Vonneguttian Victims -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

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Date Posted: 16:20:26 04/05/08 Sat
Author: CS Holden
Subject: Vonneguttian Victims

Kurt Vonnegut's tends to write about victims, especially in novels like Mother Night and Deadeye Dick, among others.

In Mother Night, the narrator is a former Nazi who escapes to America, where he lives quietly until a neo-Nazi magazine exposes his whereabouts. Even though he has been living a penitent life, he is sought out by angry post-WWII Americans who spit in his face, beat him up, and send him to the authorities. In Deadeye Dick, the narrator as a young boy fires his father's rifle from the roof of a house and accidentally kills a pregnant housewife. For the rest of his life, this character is sarcastically called "Deadeye Dick" by community members and is treated like he has some kind of contagious disease.

I guess my question has to do with how Vonnegut intuits the scapegoat mechanism. I wonder if he sees himself as both a scapegoat and a member of an angry society that has turned on scapegoats. He feels guilty for the bombing of Dresden, Germany, even though he was stuck in a labor camp and did not participate in the killing himself. That guilt gets thrown onto every character in his novels, but in typical Vonnegut fashion, he offers all sorts of defenses for them, even speaking from their perspective. It's almost as if he is daring the reader not to feel guilty. He just seems to doubt the innocence of every human being when it comes to man-made catastrophes: the sins of individuals are sins of the multitude, and vice versa. Is this justified? Is it a healthy way to look at ourselves?

We're about to reenter the Judeo-Christian part of Girard's theories. Consider Joseph Caro's meditation on Isaiah 53:

"God created a righteous nation to carry the sins of the world so that the world could exist."

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Replies:

Re: Vonneguttian Victims -- Katelyn R., 23:03:55 04/05/08 Sat
Re: Vonneguttian Victims -- Caitlin, 19:28:41 04/06/08 Sun