The challenges of authorial power as I have discussed in the introduction are not only caused by the social and political contexts of postwar America but also by critical literary discourses. In this chapter, I will do a focused examination of authorial control in the literary contexts of Vonnegut's SF and BC. I aim to examine the authorial control in terms of the author's textual control and his ability to offer meaning and solutions through his fictional world. In terms of textual control, the author's power over the characters, plot, structure, and verbal expression in the fiction are what I will examine in this thesis. As the author has control over these elements in the construction of his fiction, he is the source of meaning and the provider of solutions. Yet, Vonnegut loses certain authorial control as he adopts metafictional elements in composing his novels and thus seems "powerless." Therefore, I want to identify Vonnegut's loss of authorial power as he presents a negative image of a writer, problematizes the author identity, breaks the coherent narrative structure and chronological plot, and offers seemingly meaningless and nihilistic views on life.

To discuss Vonnegut's authorial control, I will first introduce authorial control in the tradition of realist and modernist literary presentations, since the latter are the backgrounds against which Vonnegut constructs his ideas of authorial "power" and "powerlessness." As Waugh suggests, in the realist tradition, especially in the case of nineteenth-century realism¹, the authorial power is generally "derived from a firm belief in a commonly experienced, objectively existing world of history . . . " (Waugh 6). Therefore, for Waugh, the forms of fiction, and "the conflict of languages and voices," are "resolved . . . through their subordination to the dominant 'voice' of the omniscient, god-like author" (6). According to Waugh, the god-like power of the author over the text refers to "the well-made plot, chronological sequence, . . . the rational connection between what characters  'do' and what they  'are', the causal connection between  'surface' details and the  'deep',  'scientific laws' of existence" (7).

In addition to the omniscience and omnipotence assumed by nineteenth-century realist writers, the modernist presentation of the artist figure and its individual mental world is another frame of reference for the discussion of Vonnegut's novels. Take Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as an example, Stephen is an artist figure whose "development along esthetic lines as an artist . . . combines the religious functions of priest-teacher and sinner-scapegoat" (Scholes and Kellogg 170). As the novel develops, however, Stephen is the transcending artist figure who finally gains his own aesthetic view and the courage to fight against the rigid world of religion. Whereas the realistic novelists regard the external world as objective truth, the modernist is concerned "with the mind as itself the basis of an aesthetic, ordered at a profound level and revealed to consciousness at isolated  'epiphanic' moments (Waugh 23). Although readers will receive an " open ending" in a modernist fiction such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the conflicts of "open ending" will always be resolved (Lodge 226). Waugh supports Lodge's idea by suggesting that "in modernist fiction, . . . the reader may be temporarily dislocated when point of view . . . is shifted, but is allowed to reorient him or herself to the new perspective and recontextualize each new piece of discourse (101). One good example of this shift of narrative perspective is the writing strategy of "stream of consciousness:" the author is powerful in penetrating the inner world of the characters and providing the reader with some kind of vision. Thus, in both the realistic and modernistic tradition, the author dominates over the fictional world, whether it be external or psychological, has absolute control over its meaning, and functions as the source to offer solutions to the problems in the novel and the meanings to the objective world. In other words, the "author" I discuss is not Vonnegut the person, but the authorial presence and control he inscribes into the text.
　

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The Author Figures v.s. the Author

In discussing Vonnegut's authorial power, I should first stress that this presentation is definitely not a biographical study of Kurt Vonnegut, nor an attempt to associate his real life incidents with the stories in his fictional works. Nor is it a psychological analysis of Vonnegut's mental health as a means to validate the credibility of his writings. Rather, one obvious sign of "the author" is author figure in these two novels of Vonnegut. Kilgore Trout, a reflection of the author image, is generally presented as an unpopular and trivial science fiction writer in contrast to the traditional sacred image of the author such as that of Stephen Dedalus.

In SF, Trout is described as a negative writer figure who does not treat writing seriously. "He himself [Kilgore Trout] has no idea how many novels he has written possibly seventy-five of the things. Not one of them has made money. So Trout keeps body and soul together as a circulation man for the Ilium Gazette, manages newspaper delivery boys, bullies and flatters and cheats little kids" (166). In BC, neither is Kilgore Trout presented as a professional writer: "he made his living as an installer of aluminum combination storm windows and screens. He had nothing to do with the sales end of the business¡Xbecause he had no charm" (20). Not only is Kilgore Trout never appreciated as a writer, his novels are usually associated with pornography. Even more miserably, his science fiction novels are used as toilet paper in jail by one of the characters in BC, and ironically the character becomes the only person who has ever read Kilgore Trout except for his secret fan, Eliot Rosewater. Metaphorically, Vonnegut implies the loss of the god-like power of the author as he presents Trout as a writer who cannot even control and decide what kind of illustrations to go with his novels. Trout's novel is equivalent to garbage, since its creator is a trashy artist or no artist at all. Also, Trout's frustration and personal problems as a writer in the story hold parallel to those of the author's. In BC, Trout has a depressing childhood, which possibly explains his pessimistic views of life. Trout might also pass his unhealthy ideas to his readers in the fiction. Through the clownish presentation of the powerless author figure, Vonnegut challenges the author as the source of meaning and the provider of solution as in the traditional narrative.

