Small one does not miss: I am Kurt, I am Vonnegut
The consistency of the character created by Kurt Vonnegut is striking. The soundman is in one of the most difficult conditions. Dreaming of only one thing: to dive headlong under the covers and die there. This is precisely what the sad story of one infinitely lonely boy is about …
“That be is to do” - Socrates.
"To do is to be" - Jean Paul Sartre.
"Do be do be do" - Frank Sinatra
Kurt Vonnegut, Small is not a miss
“This guy is not a miss,” they will say about some nimble guy.
But that guy, Rudy Waltz, about which we will talk, is not like that. The only time in his life that he did not miss was the day when he was cleaning his father's rifle and accidentally pulled the trigger. And such a coincidence had to happen - in the house opposite a pregnant woman was vacuuming the carpet … On that day, little Rudy shot not only those two. This shot killed the man in himself.
In addition to the heavily perceived plot, Vonnegut's novel "Small is not a miss" is interesting in two components. The first is a special method of description. The already nightmarish, unbearable narration is interrupted at the peak moments of the hero's suffering by a play invented by his own consciousness … A very exciting reception.
The first time was in prison, when the husband of a pregnant woman whom he had just shot was brought to him, a 12-year-old boy. A play in the best traditions of grotesque and cruel satire. Only gags are missing.
The second episode of the play is an accidentally heard quarrel between a brother and his wife, who deservedly calls him, Rudy, a dirty pig: Rudy hasn't washed for so long that he already stinks, which is what the wife informs her brother about …
while Rudy thinks:
“… It was good to sit quite quietly on the gallery, to catch all the sounds that floated up to me from below. I didn't want to eavesdrop. I listened attentively to the music of words … And below me, but invisibly to me, a wild discordant duet for violin and double bass was played. They both had such beautiful voices. She was a violin, and he was a double bass.
Or maybe it was a musical comedy …"
The hero calls a quarrel he heard by chance as a comedy. Both this "comedy" and the one that he wrote himself, which failed on the second day, are attempts to turn pain into laughter. Make fun of her, destroy her. But sound people cannot do this: there are no such properties.
For the third time, Rudy writes a play in his imagination, meeting a girl, the thought of which he carried throughout his life, in the form of a toothless drug addict who is trying to beg him for amphetamine. Instead of trying to help her, Rudy simply turns her over to the police. The mask behind which he so diligently hid his pain and fear all his life is finally growing to his face and soul.
Or not?..
The second, but by no means by importance, component is the striking consistency of the character created by Kurt Vonnegut. The soundman is in one of the most difficult conditions, dreaming of only one thing - to dive headlong under the covers and die there.
This is what the sad story of one infinitely lonely boy is about.
Not a writer, but a killer
He wanted to be a writer, but he became a murderer.
Did the unsurpassed Kurt Vonnegut suspect how close he was to the truth? Indeed, this is exactly the case: anal-sound people are born masters of the Word. They seem to hear these words inside themselves, fish them out in parts from the quiet air. They are cleaned of husks, inaccuracies, polished with a thin tuning fork by ear. And a new miracle of human hands, human thought is born. And rules the world in his own way. Like no one else can.
“Z e nev e in a. I thought he was a moronic genius!
Felik S. What is this?
Zhen e in e in a. It happens so: a fool is a fool, and he does one thing brilliantly - for example, plays the piano.
Felik S. No, he doesn't play the piano.
Z e n e in e in a. Well, but he wrote the play, it was even staged in the theater. Maybe he doesn't like to wash. Maybe he has no friends. Maybe he is generally afraid of people - he does not talk to anyone. But he wrote the play. And he has a huge vocabulary. You and I together know less words than he alone, and sometimes he will say that - both cleverly and witty."
And they, anal-sound people, in difficult conditions - cruel, ruthless killers. There is no body value in sound. There is resentment against God in anality. Also bears a long time. Only in this case a monster is born.
So two are born from one mother. Identical in form and different in content.
Until the age of 50, he served his parents, laid down his life in an attempt to somehow justify his existence. Every day he heard that he was a murderer. And only once from my teacher that she was a writer. He did not believe it: he had heard too often that the murderer … And in his hometown, death is called "the pupil closed."
Surprisingly vividly, the author shows a picture of the transformation of a small sonic genius into nothing. He never blew up schools, did not shoot fellow citizens, he did not even try to commit suicide … He simply turned into nothing.
This is similar to the same transfer of reality to illusion and vice versa. The world around him was an illusion that turned into reality. The people around him suggested to him that he was nothing, and he became nothing - neutro.
Renegade
One of the most unrealistic passages of the novel is the description by the hero of his own kind, how he presents himself and "people like him." He calls them Neutro.
“… People gossip that in Greenwich Village, wherever you go, you will surely come across a bugger, and that day I was struck by only asexual creatures, neutro. These were the same loners like me, they also got used to waiting for love out of nowhere and were just like me, confident that everything dear, desirable, was certainly mined, alert, like a trap.
