means that all Daffodils are his distant relations, and all Daffodil-1 1s his immediate family. However, just as the world is solving its problem of loneliness, it is hit with a plague, gravity fluctuations force the abandonment of large cities, and Wilbur is left with a meaningless Presidency, ruling over a country that no longer exists except as an anarchic collection of feudal states. Thirty years later, Wilbur writes this book; apparently little has happened in the meantime. The last few chapters are remarkably sketchy, as if either the author or the narrator has gotten bored with the whole things When the seven dwarfs sang “Hi ho” they were more diligent.
We find out in the Prologue that Vonnegut has daydreamed the whole novel while flying to Indianapolis for his uncle’s funeral, and that it is all meaningful. Unfortunately, the meaning is personal rather than universal; Vonnegut’s first sentence is, “This is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography.” And we are then supposed to extrapolate from a few family reminiscences to the action of the novel and marvel at something or other. Vonnegut’s sister Alice had been embarrassingly tall, and had died of cancer at 41; she had described her impending death as “soap opera” and “slapstick”—obviously a Vonnegut through and through. So Slapstick is “really” about Kurt and Alice; “it depicts myself and my beautiful sister as monsters, and so on.” Alice’s husband died in a grotesque accident two days before she did; he was a passenger on “the only train in American railroading history to hurl itself off an open drawbridge.” Consequently Slapstick is “grotesque, situational poetry”; it is supposedly about “what life feels like” to Vonnegut. But Hi ho?
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