do Bildungsroman e o fato de Mann prover tanto conteúdo relevante sobre essa questão. Quanto a Vonnegut, cf Cordle (2000)…”