Chapter 4 Summary and Analysis

As a boy, Vonnegut makes his first map of the world during summers at Lake Maxincuckee in southern Indiana. Because it is a closed circuit, Vonnegut can always get home by walking one direction, which makes him as bold as Marco Polo. Home is an unheated frame cottage on a bluff, adjacent to four cottages teeming with relatives. Father's generation grew up there as (almost) successors of the Pottawatomie Indians. They give themselves a tribal name, the "Epta mayan-boys," deriving from a nonsensical German phrase. They have now vanished, but the lake he swims with his siblings is imprinted in Vonnegut's mind. Were he ever to write about the lake, it would be Chekhovian, about squabbles over a beloved inheritance and the children's going out into the world. A stranger buys the house but lets Vonnegut and his bride honeymoon there...