Evil
...e other people up there, waiting to go in. They were literary critics, and they thought Billy was one, too. They were going to discuss whether the novel was dead or not. So it goes" (Vonnegut, 1966: 205). In his analysis of the memory of war, Vonnegut does not wax nostalgic about its "pastness", but rather tries to make sense of a "real history" through a surreal writing style that seems appropriate for the bizarre "qualia" (or qualities) of a soldier's phenomenal experience. The important thing here is the experience itself, as Alison Landsberg observes in an analysis of the way memory constitutes self-identity: I would like to set this notion of the death of the real - particularly the death of real experience - against what I perceive as a veritable explosion of, or popular obsession with, experience of the real. From the hugely attended D-Day re-enactments of 1994 to what I would like to call "experimental museums," like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it seems to me that the experiential real is anything but dead. In fact, the popularity of these experiential events bespeaks a pop...