Chapter 20 Summary and Analysis

Vonnegut is a "Roundhead" to Xanthippe's "Cavalier" (an oblique reference to the English civil war suggested by Arthur Schesinger, Jr., as an apt division of the world into types), and both are too barbaric to respond to the history of their art, which Saul Steinberg says is the alternative to responding to life itself. Having finished reading William Styron's Darkness Visible, Vonnegut says suicidal people can be divided into Styron's type, blaming it on brain wiring and chemistry, and his own, blaming the Universe. Humorists feel free to speak of life as a dirty joke, even though life is all there is or ever can be. At the point of killing himself, Hamlet does not ponder the grief and confusion he will cause survivors. Had the future King of Denmark wanted to be remembered post mortem he would have said so...