Kurt Vonnegut was a science fiction short story writer who became a novelist, and when he did, he created "Kilgore Trout" as a stand-in authorial persona, a writer whose novels could all be summarized by a kind of one-line (or one-paragraph) summary of their Big Idea.

He makes fun of Kilgore Trout a lot, even though he clearly kind of WAS Kilgore Trout, and the main joke is usually that the books have IDEAS but there's no actual writing involved. "What if there was a world where money REALLY DID grow on trees" for example.

Anyway, having done nine episodes of @gradschoolvonn so far, my provisional thesis about Vonnegut's novels is that what makes them more interesting than his short stories--and different than what he makes fun of in his Kilgore Trout one-liners--is that they have: two ideas

Or more. But if his short stories take a premise and work it out to its logical conclusion, the interesting thing about his novels is how they take one interesting "what if x was real" idea and bash it against... another "what if x was real" idea

So the interesting question to ask of the novels is always "Why is this novel that's about X also a novel about Y?"

Not to just hurl the word "dialectic" onto the TL, but you can think of his best writing in those terms, as a thesis, antithesis, and then an effort to work out a synthesis that gives the novel a narrative (but also conceptual) conclusion.

KV's short stories aren't BAD, per se--well, some are bad in the sense that we have cancelled them--but they do tend to be LIMITED. They have an idea, and they work that idea out to a logical conclusion. But in that sense, they tend towards a certain kind of limited satire:

Satire being a truth told so literally and exactly that it punctures the mythologies and illusions we normally wrap around it, to make it palatable. Ideally, it lets you see the thing you already knew, but whose ugly side you were not letting yourself understand.

The novels are "satirical" in some sense, but where they tend to surpass the short stories is that they smash one idea against another. And so, they don't so much satirize something as re-frame one idea by gazing at it through the lens of another, and vice versa.

So the interesting way to approach a book like Breakfast of Champions, that we talked about a week ago, is to ask: why is his novel about American Consumerism also a novel about Schizophrenia?

(the answer is not always great! IMO, his insistence on understanding American Consumerism through his ideas about schizophrenia causes him to have a very different account of the later than his son, who suffered from it).

But all of his novels that I've read so far work like this, where the big question you have to answer, on some level, is Why is this novel about X also a novel about Y?

Why is a novel about Time and Memory also a novel about Mass Slaughter? Why is a novel about Free Will also a novel about Solitude? Why is a novel about Philanthropic Capitalism also a novel about Love? Why is a novel about Loneliness also about The Grotesque?

In other words, if the limitation of satire is always that you can only discover what you already knew and recognize what you have you had already seen, the novels are able to discover something new, because they *aren't* simply satirical.

Anyway, back to reading Cats Cradle, in which the question is: why is a novel about Banana Republics and American Scientific Imperial Apocalypticism also the novel he introduces the extremely sticky concepts of karass and wampeter?