Chapter 13 Summary and Analysis

At the University of Chicago, Dr. Robert Redfield used to defend one part of the discredited theory of cultural evolution, insisting that every society passes through the "Folk Society" stage. The Folk Society is isolated geographically, is linked organically with a single area, transcends life and death and has crisscrossing bonds of kinship. Members agree on what life is about and behave uniformly. Folk societies are hell for the curious, inventive or ridiculous. When Vonnegut moves to Cape Cod as a non-Anglo-Saxon out of intellectual step with his new neighbors, he is out of place even among volunteer firemen (which he had been earlier), and he feels no less isolated in picture-perfect Sagaponack, Long Island, where he now writes. This chapter is "filets" cut from a very bad piece in Architectural Digest, talking about how Manhattan belongs to anyone who is...