Abstract
When Kurt Vonnegut describes “the soul’s condition in a man at war” as hideously deformed (Mother Night 117), he indicates the plight of his and Ernest Hemingway’s protagonists, alike. The horrors of war, the idiocies of battle permeate the works of both writers. However, while Frank McConnel accurately views Vonnegut as the most recognizably Hemingwayesque of the new generation of writers to emerge after World War II (163), it is usually to separate himself from Hemingway, to damn not praise, that Vonnnegut speaks of his fellow artist-warrior. While admiring Hemingway’s best stories, Vonnegut scorns the Hemingway mystique, his idealization of valor and physical prowess. If Hemingway’s soul is large, it is also in Vonnegut’s critique a soul corrupted by a primitive delight in the killing of animals and by the so-called arts of war (Broer, Vonnegut’s Goodbye 66). Indeed, Vonnegut’s satire of Hemingway in Happy Birthday Wanda June (1970)—self described as “a simple minded play about men who enjoy killing and those who don’t”—can be read as a critique of Hemingway’s work as a whole. More specifically, Vonnegut might well have had the protagonist of A Farewell to Arms, (1929), Frederic Henry, in mind as a likely candidate for what the Vonnegut persona, Norbert Woodley, derides in Harold Ryan as macho posturing, “heroic balderdash.”
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© 2009 David Simmons
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Broer, L.R. (2009). Duty Dance with Death: A Farewell to Arms and Slaughterhouse-Five. In: Simmons, D. (eds) New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100817_10
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