Vonnegut's Speeches and Notes

My project, after some initial investigation, focuses on Vonnegut’s collection of notes for speeches in 1990. This folder contained a mixture of typewritten outlines for speeches and hand-written notes. 3 pages of this folder were typed outlines of speeches, just the initial stages in Vonnegut’s speech writing process. These pages contained simple but crucial thoughts that Vonnegut wished to address in his speech and were often only a sentence or two long. Very few developed paragraphs appear at this stage of his drafting process. The rest of this folder, another 8 pages, were pages or scraps of paper on which Vonnegut had scribbled a few thoughts or very rough outlines of speeches. These outlines did not reveal much about the eventual content of the speech as they often contained only a word or two on what Vonnegut wanted to address. The typical outline structure followed a pattern of: Topic A, Topic B, Someone’s name, APOLOGIZE!!-- the apologies at the end of his speech notes were always emphasized. Vonnegut, in these notes, clearly recognizes the often incendiary reaction his colorful and humorous speeches tended to provoke.

This collection of notes contained some of the more incendiary of speeches Vonnegut’s collection. It is not clear for what occasion these notes and speeches were drafted, but they are all centered on the subject of war--specifically the recent involvement of the United States in the Gulf War. In these notes, and the early stages of these outlines, Vonnegut demonstrates an incredible amount of angst and frustration with the U.S.’s tradition of romanticizing the atrocity of war. Pointing towards his “pacifist” upbringing, Vonnegut claims at one point that:

I was raised to believe and still believe that on any holiday commemorating a war we should all paint ourselves blue and go down on our hands and knees in the mud somewhere and grunt like pigs.

This hostile tone is carried throughout his 3 pages of typed outlines, and makes the need for the emphasized “APOLOGIZE!!” in his initial outlines very obvious. The sincerity of this apology can be doubted however, as on one page of his type written outline he retells a story of his evening with a mysterious woman writer and her metaphor of the atmosphere of America at this time as being that of jovial dinner party where guests are increasingly becoming aware of a terrible stench in the air. He follows this metaphor with his speech’s conclusion:

There. I’ve got that off my chest. I feel much better. I bet you feel worse, unless you’ve started noticing that smell, too. There’s an easy remedy. Just hire somebody else, practically anybody else, to speak to you.

This final remark obviously casts a major doubt over the sincerity of his outlined apology, and provides insight into perhaps why there remains nothing but note and half completed outlines of these speeches.