Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Donald E. Morse: 'Why Not You?": Kurt Vonncgufs Debt to The Book of Job

example, he probed into history for the answers, but found nothing there but absurdity. In Mother Night (1962) he examined the possibility of good collaborating with the forces of evil in order to subvert and ultimately destroy such forces, but concluded that this kind of naivete was no match for a truly powerful evil force, such as Fascism. In Cat's Cradle (1963), on the other hand, he explored the possibility of stoic cynicism as an answer to the moral dilemma through his splendid creation of Bokonon and Bokononism.

3 If human beings are so hell-bent on their own destruction, then, suggests Cat's Cradle

, no one or nothing can stop them, and all the novelist can do is warn against the impending disaster becoming the proverbial canary in a coal mine. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) Vonnegut explored the opposite tact examining the possibility of doing good works as a way of stopping or at least retarding the forces of evil. "Sell all you have and give it to the poor," was Jesus' admonition in the first century, so Eliot Rosewater established his foundation to give away money. When the phone rang he answered: "Rosewater Foundation, how may we help you?" and hoped that money might indeed help the person on the other end of the line. But good works ultimately did not appear to slow evil down. Instead, they actually may have encouraged it to greater extravagances of connivance and fraud. Evil itself wormed its way into the very heart of his good works and so threatened to destroy the Rosewater Foundation itself until Eliot thwarted it by giving away all he had. When Vonnegut finally came to write directly about surviving the Dresden massacre in Slaughterhouse-Five he discovered that dwelling on such massive destruction had a profound impact on the novel's style: "... I felt the need to say this every time a character died: "So it goes." This exasperated many critics, and it seemed fancy and tiresome to me, too. But it somehow had to be said. It was a clumsy way of saying what Celine managed to imply so much more naturally in everything he wrote, in effect: "Death 3 Diogenes, the patron saint of cynics, would warmly approve of Bokonon and his view of life as given in the Books of Bokonon. 77