“It's all right,' she
said. 'You couldn't help it that you were born without a heart. At least you
tried to believe what the people with hearts believed – so you were a good man
just the same.”
It may not be the cult favorite that Slaughterhouse-Five or Breakfast
of Champions are, but in many ways Jailbird
struck me as possibly Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece. The science-fiction elements emblematic of
his most famous books are absent, but Jailbird
still achieves an amazing balance between the absurdity and pathos in
Vonnegut’s view of the human race. Like
many of Vonnegut’s apathetic protagonists, Walter F. Starbuck is introduced as
a completely unexceptional bureaucrat and schlub; the type who would have
succeeded in business with a little more drive but who found a natural home in
civil service. Somehow he found himself
tangentially connected to the Watergate scandal and is just now being released
from a prison stint back into society, with nothing to show for his life in
middle-age except for a meager doctorate in mixology. Wandering the streets for a couple days after
his release, Walter ruminates about his past, trying to pinpoint the moment
when he lost his soul, and has several chance encounters – in typical Vonnegut
fashion – with people who have effected or been effected by the same events
that steered him to this point. An
incarnation of Kilgore Trout pops up as a fellow prison inmate; he may or may
not be the same reclusive and prolific sci-fi writer who appears in various
Vonnegut novels. In the unusual and lengthy
introduction, Vonnegut recounts a history of the labor movement in America and
how it shaped not only Jailbird but
his entire outlook. The approach is
hardly ideological but purely humanistic.
He also claims to have received a letter from a young reader at one
point suggesting that all of Vonnegut’s work can be encapsulated in one simple
phrase: “Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail,” which I take to mean
that while idealism leads to and depends too much on rose-colored glasses, a group
of the worst cynics can still agree on a system of ethics that will preserve
the peace for the greatest number of people.
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