Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis

Self-servingly, Vonnegut postulates that all women bottle hydrofluoric acid inside, and Mother releases hers unwittingly at midnight before killing herself on Mother's Day, 1944. Father's relationship with Alice has no Freudian undertones but is based on shared enthusiasm for the visual arts. Father celebrates everything Alice creates as a Pieta or Sistine Chapel ceiling, which later makes her a lazy artist. In another Architectural Digest article, Vonnegut describes Alice as a gifted painter/sculptor who does little but claim she can roller skate through a museum and appreciate every passing painting.

Before the Great Depression, Father shows promise as a painter in the early stages of pictures, but when Mother praises it, he overworks the finishing touches and ruins it. The most notorious interrupter of a masterpiece in progress is "the person on business from Porlock," who breaks Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concentration...