literary anhedonia: Vonnegut

[mustinvestigate]

I should like Kurt Vonnegut. There was Slaughterhouse-Five, which pretty much everyone is impressed by, and that short story with the people wearing heavy weights and having loud noises go off regularly to ensure everyone’s “equal,” you can’t pass the 7th grade without reading that one two or three times. Any list of Vonnegut quotes will have some

Comments

[tuff_ghost]

I'm sure I've had all of these thoughts before, I just never phrased them so well :D

I definitely have a hard time being impressed by stuff for high-context reasons alone.

And yeah, women. Male gaze is always the default right? But honestly I think if their shallowness as characters is really part of the satire then something in the satire-plan went wrong. And I'm not so interested in KV that I want to debug it.

[mustinvestigate]

I blame my advancing age. If a novel doesn't give me something to invest in, I want my time to go elsewhere. Richard Yates (same time period) has a lot of female characters who define themselves by the place in the male gaze web, but their arcs or even the main plots focus on how rotten this is for all involved. So obviously it was possible for male writers then to look a little deeper...