there's something about most Vonnegut novels that isn't dull exactly but plodding and precious and v one dimensional. like it is impossible to think that it will matter if you finish the book or not. nothing will happen.

“I was the great marksman, anyway. If I aimed at nothing, then nothing is what I would hit.”
―Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick



This is one of those Vonnegut novels, I'll probably hold off giving to my son to read. Not yet son. You aren't quite ready for this depth of existentialist Vonnegut despair. The world is sometimes a rotten place, it really is, but I don't want to step on all his hope too early. Once when I was young, and I said something cynical and sarcastic in front of my father, he rebuked me and said, "Son, leave sarcasm, cynicism, and Depends® undergarments to men above the age of 50. It isn't becoming in a kid so young." I now get what he meant. This is Vonnegut for old, cynical Vonnegut fans wearing a comfortable pair of Depends®. This is for those of us in our Epilogue years.

There is always a darkness to Vonnegut that is masked by his humor and his nonchalance. You often forget that there is an actual 1000 foot canyon beneath Vonnegut as his prose dances on the line of absurdism, death, and inhumanity. In this novel, you don't forget. That is part of the act, see? Vonnegut is pointing out the bodies on the rocks below and blaming the audience a bit. Still, it is pretty damn good stuff.

n  These words should be above the doorways of the UN and all parliaments: 'Leave your story outside.'n

This one was painful. Even more darkly autobiographical than usual for a Vonnegut story.

LOA pagination:

pp. 491: "A basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought it would be wrong if anyone ever laughed at them."

"The great parade of neuters in the sweet by-and-by."

pp. 534: Life as epilogue - life is not over, but the story is. "Some people find inhabiting an epilogue so uncongenial that they commit suicide."

"It may be a bad thing that so many people try to make good stories out of their lives."

Kurt Vonnegut's coming of age satire set in the Forties contains scenes of befriending dictators, gun worship, meth addiction in suburbia, caged youngsters and clumsy police brutality. In 1982 it probably made people chuckle but it seems so prime-time for 2018. The satire has now become reality.
My favorite passage is Vonnegut's call for gun control: "My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die.
There is evil for you.
We cannot get rid of mankind's fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true.
I give you a holy word: DISARM".

More typical brilliance from Vonnegut. He makes it seem so effortless each time he combines cynicism with genuine human feeling and humor with tragedy.

Kalmasilmä Kallena tunnetun Ruby Waltzin kreisiä perhetarinaa oli ilo lukea. Annoin kirjalla vain kolme tähteä, koska Vonnegutin asteikolla se oli keskihauska, keskisarkastinen ja keskikekseliäs.

Midland Cityssä tirkistysreiät avautuvat ja sulkeutuvat. Tirkistysreikä tarkoittaa syntymää ja kuolemaa.

Waltzit ovat tyypillisiä midlandcityläisiä - sympaattisia hörhöjä. Superrikas feikkimaalari-isä menettää omaisuutensa, eikä pahastu pätkääkään. Poika Rubyn vahingonlaukaus sulkee raskaana olevan naisen tirkistysreiän. Pojasta tulee Midland Cityn ikioma paaria, Kalmasilmä Kalle, kyseenalainen paikallisjulkkis.

Vonnegutin kirjasta löytyy neutronipommi, ystävä nimeltä Adolf Hitler, Amerikan ainoa julkinatsi, taidekritiikkiä, näytelmäkirjallisuutta ja monta holhouksen tarpeessa olevaa aikuista.

Superviihdyttävää luettavaa. Kalmasilmä on tehty hotkaistavaksi. Mitään järisyttävää en sen parissa kokenut eikä sillä nyt ole edes väliä!

