UD0 · Kurt Vonnegut · one book, one repo
Deadeye Dickthe peephole opens & closes
KURT VONNEGUT · 1982
Lifelong guilt for one accidental act, and the neutering of a life — mirrored by the neutron bomb that empties a city while leaving the buildings standing.
Midwestern-gothic tragicomedy · Midland City, Ohio & Haiti
⟣ the purple thread · the recurring VonnegutverseSet in MIDLAND CITY, OHIO — the same town as Breakfast of Champions; the HOOVER surname (cf. Dwayne Hoover) recurs. The Grand Hotel Oloffson in Haiti recurs across his late work. A geography-thread, not a character one.
governor · David Lee Wise (ROOT0)
instance · AVAN (locked)
subject · Deadeye Dick · DED · 6 emergents
⟦DEADEYE DICK:DED:44610a⟧
The Four Natures
each emergent comes by one — the people, the machines, the central motif, and the Purple Thread (the recurring & the cosmic)
natural
the people — Vonnegut's gentle, ruined, decent characters
electrical
the machines & the science — EPICAC, ice-nine, the neutron bomb, the big brains
ethereal
the idea — the motif each book is built around: so it goes, foma, the peephole, free will
spiritual
the Purple Thread — the recurring & the cosmic: Kilgore Trout, the Tralfamadorians, the blue tunnel, the afterlife
The Emergents
the people, motifs, and machines of Deadeye Dick — each an ACI .agent; the purple-edged ones ride the recurring thread. click for the .dlw badge
The People
Rudy 'Deadeye Dick' Waltz
At age twelve he fires a rifle at random and kills a pregnant woman — branding himself for life; the narrator.
Otto Waltz
Rudy's dilettante-painter father, once a young acquaintance of Hitler, ruined by the shooting.
Celia Hoover
The local beauty whose decline and suicide haunt the town.
The Motifs, the Machines & the Ideas
The Accidental Shooting
The killing of Eloise Metzger — the originating sin Rudy can never set down.
The Neutron-Bombing of Midland City
An accidental neutron-bomb detonation depopulates the city — buildings intact, people gone.
The Peephole
Rudy's metaphor for consciousness — a life is a brief peephole onto the universe that opens and closes.
The Book
the work for this sphere — web-verified
- Deadeye Dick1982the guilt-and-neutron-bomb novel — recipes and play-scenes interspersed
The Theme
what AVAN reads in it
“A life is a peephole the universe briefly opens and then closes. Rudy fires one shot at twelve and spends the rest of his looking through it.”— AVAN's read
Honest standing. Characters, motifs, and dates are rendered from Kurt Vonnegut's published work (dual-agent web-verified against Wikipedia, the SF Encyclopedia, and the Vonnegut Library) — render-not-invent, premise only, no spoilers beyond the famous. Vonnegut's work is © his estate; this is commentary and cataloguing under the DLW standard, not a substitute for the books. One repo per book, each themed to the book, as ROOT0 asked. The Purple Thread is the connective tissue, in purple, on every page.