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Armageddon in Retrospect

  • short-story

A short story by Kurt Vonnegut, which I read as part of the collection with the same name.

Themes

Section titled “Themes”

From a literary standpoint, “Armageddon in Retrospect” is the kind of short story that I love. It has a tight structure, hits all the essential beats, builds a sense of curiosity, and then concludes with a delightful twist that satisfies that curiosity in an unexpected way.

The story takes place during the Cold War. It is written as a letter, and like any good campaign letter, kicks off with an appeal to the reader’s ego without revealing the author’s true motives:

Dear Friend:

May I have a minute of your time? We have never met, but I am taking the liberty of writing to you because a mutual friend has spoken of you highly as being far above average in intellect and concern for your fellow men.

What are you selling, Vonnegut?

The narrator tells us the story of the Pine Institute, a fictional entity located in the real-life small town of Verdigris, Oklahoma. It is there that an “oil millionaire” named Jessie L. Pine happens upon the works of Dr. Selig Schildknecht of Dresden, Germany1 after “ordering 200 feet of books for his library.” Ah yes, the millionaire ethos of faux intellectualism.

Anyway, Dr. Schildknecht had been ridiculed for his assertion that “the only unified theory of mental illness that seemed to fit all the facts was the most ancient one, which had never been disproved… that the mentally ill were possessed by the Devil.” To Pine, this makes a lot of sense.

Pine invests his millions in the study of the Devil, which attracts one Dr. Gorman Tarbell, an eccentric scientist willing to entertain the idea for the sake of scientific progress. We’re told that the narrator, while interviewing Dr. Tarbell for his job at the institute, questions his motives by suggesting the institute’s work was bogus, Tarbell interjected:

Crack! Down came his cane on my kidney-shaped desk. “Until we prove that the Devil doesn’t exist, he’s as real as that desk… Don’t be ashamed of your job, boy! There’s as much hope for the world in what’s going on here as there is in anything that’s going on in any atomic research laboratory. ‘Believe in the Devil,’ I say, and we’ll go on believing in him unless we get better reasons than we’ve got for not believing in him. That’s science!”

Tarbell accepts the job without pay.

His research results in some “hokey” ideas.2 Among them that the Devil can be repelled by:

  • Electricity, and can be evicted from people by an electrified headset.
  • Long talk about sex and childhood, and can be evicted from people by psychotherapy.

In one “photogenic experiment,” the narrator describes:

[A] mildly deranged person talking about her past while under a huge glass bell-jar, which, it was hoped, might catch some detectable substance of the Devil, who was theoretically being evicted bit by bit.

Then the Pine Institute gets their big break. They scale up their research in Operation Rat-hole: “an attempt to make Nowata, Craig, Ottawa, Delaware, Adair, Cherokee, Wagoner, and Rogers counties Devil-free. As a check, Mayes County, in the midst of the others, was to be left unprotected.” After three years, Tarbell gives Pine a tentative, confidential report on the operation and instructs him not to share it with anyone.

Pine, being an oil millionaire who fills his library by ordering books by the foot, obliges by letting the cat out of the bag during an interview on national TV. The world is captivated:

Pine couldn’t have chosen another instant in history when his announcement would have set off a more explosive response. Consider the times: the word, as though by some malevolent magic, had been divided into hostile halves, and had begun a series of moves and countermoves that could only, it seemed, end in disaster. Nobody knew what to do. The fate of humanity seemed out of the control of human beings. Every day was filled with despearte helplessness, and with worse news than that of the day before.

Then, from Verdigris, Oklahoma, came the announcement that the trouble with the world was that the Devil was at large. And with the announcement came an offer of proof and a suggested solution!

The sigh of relief that went up from the earth must have been heard in other galaxies. The trouble with the world wasn’t the Russians or the Americans or the Chinese or the British or the scientists or the generals or the financiers or the politicians, or, praise be to God, human beings anywhere, poor things. People were all right, and decent and innocent and mart, and it was the Devil who was making their good-hearted enterprises go sour. Every human being’s self-respect increased a thousand-fold, and no one, save the Devil, lost face.

