Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut

First published: 1979

Type of plot: Antinovel

Time of work: 1977

Locale: Cleveland; Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York City; and rural Georgia

Principal Characters:

• Walter F. Starbuck, the protagonist and narrator, a minor government employee
• Ruth, his wife
• Alexander Hamilton McCone, an eccentric millionaire who sends Starbuck to Harvard
• Leland Clewes, a friend of Starbuck who is accidentally ruined by him
• Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a bag lady, the secret head of the RAMJAC Corporation, and Starbuck’s former lover; she is really Mrs. Jack Graham

The Novel

After a rambling autobiographical prologue relating the quasi-historical backgrounds of some of the characters, Jailbird presents the memoir of one Walter F. Starbuck, recently released from jail after serving time for a minor role in the Watergate conspiracy. The novel relates the events of Starbuck’s first two days of freedom, during which he goes to New York City and encounters two people from his past: Leland Clewes, whom he accidentally ruined in the 1940’s by testifying that Clewes was a former Communist, and Mary Kathleen O’Looney, now a bag lady but formerly his lover and coworker during his own days as a Communist in the 1930’s. Starbuck’s narrative is full of flashbacks, and by the time he encounters Clewes and Mary Kathleen, he has related his entire history in a somewhat jumbled fashion.

Starbuck, the son of European immigrants, is sent to Harvard by Alexander Hamilton McCone, his parents’ employer and a stammering recluse. McCone has avoided the world ever since he witnessed the massacre of his father’s striking factory employees. McCone wants Starbuck to become a gentleman, but, instead, as a college student Starbuck becomes a union sympathizer, the editor of The Bay State Progressive, and the lover of Mary Kathleen O’Looney. In the 1940’s, Starbuck gives up his radical affiliations to begin working in a series of bureaucratic government positions. In 1949, he tells a congressional committee, in reply to a question by Congressman Richard M. Nixon, that Leland Clewes was at one time a Communist, thus unwittingly ruining Clewes, who had never before been publicly associated with Communism.

Several years later, no one will give Starbuck a job because of this betrayal, and his wife must support him. When Nixon becomes president, however, he appoints Starbuck as his special adviser on youth affairs, a completely meaningless job. Starbuck, however, allows a trunk full of money to be hidden in his White House office and hence becomes a Watergate conspirator.

Despite the fact that he is a Harvard man, Starbuck believes that his life is a failure. Upon his release from prison, he fears that he will become a bum, unable to find a job. Yet Mary Kathleen, with her gigantic basketball shoes and six shopping bags, turns out to be Mrs. Jack Graham, the reclusive majority stockholder of RAMJAC, the largest, most powerful conglomerate in the Western world. Mary Kathleen runs the corporation by sending her officials instructions signed with her fingerprints. Convinced that someone is trying to kill her and cut off her hands in order to take control of RAMJAC, she hides on the streets of New York in her disguise. Finding Starbuck again and hearing his story convinces her that kind people do still exist. She arranges for Starbuck and all those people who have been kind to him during his two days of freedom to be made RAMJAC vice presidents, but then she is hit by a taxi. When Starbuck finds her dying, he finally realizes her true identity. He hides her will, which bequeaths RAMJAC to the American people, and spends two years as a rich and influential businessman in the entertainment industry. As the novel ends, however, he is about to become a jailbird once more for unlawfully concealing a will. RAMJAC’s various divisions are being sold, with the profits going to the federal government.

The Characters

Walter F. Starbuck is an antihero, a minor, inconsequential figure caught up and manipulated by greater forces. While on the outskirts of great movements—the union strikes of the 1930’s, the Nuremberg Trials, the McCarthy era, Watergate—he never plays an active or important role. He ruefully acknowledges near the end of his memoirs, “The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.” Starbuck always is a loser, a perpetual jailbird, even in a moral sense. He admits,

The most embarrassing thing to me about this autobiography, surely, is its unbroken chain of proofs that I was never a serious man. I have been in a lot of trouble over the years, but that was all accidental. Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.

Yet in his self-critical, wry, and humorous narration, Starbuck creates a sense of empathy in the reader. This man is a bumbler, but he is an entertaining, likable, and somewhat poignant bumbler.