And I had a terribly funny thought. Someday we all, asexual, neutro, will crawl out of our burrows and hold a demonstration. I even figured out what exactly would be written on our banner, which will unfold across the full width of Fifth Avenue. In huge letters, four feet high, one word will be inscribed:
EGREGIOUS
Many people think that this word means "terrible" or "unforgivable" or "out of the ordinary", but in fact this word is much more interesting. It means that someone has "strayed from the flock."
Just imagine: a crowd of thousands of people, and each of them "strayed from the flock", each of them is a renegade."
Asexual, asexual, unusable especially for anything. They are the failed people. Sound geniuses who know "a lot of words", but for some reason do not say them out loud.
And if they all go somewhere together, then their final route may well be a high bridge or deposits of explosives in the same pale, inconspicuous abandoned factory …
In this novel, just as realistically and in detail, one more sound engineer settled, only a skin-sound one - a pilot who, of course, does not care about the lives of passengers and his own, and who, of course, invented an ideal device for bombing from planes. What else?
“… Z e nev e in a. I am so unhappy that you heard everything.
R u d i. No, don't worry. I am as insensitive as a rubber ball. You said that no one notices me, that I am not even served …
Zhen e in e in a. Have you heard that too?
R u d i. All because I am sexless, neutro. I have no gender. All this sex fuss doesn't even interest me. Nobody knows how many such asexual people are, because they are invisible. And I'll tell you what - there are a million of them here. They should parade with posters:
TRIED ONCE - ENOUGH WITH ME; LIVED ONE TEN YEARS, EXCELLENT FEELING; AT LEAST ONCE IN YOUR LIFE THINK ABOUT ANYTHING BUT SEX.
Zhen ev e in a. And you, it turns out, are witty.
R u d i. A weak-minded genius. I'm not good for anything in life, but I notice the most amusing thing."
A similar sense of self is typical for skin-sound men. You cannot call literary heroes 100% systemic. But the way the author displays them says a lot about the author himself. This does not mean that the characters are written from the author. But such a sense of self is impossible to invent.
And why?..
Unreality
We understand: the hero, in order not to go completely insane, tries with all his might to abstract himself from the monstrous reality and dives into a world invented by him. All his plays fail. Including the one he actually wrote.
When he sees his name and the title of his first and last play on the poster, he suddenly realizes that he is no playwright … They even stopped letting him into the theater, because he did not understand a word from his own play. He did not remember her, and she, in turn, was meaningless.
But he was not worried: for the first time in 38 years he saw her - a real living reality, and in it - people. For the first time, many years after his shot, when he killed a pregnant woman vacuuming a carpet.
He was not Small No Miss. He was just a man not ready for this turn of events. Never went outside. His only attempt to do so was this play.
An unsuccessful attempt, like any action without habit and skill. Because at first it is very difficult to go outside. It often fails. But the more often you do it, the easier it becomes.
Just like “closing someone's pupil,” it's difficult only the first time. And the planet itself is almost dead and has long since swallowed everything in the world "Drano". Like that girl Celia, who became a toothless drug addict …
Failed play. The personification of sound isolation on oneself. When it seems that everything that happens in the outside world is an illusion. Only what is in your head is really real. But this is the most cruel illusion that can be! Everything is fundamentally the opposite: projection is our perception of the world. The way we see it through our cranium. Passed through myself. Unreality. Not true. Ego.
"I went into a cafe, sat down at a table, and they don't even serve him - because he is not there."
Missing phoneme. It seems that it is, but it seems not. Sometimes he hums to himself some Negro tune when he prepares his culinary masterpieces. To forget that he lives on the planet of the dead …
Curtain
In general, the entire work is saturated with the stinking "sexlessness" of souls. People don't exist for each other. I must say, the tendency is quite frequent in the works of Vonnegut, written in a completely sound way. The same "Sirens of the Titan". It seems impossible to imagine that humans could endure such suffering. No one, except a person who absorbs and experiences the most severe shortages in the world, can understand this …
Such a nightmarish concentration of loneliness, a hundred thousand years of sonic loneliness. Or just one sonic life, where a thousand years is like one day, and one day is like a thousand years. This is something that is not finite, unlike everything else. It is infinite, just like the One whom this special handful of the whole humanity seeks to know …
Soon, soon the end of this community, which, like the ouroboros, consumes itself.
It is difficult to break away from these strange, heavy and gloomy fairy tales intertwined with reality so closely. This sound abyss draws in like a funnel, and it is already impossible to emerge until you reach the very bottom.
“… R u d i. Neutro are wonderful servants. They do not pretend to be special, and they almost always cook beautifully.
Z e n e in e in a (she is creepy). You are such a strange person, Rudy Waltz.
R u d i. Because I am the killer.
Zhen e in e in a. What?
R u d i. Yes, we have a killer in our family. Only this is not the father. It's me.
Pause.
Curtain"
He was not a killer. He was just one lonely boy.