In addition to the belittled image of the author by the writer figure Kilgore Trout, in the text, there is a "Vonnegut" surrogate, by which I mean that Vonnegut appears as an author figure who embodies the biographical features of Vonnegut and interacts with the fictional characters. The various arrangement of the authorial intrusion is one of the most puzzling yet intriguing elements in Vonnegut's fictional work. A brief overview on Vonnegut's treatment of "the author" and "the narrator" in the other two of his metafcitional novels, Cat's Cradle and Mother Night, will help explain the more complicated relationships between the author and the narrator in SF and BC.

In Mother Night, Vonnegut plays a trick which complicates the discussion of author. Although Vonnegut presents the story of the double agent through the first-person narrative of Howard Campbell himself, Vonnegut also reminds his readers that behind the narrator "I, " there is actually an omniscient author, Vonnegut. In the "Editor's Note," Vonnegut tricks his readers by playing both as the author and editor of Cambell's autobiographical confession. As the author, he writes, "As for my own tinkerings with the text, they are few, I have corrected some spelling, removed some exclamation points, and all the italics are mine" (x). Traditionally, the "Editor's Note" functions as background information or explanation to the composing of the novels. But here, it raises doubt to the credibility of Campbell's stories rather than give any support to the documentary-like narrative. Also, the author Vonnegut becomes as much fictional as Campbell. Contradictorily, however, the author of Mother Night still possesses a certain degree of the traditional omniscient power, since the author still remains in control over the stories, which are presented as Howard Campbell's biographical documents in a realistic sense.

Another example of the doubling of the author appears in Cat's Cradle, which is written by two writer figures, John or Jonah, and Vonnegut. The novel, moreover, is about John's process of writing a book called "The Day the World Ended," which is still left unfinished at the "end." Here, Vonnegut does leave an ambiguous connection between Jonah the writer figure and the author of the book when Jonah suggests that the "screwy name" on the pedestal is "my last name, too" (54-55). The point is not to associate Jonah with the biographical Vonnegut so as to find out the mysterious identity of Jonah. In this novel, the writer figure is without doubt the author of "the book within the book, "but is also becoming the author of the book Cat's Cradle. Therefore, Jonah functions as the double of the author as the author constantly reveals the writing process of the very book readers are reading. Although Vonnegut makes the traditionally invisible author figure present in the novel as the writer figure, Jonah, and exposes his writing process, the omniscient power of the author still remains in his over-manipulation of meaning through 127 subtitles.

While Cat's Cradle and Mother Night show the author and the narrator as double and fictitious, in SF, Vonnegut gives more challenges to the identity of the traditional author. Usually, readers are not supposed to mistake the narrator of the book for the real life author. However, unlike Cat's Cradle and Mother Night, in which the author still remains at the outside of the ficitonal frame, in SF, the third person authorial voice of the narrative occasionally shifts into the first person "I," and enters the narrative as a character. As Klinkowitz points out, "what distinguishes Vonnegut's novel is that its real-life author is present within the text: as the narrative's central character in its first and last chapters, and as a person who appears three times within the action that evolves in chapters 2-9" (Reforming the Novel 21). In SF, Vonnegut is the omniscient narrator of the text and also a fictional writer figure in the text. Thus, the god-like position of the author in the text is challenged. For instance, the stories of Billy Pilgrim being unstuck in time and his experiences in the Second World War and the planet Tralfamadore are intruded upon by the author. When Billy is experiencing the tragic moment of the dying of the colonel, Wild Bob, Vonnegut interrupts it by reminding the reader that "I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare" (67). When Billy's eyewitness of the American soldiers' sickness in the latrine is presented, the scene is shattered by an interruption: "An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. . . . That was I. That was the author of this book" (125). On Billy's way to Dresden, Vonnegut breaks into the movement by associating the scene with his experiences in the Second World War: "Somebody behind him in the boxcar said,  'Oz.' That was I. That was me" (148).

