Life is No Way to Treat an Animal
Mn
Monuments | 3 Oct 2007 | 0 Comments | Share this...
Kilgore Trout is one of Vonnegut’s most popular characters (and alter-egos), he’s a failed, disgruntled science fiction writer, whose work is featured only in the back of porn magazines. In Breakfast of Champions, he is on a collision course with Dwayne Hoover, a car salesman who is slowly loosing his mind (Vonnegut himself owned a few Saab dealerships at one point in his life). Vonnegut regularly refers to himself as the God of his universe in Breakfast of Champions, where he guides Trout to Midland City, Hoover’s home town, which is holding an arts festival where Trout was invited to speak.
Trout has a conversation with one of the truck drivers he is mind-poisoning as he hitch-hikes towards Hoover:
The driver said he used to be a hunter and a fisherman, long ago. It broke his heart when he imagined what the marshes and meadows had been like only a hundred years before. “And when you think of the shit that most of these factories made - wash day products, catfood, pop-”
He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
Then Trout made a good point too. “Well,” he said, “I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There’s a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidentally dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, ‘More power to Standard Oil,’ or whoever it was that dumped it.” Trout raised his arms in celebration. “‘Up your ass with Mobile gas,’” he said.
The driver was upset by this. “You’re kidding,” he said.
“I realized,” said trout, “that God wasn’t any conservationist, so for anybody else to be one was sacrilegious and a waste of time. You ever see one of His volcanoes or tornadoes or tidal waves? Anybody ever tell you about the Ice Ages He arranges for every half-million years? How about Dutch Elm disease? There’s a nice conservation measure for you. That’s God, not man. Just about the time we got our rivers cleaned up, he’d probably have the whole galaxy go up like a celluloid collar. That’s what the Star of Bethlehem was, you know.”
“What was the Star of Bethlehem?” said the dirver.
“A whole galaxy going up like a celluloid collar,” said Trout.
---
Kilgore Trout is the ultimate nihilist; every tragic thing that happens on the planet is inevitable and can’t be stopped. It really seems like it’s Vonnegut at his most pessimistic.