Wow, this is somehow darker than cats cradle. I can't decide which one I love more. Such an amazing story here

Personally, this is one of, if not, my most favorite book of all time. I feel like it doesn't get as much praise as it should in the way that Vonnegut gives you a character that is human, but because of his life has become something more like a creature than anything else and finds so much difficulty interacting with other humans and able to understand the things they do and what he should do because he has been made out to be so alien from the moments when he was young all the way up to adulthood. The situations Rudy gets himself into are hilarious, but sad at the same time and it leaves you questioning the things you're laughing at and if you should be laughing at all. It's uncomfortable at times and emotionally confusing and I think that makes it really moving. I loved it. Check it out!

What I take from reading this great book is that if you don't participate in the 'writing of your personal story', others may take over which - as is the case for the main character and his father in this book - can have tragic consequences. The two protagonists are being defined by the story a community tells about them and hence 'freezes' them into adopting identities they would either have to rebel against to break the spell or adopt and therefore remain stuck in a limbo forever. They opt for the latter and it's heart-breaking to read their journey, tragicomic at times and also thought-provoking because it made me question to what extent one can truly condemn another human being for a tragic mistake, what the basis for atonement would be and on what evidence one would be entitled to judge the situation in the first place. It's my second Vonnegut book and I look forward to reading more of his work!

It would be a dangerous thing, I think, to read too much Vonnegut in too short a period. It would cause the weaker among us (i.e. me) to probably fall into a slight depression which only gargantuan amounts of Looney Tunes and Reese's Pieces would cure. Deadeye Dick, like most everything else I've read by Vonnegut, is so funny that you don't realize until you've finished just how monstrously bummed-out the guy is making you. It's a brilliant book. It hurts a lot. It's probably not his best. But I always thought Slaughterhouse-5 and Cat's Cradle a little overrated. It's in the more (generally speaking) "minor" works like this one that Vonnegut shines as one of the great authors of American literature. I recommend it to any and all.

Deadeye Dick is an expression that just a few English-speakers would understand. Deadeye is a common name of a sailing boat device to get tight ropes. Deadeye Dick is, in some American Middle West places, a nickname for someone with fire arms expertise, a marksman, and the author explains it to us from the very beginning of the novel.
Can the protagonist of a novel get a gun by the first time in his life, and, firing a rifle out his family’s upstairs window hits a pregnant neighbor woman between the eyes… on a Mother’s Day? Would it be funny to anybody? It’s hard to believe. But, which author would be able to do it? Answer: just one being a genuine Black Comedy master. And that’s the case of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the author of this great nonsense, as well as several others around his central character, Rudy Waltz who, in a first-person narrative and an elderly man, tells us his outlandish life, starting with his German father, ex schoolmate of Adolf Hitler, when both of them were art students at Vienna, before de Great War. Hitler used to be a poor boy, at a point of starving to death, if it hadn’t been for a painting his father bought from him. Thanks to it, according Rudy Waltz, Hitler kept alive —and the rest is History. There is also a Neutron Bomb in this novel that leaves peacefully empty an entire town, cook recipes which won’t be taken seriously, and the exile of the main character in a Haiti’s hotel, where he takes refuge chasing by the bad conscience of his only one crime and not knowing really whether he has becoming homosexual or not. One more time, Vonnegut Jr. has committed himself to his antiheroes when is about to show us the appalling side of society, and he does it through that kind of tender cynicism, by showing them to us like victims of a world where we can be saved with that liberating guffaw that he, from his elaborated sense of absurd, gives to us.

I finished this book for two reasons: 1. I'm a Kurt Vonneget fan and want to read all of his books. 2. I don't like to start a book and not finish it.

That's it.

I can't say that I enjoyed this book, or really remember too much about it. The plot was almost pointless and it was beyond jaded. It's saving grace (for Vonneget fans) is that it gave some insight into his view of the world, which was nice. However, I wouldn't suggest this book to anyone other than those people who want to read everything by him. And if you're that person, save this book for last, I guess. It really wasn't very good, and that pains me to say. I love Vonnegut and, until this book, have yet to be disappointed.

With that said, no book deserves one star. It had a plot. The story had a point and made that point. The characters were mostly realistic and the dialogue was fine.