In BC, Vonnegut as the author of the book actually turns himself into one of the "main" characters in his novel, who converses with his characters as he creates them and tells the stories of his own life. In SF, Vonnegut does turn himself into the character "I," but most of the time, the Vonnegut persona stays out of the narrative as the third-person narrator of the story. However, in BC, the existence of the authorial voice and the development of the characters are mutually dependent. The characters need the author as much as the author needs his characters in the text. Vonnegut challenges the author's dominance over the text because the authorial intrusions undermine the omniscient power of the author as in SF. The strategy of narrative intrusion is even more frequently used in BC. Moreover, it is not only done in the form of intrusion, but actually through the author as a character. This strategy reveals the author narrator's daily life and personal problems. For example, some factual information in the ordinary life of the author narrator disrupts the fictional world he is creating: "Patty Keene hadn't heard the big news yet. Neither had Dwayne, Neither had Kilgore Trout. I only found out about it day before yesterday" (143-144). "I do not know who invented the body bag. I do know who invented Kilgore Trout. I did" (32). A body bag is a kind of invention to carry the bodies of soldiers who die in the Vietnam War. Also, the story is intruded upon through the association of the figure in real life and the fictional character: "Bunny's mother ate Drano. My mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn't nearly as horrible" (181). Moreover, the intrusion goes further as the narrator turns himself into one of the characters whose stories are largely revealed and intermingled with the other characters in the novel. The author surrogate enters into the text and also has interaction with them: "I had come to the Arts Festival incognito. I was there to watch a confrontation between two human beings I had created: Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout" (192).

In both novels, with the act of narrative intrusion, the identity of the author becomes doubled, fictitious and trivialized, and thus, compared to the author in realistic or modernist narrative tradition, their omniscient and omnipotent power is greatly reduced. As Waugh points out clearly,

In addition to authorial intrusion, the revelation of the writing process of the fiction also gives more evidence to show the loss of the traditional authorial power to offer a linear or well-made plot. Presumably, the more coherent, convincing and dramatic the plot is, the more the author can seduce and attract readers into a seamless representation of the make-believe world.

However, instead of offering any dramatic suspension, readers are told at the beginning of SF that it will begin with the sentence "Billy Piligrim has come unstuck in time" and that it will end with "poo-tee-weet?"" We learn every detail of Billy's life not through the chronological development of the plot, but through apparently random presentation of the character's moments in life. Therefore, in SF, there is no suspense, or climax as we can find in traditional novels as the author will keep the controlling power over his or her readers as involved as possible in the process of reading, and every revelation of the fictional details follows the logical sequence of fictional development.

The plot arrangement of BC is also not dramatic or suspenseful. In BC, we actually have a plot summary of the whole story at the beginning chapter, while the stories of the meeting between the "two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men," Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover, are gradually revealed. We know the "climax" of the story as Vonnegut points out the reason of Dwayne Hoover's getting insane. "Here was the core of the bad ideas which Trout gave to Dwayne: "Everybody on Earth was a robot, with one exception¡XDwayne Hoover" (14). We also learn the outcome of these two characters: Trout will have to become "a pioneer in the field of mental health" and Dwayne must get "carted off to a lunatic asylum in a canvas camisole" (15). Therefore, the author gives away the control over the plot in a chronological manner, and appears to be powerless in directing the act of reading.

Noticeably, in both novels, the narrative intrusions overlap with the revelation of the writing process in how they affect the author's structural control over the narrative. In the same way, the exposure of the creative process also undermines the omniscient and omnipotent power of the author, since readers learn about the frustration and failure of the working process. In SF, the Vonnegut persona addresses to the reader his frustration of incorporating the Dresden memories into a book: "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time" (2). Though the narrator claims that "the best outline . . . , or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll wall paper," (5) we learn as the story goes on that the outline he has worked so many times still is not accepted by the author at the end.

In BC, the author reveals a parallel situation by telling how difficult it is to control his characters: "Here was the thing about my control over the characters I created: I could only guide their movements approximately, since they were such big animals. There was inertia to overcome. It wasn't as though I was connected to them by steel wires. It was more as though I was connected to them by stale rubber bands" (202). Furthermore, by the schizophrenic dialogues between Vonnegut as author and character, the frustration and suffering can never be deeper:

"You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did," I said.

"I know," I said. (193)

From here, we can say that the revelation of the writing process and the confession of the difficulties in it not only break down the structure of novel but also threaten the traditional image of the author as a figure transcending life and turning it into a work of art. The author does not function as a god-like figure to the text, but rather as a reorganizer of various writing materials presented to readers. The author explicitly admits his problematic position in the composing of the fiction, and also questions his own ability to convey messages by the very narrative he is working on. Here, along with the belittled image of the writer figure, Kilgore Trout, the authors "in" both novels also appear to be powerless in offering a coherent fictional structure and a chronological

A Comic Book?

