(Not That You Asked) Read Online Free PDF

openly obsessed our narrator is, the better. (Consider Humbert and the thousand eyes wide open in his eyed blood.)
    From this perspective, my thesis turns out to be perfectly fascinating, not for its facile notions about authorial presence, but for the moony allegiance it expresses toward Vonnegut. It was a love letter, for God’s sake! 5 A chance for me to pronounce my adoration for Vonnegut, to defend his style, to advocate for him in what I took to be the court of academic opinion.
     
     
     
    TWO DECADES LATER, I can see the thesis as something even more excruciatingly personal: an artistic prospectus. I was explaining to myself, often explicitly, the sort of writer I wished to become.
    The main thing was that Vonnegut made an impact on readers. He wasn’t one of those recluses who hid behind coy fictional guises. Every sentence he wrote, every character, was stamped in his image. He came clean on the page as a guy losing his shit. Like in that famous opening chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, the image of Vonnegut lying in bed, sleepless, drunk-dialing his old war buddies and stinking of mustard gas and roses.
    He was honest about why he wrote, too. He copped to that central (if rarely mentioned) impulse of the writing life: He wanted attention. He spoke bluntly, courageously, about prevailing injustices, not just on the page, but in public. He was funny, self-deprecating, easy to read, a (gasp) populist. He wanted to speak to everyone and he wanted everyone to shape the hell up. He hated rich people and warmongers and fanatics. He didn’t pretend not to care.
     
     
     
    AND THAT’S NOT ALL .
Vonnegut was an atheist.
    (So was I!)
    Vonnegut was a Scorpio.
    (So was I!)
    Vonnegut was a youngest child.
    (So was I!)
    Vonnegut viewed film and television as enemies of human progress.
    (So did I!)
    Vonnegut hated literary critics.
    (So did I!)
     
    Vonnegut even seemed to intuit the emotional crises in my life: that I felt exiled by my family, simultaneously disgusted and humiliated by the world of men, desperate for human comfort. He spoke of loneliness constantly. He characterized writers as people “who feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.”
    He was, to summarize, not just my role model, but my shrink.
     
     
     
    I AM NOT SUGGESTING that I recognized my own motives in writing about Vonnegut. Of course I didn’t—I was a college student.
    But it was more than that. I wasn’t a writer. I had no concept (aside from Vonnegut) of what a writer might be. I didn’t take a single creative writing class at Wesleyan. Instead, I became what one of my classmates called, not unkindly, a “campus cartoon character.” I undertook a variety of extracurricular activities. I edited the newspaper (so did Vonnegut!). I was a sports broadcaster for the college radio station. 6 I was a resident adviser. I sang in a gospel choir. I raced around our lovely campus asking, with my every gesture and deed, the same question: What will the story of my life be?
     
     
     
    I DON’T ESPECIALLY like thinking about my college years. They were a bleak era for me, and a bleak era for the country. Ronald Rea gan had just won his second term in a landslide, and the staggering cruelties advocated by what has come to be known as the conservative movement were very much in vogue. Greed was good, facts were stupid things, Jesus was in, personal sacrifice was out, the nation was beginning a long, slow decline into moral disassociation.
    The details were straight out of a B movie. Astrologers were setting the agenda upstairs at the White House, while a gang of nutty neocons trashed the basement, running guns to Iran and funneling the cash to the death squads (the term “terrorists” was not yet in vogue) who opposed a legally elected government in Nicaragua.
    I had no idea what to do about any of this. I felt guilty and pissed off all the time. I listened to “I Will Dare” by the Replacements 12,000 times. I took a