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

observes from his perspective of "a million years in the future" those largebrained, terribly mobile, inquisitive creatures, whose: big brains.

.. would tell their owners, in effect, "Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just fun to think about" And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it

—have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on. (266). Hie restrained attitude of the narrator nicely mimics that of a doctor diagnosing the illness of a patient. This pose of objectivity becomes in turn a perfect vehicle for satirizing the human mind's delight in devising engines of destruction, such as exploding rockets. Trout's incredulity also helps emphasize the lack of human foresight which applies thinking not to the problem of survival, but to the problem of destruction. Rather than Juvenalian moral outrage, he adopts the more Horacean stance of neutral amazement No single human being could claim credit for that rocket, which was going to work so perfectly. It was the collective achievement of all who had ever put their big brains to work on the problem of how to capture and compress the diffuse violence of which nature was capable, and drop it in relatively small packages on their enemies. (189—190.)

7 Extending this contrast between human creativity and destructiveness Trout compares the rocket meeting its target with human sexual consummation: "No explosion.

.. in Vietnam could compare with what 7 Trout also captures the discontinuity between the spectators' delight in watching a rocket explode and the violent damage that results from such an explosion. 115