How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Helga and I were finally left alone.
We were shy.
Being a man of fairly advanced years, so many of the years having been spent in celibacy, I was more than shy. I was afraid to test my strength as a lover. And the fear was amplified by the remarkable number of youthful characteristics my Helga had miraculously retained. (18.1-3)
So Campbell's just about to sleep with Helga again after many years of separation (or so he thinks), and it's now that we learn that the dude has been faithful to her and never slept with anyone else. Beyond the potentially sweet moment of a second "wedding night," we get a hint that Helga might not be Helga—but how could we know?
We're being set up for a shock even as Vonnegut gives us clues about Resi's identity. After all, Campbell knows Helga's body more than anything else about her. It's a sad day when he gets confused by "the magic" of her youth.
Quote #5
One of the things Helga had in her suitcase, as I've already said, was a book by me. It was a manuscript I had never intended that it be published. I regarded it as unpublishable except by pornographers. (23.1)
This is the second time Campbell refers to his sex life with Helga as porn. What makes it pornography? Just the fact that it's sex? That it's written down? That it could be read? That Campbell rereads it for his own pleasure?
Quote #6
It was called Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova. In it I told of my conquests of all the hundreds of women my wife, my Helga, had been. It was clinical, obsessed, some say, insane. It was a diary, recording day by day for the first two years of the war, our erotic life—to the exclusion of all else. There is not one word in it to indicate even the century or the continent of its origin. (23.2)
Sex trumps geography and nationalism in this little book. It also reshapes Helga's identity: she is more than simply one Helga; each night she is a different woman. This might be saying something about these lovers' propensity for role-play or for keeping things new. By giving Helga's body multiple identities, this carefully recorded sex life erases all of her identity. If she is everyone, she is no one. Or could it mean that Helga could be anything for Campbell because she meant everything to him? Or both?