Promptly, the United Nations creates a commitee—the United Nations Demonological Investigating Commitee, or UNDICO—tasked with dealing with the problem of the Devil. Dr. Gorman and the narrator are appointed American delegates, and the narrator is elected Chairman:

As you might expect, I was subjected to a lot of poort jokes about my being the perfect man for the job because of my name.

Oh?

Well, the committee determines the cost of sending every person on earth an electrified headset to be roughly $90 billion:

As modern wars go, the price was about right. But we soon found that people weren’t inclined to go that high for anything less than killing each other.

Psychotherapy, it was then. This method was met with some objections, and at any rate, the mission could never get off the ground because of a hot mic gaffe. During a U.N. General Assembly, one American delegate, who mistakenly believes his microphone was dead, remarked to another that the “quick and easy way to get rid of the Devil” was “just to blow him to hell in his headquarters in the Kremlin.” The Russians storm out of the Assembly and later withdraw their support of UNDICO, remarking that:

Russian scientists are in full agreement with the findings of the Pine Institute as to the presence of the Devil throughout the United States. Using the same experimental techniques, these scientists have found no signs whatsoever of the Devil’s activities within the boundaries of the U.S.S.R., and, hence, consider the problem as being uniquely American.

Ah, diplomacy. Shortly, the whole thing fell apart.

But Dr. Gorman Tarbell, ever the scientist, refuses to let Pine’s international fiasco stop him from his research. Defunded and now ridiculed, Tarbell has nothing to lose. He secretly prepares an experiment in which he will perform the Black Mass and attempt to capture the Devil in an electrified barrel. He convinces the narrator to support him in this endeavor.

The two men find an abandoned church and collect the materials for their unholy experiment. As the clock strikes eleven, Tarbell performs the rite while the narrator watches and waits next to a switch to be used to electrify the barrel at the moment the Devil is stuffed into it. To their great surprise, the experiment works, and Tarbell become possessed by the Devil:

Then began the most fantastic struggle any man will ever see. Dozens of artists have tried to paint the picture, but, bulging as they paint Tarbell’s eyes, res as they pain his face, knotted as the paint his muscles, the can’t recapture a splinter of the heroism of Armageddon.

Tarbell dropped to his knees, and, as though straining against chains held by a giant, he began to inch toward the copper drum. Sweat soaked his clothes, and he could only pant and grunt. Time and again, as he would pause to catch his breath, he was pulled back by invisible forces. And again he would rise to his knees, and toil forward over the lost ground and inches beyond.

At last he reached the drum, stood with stupendous effort, as though lifting bricks, and tumbled into the opening… and then I understood, and began to quake, and a wave of nausea passed over me. I understood what it was he wanted me to do, what he was asking with the last fragment of his soul that was being consumed by the Devil in him.

So I locked the lid from the outside, and I closed the switch.

Tarbell became a “living martyr” for the cause, trapping himself with the Devil inside that electrified copper drum. It now becomes imperative to keep those two locked away, and to keep their prison electrified.

And so we come to find out the reason the narrator has written his letter to us and learn our narrator’s name:

Since the Tarbell affair is, alas, controversial, and since for propaganda reasons, our country cannot officially admit that the Devil was caught here, the Tarbell Protective Foundation is without Government subsidies. The expense of maintaining the Devil-trap and its contents has been borne by donations from public-spirited individuals like yourself…

…And, if the contributions from new friends like you are great enough, we hope… to be able to erect a suitable monument outside the church, beating his likeness and the immortal words he wrote in a letter hours before he vanquished the Devil:

“If I have succeeded tonight, then the Devil is no longer among men. I can do no more. Now, if others will rid the earth of vanity, ignorance, and want, mankind can live happily ever after.—Dr. Gorman Tarbell.”

No contribution is too small.

Respectfully yours, Dr. Lucifer K. Mephisto Chairman of the Board

Oh!

Footnotes

Section titled “Footnotes”

  1. Vonnegut was present at the bombing of Dresden in World War II. See Wailing Shall Be in All Streets. ↩

  2. When asked about this hokeyness by a reporter, Tarbell replies that he prefers the word “playfulness”. See Really big ideas come from intelligent playfulness. ↩