Analytical Book Review of Time Quake by Kurt Vonnegut Essay

Analytical Book Review of Time Quake by Kurt Vonnegut - Essay Example Kilgore Trout describes the nature of the Timequake as "a cosmic charley horse in the sinews of Destiny" (Vonnegut 17) in his unfinished memoir entitled My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot. This cosmic event occurred in the year 2001 when "a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during a past decade . . . a second time" (Vonnegut 1). Trout story reveals the ineptitudes of human awareness. Kilgore becomes a hero through his use of free will. The timequake is a device to unveil the cultural condition of America, in the hope that it might shock readers into an awareness of their careless disregard of human potential and indifference to the ideals of human dignity and unanimity in our society. Vonnegut tells readers: In real life, as during a rerun following a timequake, people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize. In a short story they have to do at least two out of three of those things, or you might as well throw it away in the lidless wire trash receptacle chained and padlocked to the fire hydrant in front of the American Academy of Arts and Letters" (Vonnegut 43). To-do so, Vonnegut portrays... The academy's executive secretary is Monica Pepper. Those stories are read with delighted awe by her husband, Zoltan, a man she had paralyzed from the waist down in an accident, and who once plagiarized a Kilgore Trout story when he was a boy. Vonnegut depicts that after "automatic pilot" crash their cars and airplanes, or fall down at the foot of escalators, the only person who seems able to take control of himself again is none other than Kilgore. To mobilize people to put their free will to use and restore order, he shouts out a phrase: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do" (Vonnegut 61). He is killed the instant the timequake is over by a berserk fire truck that smashes his wheelchair into the steel door of the academy headquarters. But with that fortress now blasted open, Kilgore uses the building as a morgue and sets up a triage hospital in the homeless shelter next door, after organizing the bums into rescue teams. Trout is the one who goes into th e street to get people back on their feet and functioning with the message. It seems appropriate that this man, whose imagination finds anything possible, should be the one to accept the situation with some alacrity and carry on. His message, "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do," captures something fundamental in the nature of Trout himself. In general, the book negatively and cynically portrays modern society, human values, norms and traditions. Vonnegut uses acute critic to unveil false morals and drawbacks of the modern world order. Cruel jokes can be seen as a characteristic of humor. The loneliness, emptiness, and alienation