The basic tenets of postmodernist fiction
(if such a term can be considered as anything besides oxymoronic) have
established the place of the writer as existing somewhere between the
position his predecessors took and the
reader. Negating the distance
between
author and reader thus becomes the goal.
Of course, Kurt Vonnegut knows that he cannot be as ignorant as his reader;
he still retains the omnipotence and omniscience of authorship. He even
acknowledges that he is, to the characters that populate his novels, the
Creator of the Universe. So why the ambivalent identity between writer and
reader?
The novel principally concerns Dwayne Hoover, who lives in a some
approximation of Middle America and who sells Pontiacs. He is,
unbeknownst to himself, about to collide with the most recognizable
character in any Vonnegut novel, Kilgore Trout, though he doesn't know it
yet. Vonnegut tells the reader what will happen, though, and it is through
this elimination of secrecy that Vonnegut invites us, too, to become Creators
alongside him.
The mundane story line is mostly there to prove to the reader that this is
indeed a novel, though Vonnegut spends most of his time deviating to add
sordid details that are completely unnecessary, or to expound on some moral
injustice that he seems worthy to criticize. As such, the first two thirds of the
novel express a preachy, distant author, whose work seems to be a sermon
against the very earth his characters tread upon.
However, Vonnegut spares us the illusion that he is trying to serve as some
sort of moral compass. As the cataclysm of Dwayne's meeting with Kilgore
approaches, the author suddenly inserts himself into the narrative itself,
revealing himself to be both modestly ashamed of his work and reticent to
preach any longer. Here, the postmodern Vonnegut appears and resurrects
the novel from its seemingly bleak prospects. He watches, just as the reader
does, the episode between the central characters, stopping here and there to
remind us that he is still in control, but nevertheless simultaneously a subject
of the same rules his characters must follow when in the story.
Slowly, the close raveling of two hundred pages worth of exposition and
character development seems almost moot, but for the service that it
ultimately does in bringing us closer to the author himself. As Vonnegut
brings the story to a close, his part in the novel becomes as important as his
role in shaping it, to the point at which Kilgore Trout, whom he encounters on
the street, becomes his father and Dwayne Hoover's dead wife his mother.
This, more than anything, is the author's immersion into his work the way he
knows that we are entering it, and as such provides a perfect specimen of
postmodernity in action.