Brewnerians: Read a story from Welcome to the Monkey House and respond. I'll try to start with a question, but feel free to begin if I haven't arrived there yet. Choose three (or more?) of the stories to respond to. Maybe you can write about confusions, or guesses, or comparisons, or the language, or characters, or the White Rock Girl or....whatever catches your attention.
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14 comments:
This was a nice story/correspondence. I took from "The Manned Missiles" at least two things. One is that politicians seem to be much more vengeful about dead countrymen than those countryman's parents. In this text, the Russian leader spoke badly of the American while the dead Russian's father wrote a letter speaking greatly of the American.
This story also touches on an issue that Vonnegut discusses in "Cat's Cradle." This issue is nuclear proliferation, cosmic proliferation, and the proliferation of proliferation. I don't think that Vonnegut believes that there is anything wrong with proliferation and going out into space to seek knowledge (though Sirens of Titan suggest that we are exploring in the wrong direction.) He simply believes that we are insane in our competitiveness and irresponsibility. After all, in this story, the two men die because America sent a man into space to take knowledge that the Russians already attained; not to gain any new knowledge. Man is irresponsible in his rush to want to achieve this, and arrogance to want to achieve this first. We all know that life is short, and we all want to know the answer to life before our life ends. However, in our hasty search of meaning, we ultimately make life shorter.
A moral that many of Vonnegut's novels preach is that the meaning of life is a lot less important than we imagine; even non-existent. If this is true, we're going nowhere fast. Then again, what is the point, really? All man accomplishes is a proliferation of human life. We spend our whole life reproducing and making life "better." Politics, the entertainment industry, the FDA. All of these things do one thing: make man's stay on earth more comfortable. And when not destroying the world, we're protecting and recovering the world from our own destruction. When people change the world, they only do so in a negative manner. The ones who "make a difference" in the world by picking up trash are merely undoing the difference that another human has already made.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, and I'm no nihilist (to my knowledge.) I just believe that no ultimate purpose exists to human life other than to live, love, and die.
I apologize, but I'd also like to make a comment regarding human life in "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow." In that story, we get to the point where humans can't die. Which I outlined as one of man's tasks. Then, reproducing becomes pointless and irresponsible, which is arguably the other main purpose or goal of life. This is when the circle of life becomes the segment of life, and as we all know, all segments end. Or did I just blow your mind.
Perhaps Vonnegut explains this better, and quite frankly, more clearly: "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to do just that.
I like this story...why didn’t you make us read it Mr. Brewner? Mark, I agree with the nuclear aspect that you mentioned…after all, the story was written in a different time when nuclear missiles were a bigger threat than high school shootings. I liked that Vonnegut didn’t make that the highlight, however. The correspondence between two fathers sheds the sort of light that brings a different perspective on the situation. For example, the gold fish story makes Bud real, almost touchable. On one hand, each boy had a dream of flying ….on the other both their dreams made them heroes. What happens to the people who die for a dream, but aren’t heroes? “How is it going to end?” If I, like Bud or Stepan, knew that my world would soon end, I wouldn’t be me ...here….in fact, space doesn’t seem like too bad of a place to end up.
this comment has nothing to do with the story because I didn't read it... I just wanted to congratulate Mark on the longest Vonnegut blog comment ever, maybe even the longest ANY blog comment ever... woohoo!!
So, seemingly we have a story about fear of nuclear armamet. The whole idea of Soviets vs. Americans, shooting missiles into space, and death via explosion would seem to suggest that. However, I don't think that this really has that much to do with nuclear proliferation. This is a story about brotherhood and forming bonds through death.
What I found strange in this story was that both fathers seemed to have an unusual almost prophetic connection to the inevitability of their son's impending deaths. Mikhail Ivankov's dreams about the horrors of space are alleviated by his son, and then later are manifested through Stepan's suffering and death, in an almost Christ-like manner. Bud was basically the same way, he went to death with apprehension doing what he loved, knowing for well that his time was soon coming.
In the end both men become iconic space immortals, whose deaths serve to bring two fathers together. Bud and Stepan live on forever floating through space as an eternal reminder of that one fateful day. This is a story not of fear, but of hope for the future and that through death we may gain a greater sense of spiritual healing.
To be honest, as I read the story, I didn't really like the overall message, that might be because I read the short story kind of late and was getting pretty tired. For me, I had a hard time following along, but after I finished the story and looked back at the letters the two men wrote, the story began to make more sense. How both men and their sons were supposedly "killed" by being sent up into space through rockets, and the overall theme that stuck out to me was how many of the people didn't show complete honesty. To me lots of deception was present in the story, which also might add to the fact that I didn't understand much of the overall meaning behind everything.
Wow! So this story reminded me of history class which usually is not a very pleasant thing, but this time was not as dreadful. The two letters written during the Cold War reflected the fear of the time with respect to the arms race and space race. I thought one of the most important things in the story was the disagreements between the people and the government. It seemed that the people did not want the violence the government put on them through the tensions of war. This constant search for peace should be glorified and hopefully one day we will be able to witness this.
This story gave me a new perspective on the Cold War. Whenver I studied that era the launching of Sputnik was described as a threatening act that scared the American population. I never realized that the launching had purely scientific motives, not just military and political. I liked how the two fathers viewed their sons' deaths as the beginning of a new era of trust. I wondered how many advancements in science could have been achieved if the two countries hadn't used as much of their resources for political or military statements, and could have worked together more.
I liked how the story was set up as letters between the two fathers. It's kind of weird, because even though the letters deal with matters of worldwide importance that could change things forever, in their most basic state they are just personal letters between two people. The story also deals with the idea of retaliation, and how that just makes everything worse. Rather than act nationalistic and let the accident cause huge problems, the fathers reconciled, and everything worked out.
I would have to say that this is was my favorite story out of the bunch. What I liked especially is the way that the letters personified the opposing sides of the war. Because these events happened so long ago, we can often view the events as simple dates on a page and miss the amount of human loss and pain that accompanied these dates in time. Even though Manned Missiles was not exclusively on war, the plot line does have an anti war tone. The story brings into focus the thousands of childhoods and personal aspirations that stand behind every single soldier. Ever more than before am I swayed to abstain from killing individuals for a "greater cause"
I liked this story. It brought an anti-war tone and the format is different from the other stories I've read. The letters, one from the Russian father, and the American father, offers a personal and more heart felt tone. The letters from the opposing sides of the war concentrated on the passion both Stepan and Bud had for what they did. The fathers disregards the cause and reasons for blame of their sons' deaths and explains, instead, their personal stories and their love for peace and their occupations. Vonnegut's story takes the brutality and ignorance out of war and replaces it with the sons' passions towards what they do and the sensitivities from both fathers understanding the circumstances and mainly the uselessness that comes out of the war.
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I was curious if you ever considered changing the structure of your blog?
Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
But maybe you could a little more in the way of content
so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot
of text for only having 1 or two pictures. Maybe you could
space it out better?
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