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Comment by dantyti | Hacker News Reader

Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors, but this idea (which was not accepted for his Master's thesis, iirc) was extremely limited and laughable in terms of literary theory even when he suggested it. 20th century structuralism (esp. literary semiotics) was leaps ahead even then, with the likes of Greimas, Barthes and Eco.

Seeing how Vonnegut referenced leading scholars (e.g. McLuhan) in his works, he should have known better. It is weird that he still felt that this limited approach was worthwhile.

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I'm not sure he did, at least not in terms of serious, academic, literery theory but you can perhaps see how it might be a useful heuristic for an author in terms of thinking about what type of story they want ot write. Vonnegut was always throwing half baked ideas into the public realm just to see where they'd land and that's a large part of his appeal for me (c.f. the stories of Kilgore Trout).

This shapes of stories thing that resurfaces every so often is kind of perfect for internet amplification, it's easy to grasp there's the potential for some nice pictures and Vonnegut is always engaging as a both speaker and a writer. I'd read his essay on the topic in the 90s because I'm a Vonnegut completist but at the time I don't think it was considered anything other than a minor flight of fancy. It's kind of a shame that things like this and DFWs "this is watter" speech which are kind of easily graspable tend ot eclipse the more interesting stuff. Though maybe it's a gateway.

It is definitely not supposed to be taken at face value. He explicitly mentions that Hamlet cannot be graphed like this - it is too ambiguous whether the events are "good fortune" or "ill fortune". He concludes that "Shakespeare was a poor storyteller".

His actual point is that we don't know enough to tell whether events are actually good or ill fortune, and therefore stories like Cinderella (or the Bible) does not reflect the ambiguities of real life.

> He concludes that "Shakespeare was a poor storyteller".

He certainly does not, or, if he says those words, he's being deliberately facetious.

He says: “I have in fact told you why this is respected as a masterpiece. We are so seldom told the truth. In Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and what the bad news is, and we respond to that. Thank you, Bill.”

> He certainly does not, or, if he says those words, he's being deliberately facetious.

It's irony. That is Vonnegut for you. His point is of course that Shakespeare isn't a poor storyteller, so it must be the model which is insufficient.

> he should have known better.

This is a sign that you may not have outsmarted him, he may have outsmarted you. Of course, that's a communication failure on his part, but when you're speaking to a large audience the failure to communicate your idea is measured as a percentage of the audience, not a boolean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp

Have you read his thesis?

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