Deadeye Dick

Deadeye Dick is a later-year novel by Kurt Vonnegut, maybe the most conventional one, and for that reason the least recognizable of his collection (although there is still a neutron bomb and the peepholes separating life from «undifferentiated nothingness», similar to Galápagos's blue tunnel). It relates the struggling life of a failed artist (Otto Waltz)—a companion of Hitler in his similar failed artistic undertakings—as recounted by his son (Rudy Waltz), a failed human being following a tragic accident that turned him into the murderer of a pregnant woman, also earning him the nickname that gives the title to the book.

The main theme is the course after one's role in society, or spot in life, or plot in history, which culminates to a point until which everything is possible, and after which everything becomes an epilogue. Another theme is the demise of one's good fortune and wealth, which we also find in, for instance, the Sirens of Titan. Otto is initially rich but loses everything in an irrational and zealous confession to his son's involvement in the accident. The two Italian brothers whom he rescued at the beginning of the plot, in contrast, grew from poor to highly successful, thanks to Otto, to whom and to whose family they remained devoted. Their company being later sued by Rudy and his mother illustrates again the constant turning of the wheel.

Another theme is the social and moral justice, and how one can live with guilt, and how we impose it onto others. Still another theme is Art and what constitutes the lot of the failed artist (failed painter, failed writer, ...), but as far as failure is concerned, this extends to other occupations, from the failed businessman (failed NBC director, failed pharmacist, ...) to the failed boyfriend, husband or even sexual partner. Family appears as a relief and remedy.

The main playful variation on literary style, typical of Vonnegut, is here to interspace cookbook recipes along the story. He also inserts theatrical passages of the action. The description of the reception of the date of Rudy's brother (Felix) at their place, in which the two hangar doors are opened, makes Vonnegut an equal of García Márquez for his splendid magical realism, which prefigures Rabo Karabekian's opening of the hangar in Bluebeard:

A wall of my home vanished. There were stars and a rising moon where it had been.