Angela && Newt

“ ‘I wish I’d seen the letter.’ She implied that Newt was too immature to deal directly with the outside world. Angela was a God-awfully insensitive woman, with no feeling for what smallness meant to Newt.” (Page 112)

This quote says a lot about Angela and Newt’s personalities. It shows that Angela may be insensitive to many things other than Newt, it also shows that she speaks her mind and doesn’t consider how people may react or how they may feel to what she is saying. I feel this quote makes Newt look like a person you can walk all over. That maybe he really is as immature as Angela makes him out to be.

I don’t agree with how Angela treats her brother throughout this novel. I feel like he is discriminated against because of his size. She has clearly taken over the novel of being his mother, however, maybe she has taken over her role too much by babying him. For example, she wanted to read the letter he wrote first. However, Newt was in college at the time which makes him perfectly capable of writing a letter too someone. I think this angers me because I think like a college student needs to experience life on their own and someone shouldn’t hold their hand through it. If Angela wants to know about things like who he writes letters too I wonder what else she makes him tell her.

I think that Angela’s character throughout the novel shows how strong gender roles were. She shows it in the way they talk about how she took care of her father, how she takes care of her brother, and how she takes care of her husband. It sounds like Angela’s husband does the work for the family and she does the housework. That is how it also seemed for when Angela’s father was alive she waited hand and foot on him. I think that with being married Angela should concentrate more on herself and her relationship that worrying about taken care and being the mother figure for Newt. Knowing all of this though maybe Angela is so insensitive because she is so busy taking care of everyone. Maybe all she knows she helping out people she is close too by providing for them.

I feel I respond to Vonnegut like this because this part of the story stuck out to me the most. Mainly because I dislike Angela’s character and I especially dislike the way she treats her brother. I wonder if she babies him because he is her younger brother who had to be raised with a mother or does he size play a factor in it? Is she really as insensitive as she is made out to be? Also, is Newt really okay with the way she treats him and the way she talks to him?