Hocus Pocus (novel) - Introduction

Introduction

Many of Vonnegut's novels include a non-traditional linear sequence, and have a plot centered around a major event which is alluded to early, and heavily foreshadowed until the final chapters. The main character is Eugene Debs Hartke, a Vietnam War veteran and college professor, who realizes that he has killed exactly as many people as the number of women he has had sex with. The character's name is a homage to American labor and political leader Eugene V. Debs and anti-war senator Vance Hartke, both from Vonnegut's home state, Indiana.

The main character's name-sharing with Eugene V. Debs, five-time Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the United States (one of his candidacies occurred while he was in prison), is explicitly discussed in the book. The following quote from Eugene V. Debs appears several times: "...while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

In an editor's note at the beginning of the book, Vonnegut claims to have found hundreds of scraps of paper of varying sizes, from wrapping paper to business cards, sequentially numbered by their author (Hartke) in order to form a narrative of some kind. The breaks between pieces of paper often signal a sort of ironic "punchline". This theme of an episodic narrative and scraps of information is echoed in one recurring feature of the novel, a computer program called GRIOT. By inputting certain characteristics of a person's life and current situation, the program can give an approximation of what sort of life that person might have had based on the database of lives the program can access. The main pieces of information required for GRIOT to work are: age, race, degree of education, and drug use.

Hartke mentions early on that he is suffering from tuberculosis at the time of his writings, and writes the word "cough" in the text every now and again as well as other descriptors to represent times when he coughed aloud while writing.

Another unusual element of style Vonnegut uses in Hocus Pocus is to consistently use numerals rather than words to represent numbers (e.g. "1" instead of "one" or "1,000,000" instead of "one million"). He explains this in an Editor's Note at the beginning of the book saying "...that numbers lost much of their potency when diluted by an alphabet".

Throughout the novel, Hartke wants to write a list of all the women he has made love to and another list consisting of all those he had killed during the Vietnam War. He becomes fascinated with how large each number will be. At the end of the novel, Eugene says that these number are the same and gives a method for calculating the number using other numbers mentioned in the book (e.g., "... the greatest number of children known to have come from the womb of just 1 woman"). The number is 82.

The entire narrative is laced with Eugene's thoughts and observations about the Vietnam war, history, and social conditions- especially class and prejudice.

Like almost all of Vonnegut's books, this is an account told in the past tense by a character who shares his background with Vonnegut. It is also suggested that it mirrors some parts of the Attica Prison riots.