Deadeye Dick Trivia Quiz

Answer: Recipes

Rudy spends a lot of time in the kitchen with the family servants as a child, as it is the only warm place in the house. He learns to cook and bake from Mary Hoobler, the family cook. This skill comes in handy later when his older brother Felix leaves home, the family are unable to keep the servants and Rudy has to take care of his parents, neither of whom can cook.

Some of the recipes are Haitian, as Rudy and Felix are living in Haiti in the present day and have bought a hotel there, the Hotel Olofsson (a real place, where Vonnegut had stayed).

In the author's note, Vonnegut describes the recipes as 'musical interludes for the salivary glands'. Although they are based on recipes from real cookery books, which Vonnegut notes every serious cook should own, he warns the reader not to try the recipes at home as he has tinkered around with the ingredients.

Answer: Peepholes closing

When a person is born, Rudy says that 'their peephole opened', and when they die, he says that 'their peephole closed'. He describes his birth as starting out as a 'wisp of undifferentiated nothingness' before becoming aware of light and sound. He gets the idea of peepholes from a black woman he meets in the cells at the local police station, who has been arrested for attacking a racist bus driver.

She says that when she was born, her peephole just opened one day and she heard people saying, "That's a black one there. Unlucky to be black." When Rudy tells her that he accidentally shot a woman dead, she says, "You done closed a peephole."

Answer: Adolf Hitler

In his youth, Otto Waltz had met Hitler in Vienna while studying art and bought one of his paintings. After Hitler becomes Chancellor in 1933, the Waltzes (minus Rudy) go to visit him and he gives them a Nazi flag, which Otto flies from the weathervane, although he eventually takes it down when the US goes to war with Germany. He also has a Hitler Youth uniform made for Felix and expects Felix and his friends - one of whom is Jewish - to greet him with 'Heil Hitler', although by the time Rudy is older, Otto has stopped praising Hitler as it is making local people angry.

The painting owned by the Waltzes, 'Minorite Chapel', is a real painting by Hitler.

Answer: Twelve

On Mother's Day, when Rudy is twelve, Otto takes him and Felix to a rifle range and then gives Rudy the key to his gun room, where he has a large collection of weapons bought from an old friend in Austria. Felix has previously been given the key at the age of fifteen. Both boys are skilled shooters, and Rudy also learns how to clean a gun (Felix speculates that Otto is too lazy to do it himself). Felix and his friend Bucky, the son of the local police chief, have a habit of shooting birds and insulators for fun, although Otto does not know this.

In the morning, Eleanor Roosevelt comes to visit, and after she leaves the Waltz house, Rudy goes upstairs in the carriage house, loads his Springfield .30-06 rifle and fires. Francis X Morissey, the police chief and a friend of Otto, comes over later that day and tells them that Eloise Metzger, the wife of local journalist George Metzger, has been shot dead and asks if they knew where the bullet might have come from.

The police arrive, reporting to Morissey, only to hear Otto declare that Rudy shot Mrs Metzger, but Otto is to blame for her death.

He trashes his weapon collection, and both he and Rudy are arrested. To make matters worse, Mrs Metzger is revealed to have been pregnant.

Answer: He imagines that he is starring in a play.

There are four scenes where this happens: Rudy's confrontation with George Metzger, an argument between Felix and his wife Genevieve which Rudy overhears, Celia Hoover wrecking the pharmacy after Rudy refuses to give her drugs, and her funeral. In each scene, the text takes the form of a play and Rudy imagines himself and other characters as actors.

In the first scene, the police had shoved Rudy's face in the fingerprinting ink and put him on display for local people to mock, and then brought George Metzger in and offer him the opportunity to beat Rudy up.

However, Metzger is confused and dispirited, does not react in the way the police want him to and refuses to touch Rudy, saying, "G-d - there should not be animals like us. There should be no lives like ours." He later writes an editorial about the evils of guns.

A young policeman then takes Rudy home and gives him the nickname of Deadeye Dick.

