A Series of Accidents is a chronological read-through of the books of Kurt Vonnegut. You can check out earlier articles in the series here.
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian is not really a book. It runs about 30 pages in my e-book viewer, and can’t be much bigger in print. It started life as a short radio program called Reports on the Afterlife, with each segment running about 2 minutes on WNYC. The audio recordings of most episodes are available online. The transcripts of the episodes were later released as a book to raise money for the station, which is mainly how it circulates today. But it’s hard to call it a novel, or even a short story collection.
The conceit of the series is that Jack Kevorkian, the famous “Doctor Death” who offered people back-alley euthanasia, is giving Vonnegut a series of “near-death experiences” as a controlled experience. Vonnegut uses this to become a “reporter on the afterlife”, interviewing figures both famous and not in the parking lot before the pearly gates. Interview subjects include Adolf Hitler, Isaac Newton, and William Shakespeare. The introduction, which is almost a third of the length of the text, serves mostly to set up this construction and apologize somewhat for using such a thoroughly Christian concept of the afterlife, given Vonnegut’s atheistic leanings.
The stories are mostly understated jokes, in true Vonnegut fashion. Hitler, for example, asks for his headstone to read “Excuse me” or “Beg your pardon.” Other interviews serve as seemingly real epitaph for average people that Vonnegut knew or perhaps read about in the newspaper: a man who died saving a dog, or a local bar owner. The overall effect is to suggest, as Barry Lyndon does, that in death we are all made equal, the kind of holy fools which populate Vonnegut novels.
This is hardly the first or last Vonnegut work over which the shadow of death looms. The author was well into his seventies, and had already seen many people close to him pass away. And yet, when one listens to the audio, he sounds full of life, with his old-fashioned Midwestern accent charming the audience. One sometimes hears stories of Vonnegut the performer, sweeping people off their feet at lectures and literary luncheons, and there’s at least a part of that here.
Despite having his name in the title, the book doesn’t really engage much with the figure of Jack Kevorkian, the controversial doctor who promoted and performed euthanasia. He’s here largely to perform a plot function, to put Vonnegut into a near-death state so he can interview all of these figures, and the text doesn’t weigh in much on his other line of work. However, Vonnegut does get in some social commentary when he meets a woman who has been executed by the state of Texas. The implied contrast suggests at least some irony in that the state prosecuted Kevorkian for killing willing people at the same time it was itself killing unwilling one.
Ultimately, I think this little diversion showcases that, while Vonnegut was a great novelists, his ambitions always stretched across multiple media. He wrote plays, scripts, and newspaper columns, and made numerous TV and film appearances. All of these texts linked back to the ultimate hypertext, the Kurt Vonnegut persona. And so, although his temporary deaths became sadly permanent, we can vividly imagine Vonnegut wandering around the afterlife, annoying everyone in an undeniably clever way.
Next time out, we’ll bring the series to a close with Vonnegut’s final essay collection, A Man Without A Country, and reflect on the project overall.