From Metaphor to Discourse

Throughout the seventies, Kurt Vonnegut’s new role of writing as a famous author led him to walk a narrow path between metaphor and discourse. From Breakfast of Champions through Jailbird his interests flash back and forth between his characters and himself, and when these novels succeed it is because that tension is productive rather than needlessly digressive and distracting. The temptation to make a direct public statement is strong in each of these books, but nearly always that energy is directed toward structuring the work as an integral collage of personal meaning and invention. Between Time and Timbuktu is notable only for its five-page Preface. Everything else was committee work by educational TV writers and producers, who took bits and pieces from the Vonnegut’s various works and pieced them together for a 90-minute narrative, telecast nationally on 13 March 1972.