Answer: Asexual

Rudy is asexual or, in his words, a 'neuter'. Vonnegut states that Rudy's asexuality represents his own declining sexuality. Rudy never has any relationships, unlike Felix - who marries several times - and claims that pharmacy is his first love. While he is in New York visiting Felix and watching the premiere of his play, he is able to identify fellow asexuals in Greenwich Village, and imagines an asexual parade, where the front line would carry a banner with 'EGREGIOUS' written on it. 'Egregious', in this context, means 'outside the herd'.

When talking to Genevieve after her fight with Felix, he says that New York is full of asexuals and that it's hard for most people to tell because they see asexuals as invisible. He also thinks his asexuality is the reason why he is such a good cook and housekeeper.

Answer: Kathmandu

John Fortune is a war hero and dairy farmer who was the best man at Otto and Emma Waltz's wedding, though he and Otto later fall out because of Otto's love of Hitler. He accidentally dropped a timber on Otto's foot and prevented him from serving in the First World War.

After Fortune's wife died of cancer, he went to Kathmandu and was later found by a British doctor, James Brokenshire, after collapsing with double pneumonia. He was wearing bib overalls when he died and was buried in Kathmandu. Rudy writes an essay about him in high school, which he later turns into a play.

The play is only performed three times, once in Midland City and twice in New York, and it bombs, but two local people - Fred T Barry, a businessman, and his mother Mildred - love it and are among the few people who sit through the whole thing. Fred has an arts centre built and named after his mother when she dies, but it is never used. Vonnegut says in the author's note that the unused arts centre represents his head.

Answer: Eating Drano

Celia Hoover, née Hildreth, is the most beautiful girl in town and Felix's prom date. She comes from a poor white family who live in the black part of town. When he takes her home before the prom, Otto steps out with an apple and makes a reference to Helen of Troy. Celia is furious, tells the Waltzes that she hates her beautiful face and rich people, and storms off.

She later stars as John Fortune's wife in 'Kathmandu' and marries Dwayne Hoover, a car salesman and a recurring Vonnegut character. During the blizzard, she volunteers at the local hospital.

She develops an amphetamine addiction which spoils her beauty, and trashes Rudy's pharmacy when he refuses to give her amphetamine tablets. She kills herself by eating Drano chips. Felix is high on methaqualone at her funeral and makes an exhibition of himself, to Emma's disgust, but Dwayne comforts him.

Answer: A mantelpiece

Both of Rudy's parents become ill when a blizzard sweeps Midland City; Otto has double pneumonia and Emma has frostbite. After Otto's death, Rudy and Emma move into a tiny house in a development built by the Maritimo Brothers' company; Gino and Marco Maritimo are a pair of Italian immigrants, old friends of the Waltzes and the only people to defend Otto after the shooting of Eloise Metzger. Cliff McCarthy, a painter, discovers that the mantelpiece is radioactive when he leaves camera film on it and the film turns black.

A Geiger counter confirms that the mantelpiece is radioactive and Rudy and Emma are moved into a Holiday Inn, while the mantelpiece is removed. The mantelpiece had been made with cement which had been polluted by uranium 235. Emma becomes more abrasive and outspoken as a result of several brain tumours caused by the radioactive mantelpiece, and wages a campaign against the art which Fred Barry is trying to promote with the arts centre.

Answer: Will Fairchild

A neutron bomb goes off in Midland City, killing the entire population but leaving buildings intact (though Vonnegut points out in his author's note that this is not what would actually happen in real life, and a neutron bomb would cause far more destruction).

The official story is that the bomb went off while it was being transported, though conspiracy theorists believe it was a government plot to bring back slavery. Rudy and Felix visit Midland City afterwards, along with Fred Ketchum, their lawyer, and Hippolyte Paul de Mille, who they pass off as a relative of a local man's Haitian cook.

They are allowed to take photos of their personal property, but cannot take anything away. Felix gets permission to visit the cemetery where Otto and Emma are buried and Hippolyte Paul offers to raise the ghost of Celia Hoover, which angers Felix. Rudy asks him to raise Will Fairchild, a pilot and local war hero after whom the local airport is named, and who had died in a stunt accident.

His grave marker is in the shape of a plane engine and propellor. Rudy believes that Fairchild's ghost will be wandering the town looking for his parachute.