Galápagos (novel)
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| Galápagos | |
.jpg/200px-Galapagos(Vonnegut).jpg) Cover of first edition (hardcover) |
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| Author | Kurt Vonnegut |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Delacorte Press |
| Publication date | 1985 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-385-29420-4 |
The novel Galápagos is Kurt Vonnegut's look at evolution. It was first published in 1985 by Delacorte.
[edit] Plot summary
Galápagos is the story of a small band of mismatched humans who get shipwrecked on the fictional island of Santa Rosalía in the Galápagos Islands after a global financial crisis has crippled the world's economy. Shortly thereafter, a disease renders all humans on earth infertile, with the exception of the people on Santa Rosalía, making them the last specimens of humankind. Over the next million years, their descendants, the only fertile humans left on the planet, eventually evolve into a species resembling seals: though possibly still able to walk upright (it is not explicitly mentioned, but it is stated that they occasionally catch land animals), they have a snout with teeth adapted for catching fish, a streamlined skull and flipper-like hands with rudimentary fingers.
The novel is not the story of how they survived on the island. It is the story of how a series of unrelated events got these people to the island.
The story's narrator is a spirit who has been watching over humans for the last million years. This particular ghost is the immortal spirit of Leon Trotsky Trout, son of Vonnegut's recurring character Kilgore Trout. Leon, a Vietnam War veteran who is affected by the massacres in Vietnam, goes AWOL and settles in Sweden, where he works as a shipbuilder and dies during the construction of the ship, the Bahía de Darwin. This ship is used for the Nature Cruise of the Century which would help the human race to survive on Galápagos.
Trout maintains that all the sorrow of humankind were caused by "the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain". Fortunately, natural selection eliminates this problem, since the humans best fitted to Santa Rosalía were those who could swim best, which required a streamlined head, which in turn required a smaller brain size.
Like Vonnegut's earlier Slaughterhouse-Five, the story is fragmented and told out of sequence. Major events are rarely seen directly, but are rather alluded to and mentioned in reference to other events. In this way, the focus of the reader remains on the characters; the reader is not allowed to become engrossed in the storyline itself.
Unorthodox methods of suspense are used by the author, such as a technique used by the narrator wherein he signifies characters who will shortly die by placing an asterisk "*" in front of their name.
[edit] References
- Moore, Lonnie. "How Humans Got Flippers and Beaks", New York Times 6 October 1985, section 7, page 7.
- Vonnegut, Kurt. Galápagos. New York: Dell Publishing, 1999. ISBN 0385333870.
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