Who Am I?: Kurt Vonnegut's 'Galápagos' Quiz

Answer: Leon Trout

Leon Trotsky Trout, to give him his full name, is the narrator and the son of Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer and a recurring character in Vonnegut's novels. He serves in the Vietnam War, and has a mental breakdown afterwards when a Swedish doctor mentions that he is a fan of Trout's books.

He moves to Sweden on the doctor's advice, and is later decapitated by a steel beam while working on the Bahía de Darwin as a welder in Malmö. As a ghost, he haunts the ship, and later haunts Santa Rosalia for a thousand years.

Answer: Zenji Hiroguchi

Zenji Hiroguchi is one of the first characters to have an asterisk next to his name in the chapters leading up to his death, a convention used by Vonnegut throughout the novel to show which characters are going to die, and face the Darwinian test of survival. Hiroguchi is Japanese, and the inventor of the pocket computer Gokubi and its successor, Mandarax. He and his wife Hisako are travelling under false names. He agrees to go into business with Andrew MacIntosh, a sociopathic American businessman.

Hiroguchi and MacIntosh are both shot dead by Geraldo Delgado, an insane Ecuadorian soldier who thinks Mandarax is out to get him.

Answer: James Wait

James Wait poses as an engineer named Willard Flemming and courts Mary Hepburn, in the hope of getting her money. He has married several women and robbed them, but has never been caught by the police. Mary falls in love with him after seeing him feeding a group of young Kanka-bono girls (a fictional cannibal tribe) on bar snacks. He also used to work as a prostitute, and had an affair with Celia Hildreth/Hoover (who also appears in 'Deadeye Dick'), the wife of Dwayne Hoover, a salesman and recurring Vonnegut character. He unknowingly impregnates her and their child grows up to become Bunny Hoover, a gay pianist.

Wait suffers a heart attack, marries Mary on board the ship and eventually dies, and his dead body is stored in the meat locker and eventually goes down with the ship. Mary never finds out his true identity.

Answer: Siegfried von Kleist

Siegfried von Kleist is the younger brother of Adolf von Kleist, the captain of the Bahía de Darwin, and suffers from Huntington's chorea, which runs in their family, and which caused their father to murder their mother. The narrator cites this as an example of genetics and hereditary conditions.

The symptoms start to manifest in the form of involuntary 'dancing' spasms and hallucinations. Siegfried drives the guests down to the Bahía de Darwin while a mob strips the ship of almost all its contents.

He plans to commit suicide by crashing the bus he is driving, but is killed by a tidal wave instead.

Answer: Mary Hepburn

Mary Hepburn is a widow whose husband Roy died of a brain tumour, which caused him to act out of character and sign them both up for the Nature Cruise of the Century. She is a science teacher in Ilium, a fictional New York town where many of Vonnegut's novels are set (such as 'Slaughterhouse-5' and 'Cat's Cradle'), and has studied Galápagos wildlife. This becomes important later in the book, as she is able to identify which island they are on when a vampire finch, which is native to Santa Rosalia, sucks her blood. She falls in love with James Wait aka Willard Flemming, who thinks she is Jewish (she is wearing a shirt with 'Kaplan' on it) and the two are married by Adolf von Kleist before Wait dies. She uses Adolf von Kleist's sperm to impregnate the Kanka-bono girls once they reach puberty, and the girls become the mothers of the human race.

Mary tries to use Mandarax to diagnose what is wrong with von Kleist when he becomes senile, but he throws Mandarax into the sea and she tries to rescue it. Both she and the tiny computer are eaten by a great white shark.

Answer: Mandarax

Mandarax, despite being a machine, is treated as a character along with fellow non-human Kazakh, and is also given a star next to its name when its death is imminent. It was invented by Zenji Hiroguchi. Its predecessor was Gokubi, which could only translate into ten languages; Mandarax can translate a thousand or so languages, and also functions as a calendar and calculator, can be used to diagnose diseases by asking questions, knows the rules to several games, and acts as an encyclopaedia of both facts and quotes. If a word is typed into it, it provides a quote; for instance, it responds to 'October' with a quote from 'Ulalume' by Edgar Allan Poe.

Mandarax 'dies' when Adolf von Kleist grows tired of it and throws it into the sea.

Answer: Andrew MacIntosh

Andrew MacIntosh is a widower and the father of Selena, with friends in high places (Bobby King, a marketing man who runs an advertising campaign for the 'Nature Cruise of the Century', encounters him in a restaurant, where he is sitting with Jackie Onassis and Rudolf Nureyev). Mandarax diagnoses him as a sociopath. He plans to buy Ecuadorian assets and help Zenji Hiroguchi set up a corporation to market Mandarax, in the hope of making both of them rich. He and Hiroguchi use Mandarax as an interpreter, as he cannot speak Japanese and Hiroguchi cannot speak English.

MacIntosh is shot in the head by Geraldo Delgado, along with Hiroguchi, while the two are walking through the barricade outside the hotel.

Answer: Hisako Hiroguchi

Hisako Hiroguchi is Zenji's wife, and is pregnant with their daughter Akiko. She teaches flower arranging classes, and feels that Mandarax's knowledge of flower arranging - which was gathered by taping one of her classes - makes her redundant. As Hisako's mother was affected by the radiation of Hiroshima, Akiko is born covered in fur, which helps protect her body. Hisako and Selena raise her together, and she later mates with Kamikaze, the son of Adolf von Kleist and one of the Kanka-bono girls. As Selena is blind, she in particular appreciates the feel of Akiko's fur.

After Akiko grows up and moves out, Hisako and Selena make a suicide pact and commit suicide by walking into the sea together and drowning.

Answer: Kazakh

Kazakh is one of two non-human characters in the story, and is Selena MacIntosh's seeing-eye dog. She has been spayed, and was trained by her handlers not to bark, play with other dogs or sniff out food. The narrator states that both she and her owner have very little personality. Andrew MacIntosh offends Jesús Ortiz, a kindly young waiter in the Hotel El Dorado, by ordering him to put two filet mignons on the floor of the MacIntoshes' room for Kazakh and then get out. As Ecuador is going through a period of mass starvation, Ortiz is disgusted with MacIntosh's behaviour and vandalises the hotel telephone lines.

The Kanka-bono girls kill and eat Kazakh while the Bahía de Darwin is sailing, due to the lack of food on board.

Answer: Adolf von Kleist

Adolf von Kleist is the older of the von Kleist brothers, and is an alcoholic with several drink-driving convictions. He appears on TV to promote the cruise, and is a figurehead, with his Ecuadorian first mate, Hernando Cruz - who abandons the ship and returns to his family - doing the work behind the scenes. He hides in the crow's nest and gets drunk when the mob of locals rob the ship. He and Mary Hepburn have a sexual relationship while on Santa Rosalia, and Mary, who has been through the menopause, uses his sperm to impregnate all six of the Kanka-bono girls when they have reached puberty. In this way, he ends up becoming the ancestor of the human race, who have evolved over the course of a thousand years into seal-like creatures. As the captain is a racist, he and the girls avoid each other as much as possible.

Of the passengers of the Bahía de Darwin, Adolf von Kleist is the last to die. He has become senile, and jumps into the sea to escape vampire finches, but is eaten by a hammerhead shark.