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

and of the very planet itself,

2 while in Bluebeard a lone artist in the near future confronting the murderous destructiveness of modern war compassionately transforms its blasted landscape into an image of human hope. In Galapagos Vonnegut returns for the first time since the phenomenally successful Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) to fantasy's "nonidentical twin, science fiction" (Kroeber 1)—but with significant differences between this 1980s extrapolated comic look at the dubious future of mankind and the earlier novels. Gone is the earlier freneticism of The Sirens of Titan (1959), the cataclysmic destruction of Cat's Cradle (1963), and the predictability of Player Piano (1952). Missing also is the Tralfamadorean or God's eye view of all time found in Slaughterhouse-Five and in its place is a sweeping view back to the near future from one million years ahead. Using science fiction and setting the novel a million years in the future, becomes in itself, for Vonnegut "a way of saying God doesn't care what becomes of us, and neither does Nature, so we'd better care. We're all there is to care" ("Serenity," 31) 3 This sense of the urgent need to take responsible action now leads Leonard Mustazza to argue that Ultimately, ... [ Galapagos] is not concerned with either the past or the future but the present, is not predictive but cautionary, is not about science or religion but about the way we treat one another here and now. (64) In science fiction, as Ursula Le Guin maintains, the future is always a metaphor (154) 4 Vonnegut uses the metaphor of the far future to describe 2 The evolution Vonnegut pictures is a slow, steady, truly Darwinian one that takes place over a million years because of a change in the environment For an extensive discussion of Darwin's work and Galapagos see: Mustazza 55—65, especially 55, 58—59, and 62— 64. 3 James Gunn among numerous other critics draws a clear distinction between fantasy and science fiction: "Science fiction presents a strangeness the reader did not imagine could exist in his world; fantasy tells the reader that the world is strange beyond his belief' ("The Horror," 137). 4 "All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is a metaphor.

... The future, in fiction, is a metaphor" (Le Guin, n. p.

; 154). 110