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Walter Starbuck, a profession humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, and he (like Howard Campbell in Mom Evening) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as basics for the Watergate shenanigans, of which he had no knowledge), yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with ability unquestioningly and offered societal order all his life). For the reason that sense, Starbuck is a universal Vonnegut protagonist, a person compromised by the essential lack of an inside. Jailbird (1979) uses the format of the memoir to retrospectively track Starbuck's uneven, centerless, and purposeless odyssey in or out of the offices of ability. He presents another Vonnegut Everyman found amongst pushes he neither recognizes nor can defend. Written in the aftermath of Watergate, Jailbird is, of course, an effort to order those catastrophic situations and also to find some rationale or meaningful result, and, as is usually the case with Vonnegut's pyrotechnics, there is absolutely no easy answer, or simply there is absolutely no answer in any way. Starbuck (his name an Americanized version of his long, overseas birth name), in his deep ambiguity and ambivalence, may himself constitute an explanation for Watergate, a series of whose consequences have never, ages later, been totally assimilated or recognized. The Nixon who passes across the panorama of Jailbird is no more or less ambiguous than Starbuck himself - a man without characteristics whose overpowering quality is one of imposition.