Because the novel is his autobiography, Starbuck is the most fully developed character. Vonnegut is not interested in psychological realism in Jailbird. Most of the characters remain satiric caricatures of corrupt lawyers, unemployed Ph.D.’s, and hard-hearted businessmen. Cleverly drawn with vivid, idiosyncratic detail (one man has a french-fried hand), Vonnegut’s characters are more like comic-strip figures than real people. Starbuck’s minimum-security federal prison in Georgia is populated by Harvard men and Watergate criminals. His guard, Clyde Carter, is a third cousin of President Jimmy Carter and looks exactly like him. Clyde spends his extra time taking correspondence courses in bartending and locksmithing until he is made a RAMJAC vice president. Another prisoner, Emil Larkin, was President Nixon’s hatchet man. Vonnegut describes him as “a big man, goggle-eyed and liver-lipped, who had been a middle linebacker for Michigan State at one time. He was a disbarred lawyer now, and he prayed all day long to what he believed to be Jesus Christ.” Vonnegut excels in such small, barbed parodies.

The other major characters are also depicted through idiosyncracies and remain types rather than fully developed personalities. The ironic juxtapositions of the plot serve to establish these characters: Leland Clewes marries Starbuck’s Harvard girlfriend, Sarah; Mary Kathleen’s mother died of radium poisoning from a factory run by Sarah’s family; the ardent socialist Mary Kathleen is the major stockholder in one of the most powerful conglomerates. Vonnegut further stereotypes his characters by their names: Alexander Hamilton McCone is a millionaire, Mary Kathleen O’Looney is a bit crazy, and Starbuck recalls the well-meaning but powerless first mate who is overwhelmed by Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Leland Clewes’s bland identity is suggested by the appearance of another character named Cleveland Lawes. The significant names, the stereotyped detail and caricature, and the fabulous twists of the plot suggest that all the characters are, in a sense, jailbirds in terms of being trapped and manipulated by seemingly meaningless forces.

A final kind of characterization which further adds to this theme is Vonnegut’s use of historical figures as varied as Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Richard M. Nixon, and Robert Redford. In the tradition of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (1937-1938) and E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), Vonnegut’s novel asserts that larger historical movements are always lived and experienced by actual little people.

Critical Context

Vonnegut’s novels are protest literature, full of black humor and satire employed to provide a moral commentary on the evils of twentieth century life. His early works, such as Player Piano (1952) and Cat’s Cradle (1963), earned for him an enthusiastic cult following, but he emerged as one of the most influential and provocative leaders of the black-humor literary movement of the 1960’s with his apocalyptic Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). These early works often employed science fiction in order to depict bleakly humanity’s self-destructive nature.

In the 1970’s, Vonnegut’s work began focusing more on American social and political history. Jailbird represents his response to the Watergate era as well as important earlier events in American history, but it continues in the parodic, black-humor tradition. Some critics believe that Vonnegut’s work in the 1970’s, and in Jailbird in particular, represents a diminishment of his early creativity. Nevertheless, much of the social and political satire in Jailbird is very effective. Also, Vonnegut seems, for the first time, to be suggesting some moral alternatives to the evils that he depicts. The emphasis on the Sermon on the Mount, on kindness and courtesy, on the giving and caring natures of Sarah Wyatt and Mary Kathleen, shows the values that Vonnegut would have replace the impersonal and greedy capitalism that he condemns. His books since Jailbird, especially Deadeye Dick (1982) and Galápagos (1985), continue to offer in small ways some optimistic alternatives to the corrupt systems that humanity has created.

Bibliography

Boon, Kevin A. Chaos Theory and the Interpretation of Literary Texts: The Case of Kurt Vonnegut. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Extending the scientific theory of chaos to literary criticism, Boon uses words and phrases such as “strange attractors,” “fractals,” and the “micro/macro connection” to describe certain aspects of Vonnegut’s prose. A somewhat offbeat but neveretheless astute analysis of Vonnegut’s work.

Broer, Lawrence. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989. Broer offers an in-depth analysis of individual novels by Vonnegut, including Jailbird. His study gives the reader a unique perspective on the common themes that run throughout Vonnegut’s work.

Mustazza, Leonard, ed. The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Critical essays present a detailed study of Vonnegut’s various works, including Jailbird. A biographical introduction and a selected bibliography make this a valuable resource.

Reed, Peter J., and Mark Leeds, eds. The Vonnegut Chronicles. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Presenting a series of interviews and critical essays on Vonnegut’s writing, this volume offers a broad variety of opinions and observations from scholars and journalists. A good source of information that helps the reader see more clearly the unique characteristics of individual novels against the wider context of Vonnegut’s work.

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991. A revealing look at Vonnegut’s life. This collection of Vonnegut’s essays examines both the personal issues and social events that shaped his distinctive writing style as well as his view of modern culture. Vonnegut offers a rare glimpse of his heart in this intimate self-portrait.