Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1994. [Vol. 2.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 22)
STUDIES - Donald E. Morse: The Joyful Celebration oflJfe. Kurt Vonnegut's Affirmative Vision in Galapagos and Bluebeard
account for the distopia in Galapagos, Slapstick (1976), Slaughterhouse-Five, The Sirens of Titan, and Player Piano. As a novelist, Vonnegut has become increasingly worried about humans destroying the natural world and of the widespread ignorance of nature which encourages such destruction. When faced with a choice between, say, comfort and machine entertainment or some discomfort and an encounter with nature, most characters in his fiction like most of the earth's inhabitants will choose comfort and the machine (see in addition to Galápagos, for example, Player Piano, "Deer in the Works" in Welcome to the Monkey House [1968], or Breakfast of Champions [1973]). Galápagos itself cautions against this disastrous choice, but unlike many novels which contain a similar warning, including Slapstick Vonnegut's weakest novel, Galápagos does not postulate an idealized picture of a reversion to some pre-industrial state where most of the good things from the contemporary world remain, but society becomes feudal in outlook, organization, and technology. 5 Instead, as Mustazza observes: the movement in the narrative [of Galápagos] is bidirectional, progressive in that it applies a Darwinian solution to the problem of moral error, retrogressive insofar as the state of innocence that is ultimately achieved is allusively linked to primal mythic innocence. (55) "This was," as the narrator says, "a very innocent planet, except for those great big brains" ( Galápagos , 9 and compare 270). The disaster which precipitates the change in evolution in Galápagos appears benign unlike in Deadeye Dick (1982) where a neutron bomb wipes out Midland City producing not a murmur from an uncaring, callous, indifferent world, or in Cat's Cradle where human greed and stupidity precipitates death by freezing of all life on the planet, or in SlaughterhouseFive where the universe ends because a Tralfamadorean test pilot accidentally wipes it out (80). In Galápagos the human population on most 5 For a negative view of such values see Jackson, especially 141—56; and Hunter, especially 28—38 and 127—9. 112
