Jailbird is a novel by Kurt Vonnegut originally published in 1979. Its plot concerns a man recently released from a low security prison. The novel eschews the typical build to a climax and reveals the outcome almost at the very beginning of the book....
Did you see the item late last week about that guy in Oklahoma City who was supposed to get a 30-year prison stretch for robbery and shooting with intent to kill? But the Rhodes scholar in question, one Eric James Torpy, instead requested a...
"Why can't we wear sandals?" Betty Mills asked angrily. "And why, if your bra is showing, or the beginnings of a breast, they won't let you in?" Mills, the wife of an inmate at the Lorton Correctional Complex, is one of scores of...
Lindsay Lohan was a jailbird for just 84 minutes Thursday, becoming the latest celebrity to serve less than a day for a drunken driving offense.Lohan, 21, turned herself in to the Los Angeles County women's detention center in Lynwood at 10:30 a.m. She was searched,...
Ordinarily, a rotund grandfather shopping for watermelon in a supermarket wouldn't get a second look. Carlos Landin Martinez, however, had two bodyguards with him, and an off-duty drug agent buying food for a family barbecue knew why.Landin led two parallel lives: a quiet retiree who...
What we have in Jailbird is an extremely closely woven narrative built up of ironic juxtapositions and incongruities stated and counterpointed as in an elaborate symphony. The development of character in terms of psychological realism is not important to Vonnegut (though a Dickensian presentation of idiosyncracy is) and in fact some of his characters' names are close anagrams of one another—Leland Clewes/Cleveland Lawes; Arpad Lean/Delmar Peale—as though to suggest that their personalit...
[In Jailbird] Vonnegut's manner, as usual, is jokey and faux naïf. He writes about serious matters—labour massacres and judicial murder in America—without the slightest risk of earnestness. Yet underneath the comedy, Vonnegut is still indignant at capitalism and bitter over the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, wondering a little ruefully why the story of their martyrdom has been forgotten…. Vonnegut's voice does not falter; like the master raconteur he is, the ...
Beneath the absurd comedy of [Jailbird] with its chance encounters and unlikely coincidences exists a dark undertone of satiric comment on the loneliness, corruption and impersonality of American society. RAMJAC and Watergate are central symbols of our existing economic and political evils. Vonnegut's heroes are the little people like Mary Kathleen and such political martyrs as Sacco and Vanzetti (reminding one of Dos Passos's U.S.A., a probable influence on Vonnegut). As Mary Kathleen says ab...