Furthermore, Vonnegut has seemingly loss of control over verbal expression in both novels. The author in the tradition of realistic and modernist narratives has superb, if not absolute, control over language in constructing his fictional world with not only a coherent plot but also images and symbols which function to suggest deeper meaning. However, in BC, Vonnegut seems to have given up this attempt by using a lot of seemingly meaningless drawings as though he is offering readers a comic book. The illustrations are mainly rough sketches of some ordinary objects, such as hamburgers, fried chicken, and apples. There are even offensive drawings of a "wide open beaver," "female underpants," and "an asshole" in the book. The pictures will often follow right after the narrator mentions the object he is describing. For example, we will have a picture of a gun when we read "this was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings" (49). We will see the image of a cow when Vonnegut tells us the unnecessary fact that "a hamburger was made out of an animal which looked like this" (124). Just as Vonnegut says in his preface that "I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly¡Xto insult"(5), these graphics appear to be ridiculous and redundant to a piece of literary work, which ought to be a construction in verbal language. The shift of expression from linguistic construction to graphic presentation suggests a challenge to traditional artistic narrative. Whether the author loses this power in verbal expression to gain another kind of power will be discussed in Chapter Three.

In SF, the author also abandons the power of verbal expression to a certain degree, though he does not use as many illustrations as he does in BC (there are only three graphics, and all of them with words). It is noticeable that whenever death appears in the narrative, the narrator seems to have lost interest in presenting it or providing any meaningful comment on it, leaving the reader only with an abrupt and repetitive sentence, "So it goes," as a concluding remark. No matter it is the tens of thousands of death of the victims in the fire bombing of Dresden, or the death of the historical figures Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, or the death of an unheard elevator man, or the fictional character Billy Pilgrim and his wife, Valencia, or even a bottle of lifeless champagne, the Vonnegut author persona will always stop the narration with "So it goes." The expression is neither descriptive nor informative. It seems to be easy for the author to do so and when the pattern is set up, the responses we have to all the deaths in the novel seem to become the mechanic and meaningless "So it goes." But is it really true that Vonnegut's unrepresentative language means his inability over verbal expression or does it question the function of the language itself? In the traditional narrative, language is a means of the meaningful communication and visionary expression of the author. Thus, the author is in absolute control of the messages and meanings of the text and will offer readers solutions to the problems and issues discussed in the novel.

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Poo-tee-weet?

But, for SF, we are left wondering: what are the messages that the author wants to give on a massacre through SF? What is the meaning of the war, or what do human beings learn from the traumatic experience? How can we keep the peace of the world? What are human beings for?

If we are ever given any message, we seem to be offered contradictory information. In SF, the solution seems to be engraved in a silver chain around Montana Wildhack's neck," God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference" (209). However, it is undermined since Vonnegut points out that "among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present and the future" (60). Vonnegut seems to offer a rather nihilistic view, which does not help at all: we can do nothing to improve our world and nothing can be done or undone for what has happened. The final answer the book offers seems to be only the chirping of the bird "Poo-tee-weet?," which is more discouraging than comforting, since "everybody is supposed to be dead. . . . Everything is supposed to be quiet . . . except for the bird" (19).

In BC, Vonnegut as the author persona tells the reader that the issue he wants to explore in the book is the problem of "free will." Vonnegut clearly states that "so it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals he ate or failed to eat on that particular day" (4). However, the story ends openly with the huge handwriting of "etc," which has appeared previously in chapter 20, and without any conclusion and solution to the problems in the novel.² Or, if the author does offer any meaning, it seems to be as fatalistic as it is in SF since Dwayne Hoover has to go insane as a "destructive testing" by the influence of Kilgore Trout's fiction, and Kilgore Trout can never be freed by his creator Vonnegut. As SF is notorious for its "So it goes" and its end with bird talk, so BC is filled with "and so on." Thus, the stories of BC could go as far as it wants to be as long as it keeps clustering the stories of Dwayne, Kilgore and the Vonnegut author persona. This seems to imply that even if readers "finish" reading the novel, there is no "end" for the meaning. But here, I do not intend to limit the discussion of the author's ability to offer meaning or solution merely on whether there is an "end." As I have discussed previously, the negative author image, the loss of the omniscient authorial power, the breaking of fictional coherence, and the lack of control over verbal expression, all these characteristics in both novels of Vonnegut challenge the author as the ultimate and absolute origin of meanings and solutions.

However, can we claim that the loss of the traditional authorial power in the realistic and modernist sense is equal to the loss of all the authorial power, or the death of the author? In the following two chapters, I will do a close textual examination on SF and BC separately to see if the author is really powerless in his ways of presenting his subject matter and conveying his messages.

¹ The term "realism" in the discussion of this thesis is mainly based on the postmodernist's view. To have a better understanding of the authorial power of realism, George Levine's The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) can be a helpful reference. Also, realism in this thesis refers to British realism. Michael Davitt Bell in The Problem of American Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993) points out the problematic definition of American realism.

²As Vonnegut breaks the frame of BC by undermining the fictional with the factual, we can also regard the portrait of his own image in tears and the brief introduction of his life as the ending of the book. No matter which ending is taken into consideration, each presents the powerlessness of the author in terms of author image and textual control