O! I am Fortune's fool!

People say this is a book about the death of innocence. I say, you want to feel sad a while? This Vonnegut's got you covered.

3.5 stars. A slice of realism that proves Vonnegut a strong writer of fiction period, not just the sci-fi variety. It shows a lot more restraint than Vonnegut's wilder works, but by being more subdued and less playful it seems less a parable and thus less universal.

This completes the set, I've now read all of Kurt vonneguts novels. Sadly, this one is maybe the one I enjoyed least. There are good flashes, but overall I found it a bit lifeless and flat. So it goes.

Before this, I had read a number of Vonnegut titles. But, unlike all of his other works that i have encountered, this one had a significant lack of "science" as far as the "science fiction" goes. There was no space opera that we find in The Sirens of Titan. There were no aliens, like in Slaughter-house 5 (and no time travel either). There was not a single gram of Ice-Nine nor was there an omniscient narrator that met his colorful creations at the end to give them advice. Apart from a neutron bomb at the end (which is a very real weapon), the book was largely mundane. But, it is this mediocrity that makes it exceptional.
Vonnegut has shown us the portrait of Midland City, in crystal clear 3D imaging. And, in doing so, he has provided us with a portrait of the quintessential American suburb. The main characters in this book all come from this negligible point on the map, and they all share in common key events: the local production of a Broadway flop, the worst blizzard of 1960, the double murder of an innocent mother and her unborn child, the senior prom of a certain Felix Waltz, and the atomic destruction of every life within city limits. These events may seem chaotically assembled, with no clear pattern between them. But, hey, so does the Midwest.
Everyone's favorite scifi satirist has proven in Deadeye Dick that he can take even the ordinary and turn it into something his readers just can't stop thinking about.
Good job, Kurt!

Like many Vonnegut books, this is an almost rambling (coherently so) account from the protagonist about the circumstances of their life. Vonnegut is one of my favorite writers when it comes to satire, and this one explores guns and violence, the bomb, and to an extent small town life. It not my favorite of his writings, but I still enjoyed it.

This isn’t my favorite Vonnegut book, but I like his style and this one was still pretty solid. It was an absurd story of an equally absurd family from Midland City, Ohio (the setting of Breakfast of Champions). They have a father who was friends with Hitler at art school, and two sons who by the end have moved to Haiti and own a hotel because of their failures. It’s got some really good themes, but one of which that seems to come up is responsible gun ownership or gun control. The title of the book comes from the accidental double murder that the main character commits when he’s allowed to enter his father’s gun room as a twelve year old.

But there’s some truly ridiculous plot points in this that are great and very darkly humorous, in typical Vonnegut fashion. An accidental neutron bomb going off and destroying an entire city, a father who goes to visit his good friend Hitler in Nazi Germany, and an awful play about a man disappearing on a search for Shangri-La. It’s a good not great book, probably 3.5 stars from me.

I read this in Puerto Vallarta with my parents in maybe 8th grade? My first Kurt, and maybe one of the first contemporary semi-grown-up books I read? It was a library book my parents had taken out and both read on the trip and I think I finished Tom Sawyer or some shit real quick and they hooked me up with it.

Kurt Vonnegut's books are hard to describe. There is so much going on in them

I actually liked Deadeye Dick more than Slaughter House five.

I absolutely love the final quote. In my opinion it summarizes the world we live in perfectly

The friendship of Otto Waltz with Hitler is a great idea, very amusing and I absolutely loved it. Especially how Otto could have prevented the WW2

I do like characters in this book. They all seem to be real people. The kind of people who messed up in life.Whose actions have effects on them and those around. I like how he shows how their actions interconnect

Interesting is how he goes at the end through characters talking when was the highlight of their lives. In a way it is also a bit depressing

And of course a lot of social commentaries on things like politics, men and guns, parent and kids, social structure.

A pretty good book in my opinion

Warning: Don't read this novel if your house has burned down or somebody shot your dog. Written two years before Vonnegut's 1984 attempted suicide, it's the most depressing and depressive novel I've ever read.

The narrator, Rudy Waltz, as a teen accidentally shot and killed a pregnant woman while minding his father's gun collection. His father, a wealthy but totally untalented would-be artist in Midland City, Indiana, after a brief friendship with Hitler bought and outfitted a massive carriage house which he turned into a home. Rudy's mother has never done anything and never will. His bother Felix, married five times, has spent much of his life subsisting on drugs and clothes.

Father and mother lose their fortune in a law suit and seldom bother to dress during the day. Midland City has produced no one of note and was mentioned on national news only for an historic blizzard. Its inhabitants vary from the odd to the vicious. It is later depopulated by a neutron bomb which leaves the buildings intact.

