From the start of the book,
Vonnegut constantly reminded us that the killing of Edgar Derby was coming,
that it was going to the climactic point of the book. However, the scene itself
was pretty anti-climactic. It was one page before the book ended and the entire
thing took one short paragraph to describe.
“Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot."
Campbell got to speak for much longer
than the entire scene of the supposed climactic point. How does that make
sense?
Something that seems much more like
the climactic point is the bombing of Dresden. The book had been building up to
the point where Vonnegut could finally tell us what happened in Dresden, but
not in a way that told us exactly what was going to happen. It had an entire
scene with some follow-up, leaving more than a page for the end of the novel.
So what is the point of Vonnegut to be contradictory in this way? It’s not that
Derby’s death was not important, it just wasn’t presented in a way that made it
seem like the big climactic point. I guess if Vonnegut is going to announce the
beginning, end, and climactic point of his book he might want to through the
reader off guard a little bit, but I don’t know. We did have more details given about Derby's death throughout the book, but the overall way it was presented did not leave much drama as to what was going to happen. So why tell the reader these details ahead of time anyway? It does fit in with tralfamadorian ideas and the novel is supposed to be formatted like the tralfamadorian novels. So does that mean the climax in tralfamadorian novels are pretty anti-climatic? I mean, I would believe it with how their ideology is. What effect does this have on the novel? Do you have any ideas as to why Vonnegut
would do this?
