Resilience, Time, and the Ability of Humor to Salvage Any Situation

Abstract

By Kurt Vonnegut’s own admission, the stories in Bagombo Snuff Box would most likely never have “seen the light of day again” had it not been for the renown and success of his later books, such as Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five(1969), and Timequake (1997). Bagombo Snuff Box is comprised of fiction previously published in magazines and journals in the 1950s and 1960s, with short stories that range from science fiction to depictions of daily domesticity to quirky vignettes of office life. Against the formidable reputations of his more critically acclaimed texts, several of the narratives included in this anthology can seem somewhat outdated (particularly those with leading female charactersl), or even stiflingly flat when removed from the contours of the publications in which they were first printed. Readers conditioned by the concise abruptness and dry, acerbic wit characterizing Vonnegut’s more well-known work may be startled by stories that sometimes read as somewhat unfinished and a little bare, rather than purposefully terse. Refuting (or at least confronting) these claims of miffed criticism are the bookend chapters by Vonnegut, explaining, in part, the resilience of his work. If there are stories in Bagombo Snuff Box that strike readers as problematically simplistic, Vonnegut’s insights on his work, in particular, and the process of writing, in general, offer an intricate framework through which to process the collection’s patterns of characterization, symbolic sequences, and narrative motifs, literary devices that can be traced along themes of coping, survival, and resilience.