Kurt Vonnegut's Story Diagrams

Kurt Vonnegut was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He did not graduate initially because the University rejected two proposed master's theses, leaving in 1947 to work for General Electric. The second proposed thesis was entitled "on the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist painting and late-19th Century Native American uprisings", while the first was "Shapes of Stories".

In Shapes of Stories, Vonnegut proposed diagramming stories in terms of the ups and downs faced by the main character:

The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads

Each story diagram is plotted with time (beginning to end) on the horizontal axis, and fortune (from bad to good) on the vertical axis. One of the most popular story types is what Vonnegut called “Man in Hole,” in which the protagonist gets in trouble, gets out of it again, and ends up better off than where they started. Vonnegut is reported to have said that “You see this story again and again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted.”  A very similar story structure is what Vonnegut termed "Boy Meets Girl." They are both illustrated in the next graphic due to Maya Eilam.

Vonnegut applied these ideas to both the Old and New Testaments. In Creation stories, a deity progressively delivers gifts and the world is built. In the Old Testament, this is followed by the Fall in which these gifts are taken away.

By contrast, the New Testament adopts a form better to known to modern readers in which the fall is followed by redemption. This is very similar to the story of Cindarella which Vonnegut deascribed as “The most popular story in our civilization. Every time it’s retold, someone makes a million dollars.”

Other stories are more negative or amibiguous, such as Kafka's The Metamorphosis which starts off bad and only gets worse

Now there’s a Franz Kafka story. A young man is rather unattractive and not very personable. He has disagreeable relatives and has had a lot of jobs with no chance of promotion. He doesn’t get paid enough to take his girl dancing or to go to the beer hall to have a beer with a friend. One morning he wakes up, it’s time to go to work again, and he has turned into a cockroach. It’s a pessimistic story.

Or Hamlet in which the entire story is ambiguous. Says Vonnegut:

The question is, does this system I’ve devised help us in the evaluation of literature? Perhaps a real masterpiece cannot be crucified on a cross of this design. How about Hamlet? It’s a pretty good piece of work I’d say. Is anybody going to argue that it isn’t? I don’t have to draw a new line, because Hamlet’s situation is the same as Cinderella’s, except that the sexes are reversed.

His father has just died. He’s despondent. And right away his mother went and married his uncle, who’s a bastard. So Hamlet is going along on the same level as Cinderella when his friend Horatio comes up to him and says, ‘Hamlet, listen, there’s this thing up in the parapet, I think maybe you’d better talk to it. It’s your dad.’ So Hamlet goes up and talks to this, you know, fairly substantial apparition there. And this thing says, ‘I’m your father, I was murdered, you gotta avenge me, it was your uncle did it, here’s how.’

Well, was this good news or bad news? To this day we don’t know if that ghost was really Hamlet’s father. If you have messed around with Ouija boards, you know there are malicious spirits floating around, liable to tell you anything, and you shouldn’t believe them. Madame Blavatsky, who knew more about the spirit world than anybody else, said you are a fool to take any apparition seriously, because they are often malicious and they are frequently the souls of people who were murdered, were suicides, or were terribly cheated in life in one way or another, and they are out for revenge.

So we don’t know whether this thing was really Hamlet’s father or if it was good news or bad news. And neither does Hamlet. But he says okay, I got a way to check this out. I’ll hire actors to act out the way the ghost said my father was murdered by my uncle, and I’ll put on this show and see what my uncle makes of it. So he puts on this show. And it’s not like Perry Mason. His uncle doesn’t go crazy and say, ‘I-I-you got me, you got me, I did it, I did it.’ It flops. Neither good news nor bad news. After this flop Hamlet ends up talking with his mother when the drapes move, so he thinks his uncle is back there and he says, ‘All right, I am so sick of being so damn indecisive,’ and he sticks his rapier through the drapery. Well, who falls out? This windbag, Polonius. This Rush Limbaugh. And Shakespeare regards him as a fool and quite disposable.

You know, dumb parents think that the advice that Polonius gave to his kids when they were going away was what parents should always tell their kids, and it’s the dumbest possible advice, and Shakespeare even thought it was hilarious.

‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’ But what else is life but endless lending and borrowing, give and take?

‘This above all, to thine own self be true.’ Be an egomaniac!

Neither good news nor bad news. Hamlet didn’t get arrested. He’s prince. He can kill anybody he wants. So he goes along, and finally he gets in a duel, and he’s killed. Well, did he go to heaven or did he go to hell? Quite a difference. Cinderella or Kafka’s cockroach? I don’t think Shakespeare believed in a heaven or hell any more than I do. And so we don’t know whether it’s good news or bad news.

I have just demonstrated to you that Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho.

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

And if I die — God forbid — I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?’

There are further good discussions of these diagrams by Ana Swanson at The Washington Post and Maria Popova at Brain Pickings.

In 1961, the University of Chicago accepted Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, and awarded him the M.A. degree based on "the anthropological basis of his novels." (see this tribute in the Chicago Maroon).