“Bright future”
The characters of the novel are ordinary people, as none of them are of noble birth or of pious characteristics. Vonnegut selects ordinary people on purpose so as to show the future without embellishment. James Wait is “a notorious villain”; captain Adolfo von Kleist is “incompetent specialist”; teacher Mary Hepburn is “naive and pure”; and all of them will have to become the progenitors of the new mankind. And adding to these “ordinary people” six girls belonging to the tribe of cannibals Kanka Bono, makes the picture even more dreadful. So Vonnegut deprives the descendants of noble birth. On the contrary, they have something primitive-animal, but this, according to the author, is still better than having big brains. The image of “ordinary and real people going on a cruise” creates a world where everyone will no longer have to speak, but act, and every action directly affects the distant future. A lot of inconspicuous accidents have a huge impact on the subsequent history.
Advantages of big brains
Within the novel, the author constantly mocks the people’s big brains in his special “black humour” manner. He considers the brains the main source of all the problems. But along with the negative things, he finds brains being able of creating positive things as well, and one such thing is imagination, or people’s ability to “enjoy in their heads events which hadn't happened yet and might never occur”. The narrator develops this idea on the example of his mother who believed that “someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a lot of people wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on”. The image shows that the author’s belief in people is not completely negative, and he adds the quotes to “Mandarax”: “Imagination is as good as many voyages - and how much cheaper!” ( by George William Curtis)
The book in the book
The narrator’s father was a writer of science fiction, and in one of his novels called “The Era of Hopeful Monsters” he depicts a model of a planet copying the Earth. “It was about a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment. And then, with all the forests being killed and all the lakes being poisoned by acid rain, and all the groundwater made unpotable by industrial wastes and so on, the humanoids found themselves the parents of children with wings or antlers or fins, with a hundred eyes or with no eyes, with huge brains, with no brains, and on and on.” These humanoids are humanity’s prototypes and the image depicted shows what might happen if Nature rebels. The author’s warnings are valid today as well; the problems of ecology are of great importance and Vonnegut was always sure that people will destroy themselves.