Rudy, now in late middle age, has never had a girlfriend, never had sex, considers himself a neuter and finds life to be an odd, meaningless experiment.

Though some of these incidents might be classified as spoilers, revealing them makes no difference as far as the novel is concerned.

Little of Vonnegut's vaunted humor is present until near the end, and then in a bitter, skewering mode.

So why four stars? Because, as always, Vonnegut is express-train readable, his simplest sentences doing strange little jigs and backflips just when you think they've gone to sleep. Not his best, certainly, but worth the trip.

Another review lost when Firefox crashed... Sigh. Start again.

Although Deadeye Dick was written by a seasoned Vonnegut, at the height of his skill as a master of American diction in prose, this novel just doesn't quite come together for me 100%. The witty, pithy, and yet still heartrendingly human and vulnerable sentiments that are Vonnegut's trademarks are here in spades. Bravo! A good read indeed. But, but, something seems to be missing from this one, something I can't quite put my finger on.

The novel has themes, actions, and some symbols--which the author explains to us in the preface. Is this what put me off? Was there nothing to do as a reader except stand passively by and observe what had already been explained to me? Or is it perhaps the novel's primary message which somehow made it impossible for the novel to actually be what we've come to call a novel.

Let me explain: The main event of the narrative is an act both so random as to be absurd and yet so horrific in its occurrence as to seem to demand explanation. That is as much to say, then, that the novel is about the insufficiency of the traditional narrative to explain some of the most dire events--exactly the events that we seem to need to explain the most.

This is a revelation I thought I had come to on my own, and much of my own recent writing has been about this very situation: how much we rely on traditional narrative forms to understand the universe and how insufficient that is in actually making sense out of the universe. (I'm currently composing a novel in frames in which six storytellers spend a week telling each other tales through the night. Therefore, in my novel, narrative itself--as it is in my master Boccaccio's Decameron--becomes a major theme. My point in composing such a text is that we have need of new narrative--even non-narrative--narrative forms in order to really understand--or understand a little better--the actual chaos that is the universe--which, in the end, may not be narrative at all. I'll go out on a limb here and say that it's not, destroying the foundations of all human religion, science, and philosophy in a single sentence. Take that!)

However, I had read Deadeye Dick nearly thirty years ago, I believe, when I was studying abroad in Florence, Italy, in 1989. Probably I hadn't really come to the conclusion that much of even the so-called human sciences are framed by classical narrative: history, for example, turns events into recognizable tales of personality and intent, success and/or failure, and then consequences. Anthropology studies our need for and the forms that our (humankind in general) stories take. And. let's face it, religion and politics are all about exploiting stories in order to control people--sometimes to make them empathetic and moral, sometimes to take their cash or to get them to do horrible things to unbelievers or foreigners or, preferably, both--this explains why politics and religion tend to flock together.

Connecting these thoughts makes me like Deadeye Dick better than I thought I did when I began writing this review. If that's really what the novel is saying. I guess if I say that's what it's saying then that's what it's saying because the moral of a story is in the eye of the beholding reader, no? This is why I personally believe the greatest story ever told not to be the passion of the Christ but rather "The Emperor's New Clothes." That tale's logic works as a metaphor for art and story-telling as well as the other, societal conformities that it's commonly interpreted as lambasting. This is also why Boccaccio is such an important author/ity to me. Stories about story telling are not only about story telling; they're about the human mind, about conformity, deceit, religion, politics. They are pure historiography and anthropology, baby. They tell us not what we need to know but maybe how we need to know. That's important maybe. To a writer anyway.

Life means nothing! You live you die! Go get some ice cream or something!

Just read this for the first time, and found it to be pretty minor Vonnegut on the Vonnegut scale. It's interesting to see him working with a more conventional plot, and less with unconventional philosophy, and channeling his signature cynicism into plot developments rather than explanations of the world for the readers, but there just wasn't much surprising here, particularly compared with his later works, essays, and short fiction. The ending was pretty unsatisfying, and the intro where he lays out his symbolism (the unappreciated, abandoned arts center is Vonnegut's head, the neutered protagonist is his libido, etc.) made the whole thing seem like an exercise in wandering personal exploration and obscuration. Still very readable, and I really enjoyed the epigram (supposedly from Plato) about the man who'd lost interest in sex due to his advanced age comparing to being allowed to dismount from a bucking, wild stallion. Worth reading, just not insightful and funny on the level I normally expect from Vonnegut.

What a troubled subconscious! This lacks order, but perhaps I like it that way. A whole lot of nothingness in Vonnegut’s words— but an enjoyable lot of nothingness. Destined to be a nobody amongst everyone else, I too am scared. But the world will end one day and its not going to matter how bad of a playwright you are. Or whether you committed a double homicide for that matter.