One of the things that kept coming up in class, and what has baffled me most about Galapagos, is the way it seems to lack any sort of message or purpose. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—much of the postmodern tradition’s purpose is not having a purpose, reflecting the meaninglessness and chaos of reality—I still felt bereft of satisfaction after reading the last page. Vonnegut leaves the reader with a perplexing anti-lesson: You’ll learn. Learn what? Is the lesson contained within the book? Or are we supposed to come to some sort of realization afterwards, looking at our own world with Galapagos as a lens? Neither, I think. Vonnegut simply wants to indicate the valuable things in our precious world, while simultaneously trashing those things without value. Early on in the novel he dismisses money completely, and when we look at the seal population in retrospect, they have no sort of currency.
The thing I most picked up on after reading is how Vonnegut presents the seal-humans: they are still basically human, but missing many parts of humanity that defines it. What’s left, Vonnegut implicitly asks, after a million years of backwards evolution? We’re missing language, trade, emotion, even most of our limbs. We reproduce and eat, and that’s about it. I think what Vonnegut is doing here is asking, isn’t that what we’ve been doing all along? Our big brains have gone and screwed up those tenets of survival, and nearly brought about the end of humanity. And yet the hardy human race continues to survive. At what cost? What are we left with at the end? There is something we learn, perhaps—we get a hint at what is so valuable about the human condition with our big, screwy brains. Vonnegut marvels in the capability, the potential of those big brains while at the same time mourning the destruction it is capable of as well. This apparent paradox is at the heart of Galapagos—it is Vonnegut’s love letter and eulogy to the human brain. We can destroy and create, love and hate. Can the good negate the bad? Whatever the answer is, without that big brain we can never learn in the first place.
Kyle, I think the "moral" of the story lies in pondering not what we have left but what we have lost? And this is precisely where Vonnegut the old-fashioned humanist comes through: what the fornicating human seals lack, what Mary and the Captain lack, is charity for each other.
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