What we have in Jailbird is an extremely closely woven narrative built up of ironic juxtapositions and incongruities stated and counterpointed as in an elaborate symphony. The development of character in terms of psychological realism is not important to Vonnegut (though a Dickensian presentation of idiosyncracy is) and in fact some of his characters' names are close anagrams of one another—Leland Clewes/Cleveland Lawes; Arpad Lean/Delmar Peale—as though to suggest that their personalities are accidental and that in essence they are the same—strange machines making weird noises and doing odd things to one another, whose actions in the world always turn out contrary to what they intend…. Human beings, in Vonnegut's novels, are pawns of forces they cannot comprehend and of which they are only vaguely aware. In Sirens of Titan, for example, the whole of human history is explicable as the procurement for...