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  • 25-NOV-2025 | Excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Welcome to the Monkey House”

25-NOV-2025 | Excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Welcome to the Monkey House”

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Dan Bogachek
November 25, 2025

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Excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s “Welcome to the Monkey House”

So Pete Crocker, the sheriff of Barnstable County, which was the whole of Cape Cod, came into the Federal Ethical Suicide Parlor in Hyannis one May afternoon and he told the two six-foot Hostesses there that they weren't to be alarmed, but that a notorious nothinghead named Billy the Poet was believed headed for the Cape.

A nothinghead was a person who refused to take his ethical birth-control pills three times a day. The penalty for that was $10,000 and ten years in jail.

This was at a time when the population of Earth was 17 billion human beings. That was far too many mammals that big for a planet that small. The people were virtually packed together like drupelets.

Drupelets are the pulpy little knobs that compose the outside of a raspberry. 🏁

  • We see a unique story-telling voice. It spells everything out explicitly instead of leaving in hidden meaning. In a way, the opposite of Hemingway’s iceberg style.

  • Note the rhythm we get with the pair of 1-2’s. The main thread occupies the larger block. Then the short block breaks off to clarify a detail, and we come right back to the main thread. (What technique we’ve seen before does this remind you of? 😉)