I finished reading Vernon God Little 2 weeks ago. I read it again last week. I originally read this for a Literature
class on Satire, and this is the best book the class offered, in my opinion, although I enjoyed them all(including
Guliver’s Travels, More’s Utopia, Voltaire;s Candide, etc.) I wrote an essay on this book as well for my term paper,
but during class discussion I got a lot of questions about my interpretation, which, despite the questioning, I
consider to be quite valid, especially since you can interpret any work a number of ways, I tend to think that my
interpretation might be more accurate, but that’s just me.
I do not want to give away the plot and my total understanding of the book(that would take too much time), but
the book seems to be about many things we’ve heard before. These are stereotypes about American values and
culture, such as media, violence, obesity, etc. The presence of cinematic and literary tropes, as well as stereotypes
story of American culture are shown as many have shown before in a million other movies, documentaries,
books, essays, news casts, commentaries, magazines, et cetera.
I consider this to be a great work, simply becasue the tried tropes are there, in my estimation, as distractions. It
is what we consider when we read the book, and it is what we are meant to consider. The question you need to
ask is why? If these tropes and stereotypes are in deed distractions, what are they being used to hide? What’s
the message? What’s the message? What is it really saying? Is it Vernon that we should be questioning? Vernon
may be a dubious character after all, but at least he’s candid about it(of course, it’s along road to come to that
conclusion and I’m not very good with giving directions, but I do know the way there).
If you’ve read this book before, re-read it with the above in mind.
It also helps to know a bit about Satire, particularly Menippean satires, for more info check out works from
Mikhail Bakhtin or Joel C. Relihan’s Ancient Menippean Satire. In fact, you might want to check out Relihans, at
least chapter two which discusses some characteristics of Meniappean satire and pages 106 to 122 of Bakhtin’s
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, which also lists characteristics of Menippean satire in the readability.