Deadeye Dick

It was time for me to have an apparently light and quick read, and I stumbled on a Kurt Vonnegut novel that I had not read, Deadeye Dick, one of his later novels, written in 1982 when Vonnegut was 50. I always felt some connection to Vonnegut, not only because I love his books (especially Breakfast of Champions) and his humor, but because he was also a Hoosier. His family owned the main hardware chain in Indianapolis, and when I was in medical school there in the 70s, I thought it was really cool to see a Vonnegut Hardware store, and I passed by one of those stores on the way too and from the medical center.

The venue for Deadeye Dick was Midland, Ohio, the same town as Breakfast of Champions, a generic, uninspiring, and mostly uneventful Midwestern town. Vonnegut’s main character is Rudy Waltz who is the product of wealthy (by inheritance) and unproductive parents who have little understanding of the world around them. He begins his book with a line that only Vonnegut would write, “To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.”

Waltz’s life was altered at the age of 12 when he accidently shot and killed a pregnant woman. The cops nicknamed him Deadeye Dick, and the name stuck to him, one that people constantly used behind his back for the rest of his life. The book revolved around his life-long guilt for that senseless act, as well as the impact it left on his family. He lived out his life as an asexual nightshift pharmacist in Midland. Vonnegut wrote, “That is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.” But, he wrote a play about his life which made it to Broadway for one performance only. Similarly, his older brother blundered his way to being President of NBC before being dumped from the company for the network’s awful ratings.

So, it’s a story about Vonnegut’s view that life is ultimately meaningless: “We all see our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.” How depressing, and I disagree, but still find it worth reading – no one writes quite like him.