Please help identify: Kurt Vonnegut piece

ianzin · June 10, 2005, 3:11pm

I’m trying to locate a Kurt Vonnegut piece, but I only have very vague recollections about it because it’s about 16 years since I skimmed over it.

It was one of his non-fiction pieces. In it, he analysed the dramatic structure of various famous books and stories. I believe he even went so far as to represent their peaks and troughs with a simple line diagram - and these little line sketches were actually reproduced in the book. (Apologies if I haven’t described this entirely accurately, which I probably haven’t.)

Can anyone identify which piece I’m referring to, and in which Vonnegut book or compilation I can find it?

The_Scrivener · June 10, 2005, 7:19pm

[snarky comment] Great, now if only somebody could diagram the chess game that Vonnegut described in “All the King’s Horses”.[/sc]*

Sorry I can’t help you with that I.D., ianzin. I’ve read a fair amount of Vonnegut and that doesn’t ring any bells.

The infamous chess game that cannot be played as described. Which is probably hard to do, given the bazillions of combinatorial permutations possible in chess…

Elvez · June 10, 2005, 7:33pm

I’m not sure how many non-fiction books he’s written, but here are the ones I know of:

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Palm Sunday
Bagombo Snuff Box
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
Nothing Is Lost Save Honor
Fates Worse Than Death

I know it’s not Wampeters, and I doubt it’s Kevorkian, that you’re looking for.

byomtoob · June 10, 2005, 7:38pm

I believe that its in Palm Sunday. Its in an essay describing something that he wrote his graduate thesis on at the University of Chicago. If its not there, try Wampeters, Foma, and Granfaloons.

jackelope · June 10, 2005, 7:59pm

I saw Vonnegut give a talk at the University of Georgia in about 1993; this was included in the lecture (his diagram of the plot of “The Metamorphosis” was hilarious). I don’t recall ever having read it though, and I’ve read most of his work.

merrily · June 10, 2005, 9:20pm

I’ve read it. I did a quick look and didn’t locate, but it does exist.

Not much help, sorry, but I hope to encourage you, at least.

merrily · June 10, 2005, 10:02pm

Palm Sunday.

from this website:
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cinder/cin15.htm

Vonnegut, Kurt. Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage. New York: Dell, 1981; Delacorte Press, 1984. [Vonnegut explains that his prettiest contribution to his culture was his master’s thesis at the University of Chicago, which was rejected. It included graphs of plots, the most complex being Cinderella. “At this very moment, a thousand writers must be telling that story again in one form or another. This very book is a Cinderella story of a kind.” Vonnegut says that he was tempted to leave the Cinderella graph out of his thesis because it was too complicated–steps upward, a sudden drop, then a rapid sweep upward. The steps are “all the presents the fairy godmother gave to Cinderella, the ball gown, the slippers, the carriage, and so on. the sudden drop is the stroke of midnight at the ball. Cinderella is in rags again. All the presents have been repossessed. But then the prince finds her and marries her, and she is infinitely happy ever after. She gets all the stuff back, and then some. A lot of people think the story is trash, and, on graph paper, it certainly looks like trash. But then I said to myself, Wait a minute–those steps at the beginning look like the creation myth of virtually every society on earth. And then I saw that the stroke of midnight looked exactly like the unique creation myth in the Old Testament. And then I saw that the rise to bliss at the end was identical with the expectation of redemption as expressed in primitive Christianity. The tales were identical” (p. 3l5)]