You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Harry Nash, the hero of Kurt Vonnegut's short story, “Who Am I This Time?,” is a clerk at a hardware store in North Crawford. Painfully shy, he “wasn't married, didn't go out with women—didn't have any close men friends either. He stayed away from all kinds of gatherings because he never could think of anything to say or do …” (Vonnegut, 1978, p. 20). Somebody in the town once remarked, Vonnegut tells us, “that Harry ought to go to a psychiatrist.” But, the plain-speaking narrator of the story says, “I don't know what a psychiatrist could have turned up about him that the town didn't already know”; and, something of a psychoanalyst himself, the narrator adds that Harry's trouble was related to early abandonment: “he' been left on the doorstep of the Unitarian Church when he was a baby, and he never did find out who his parents were” (p. 21).
What the gods take away with one hand, they give with the other—so the Greek maxim says. The “gift” that accompanied Harry's colorlessness was acting ability. He was extraordinarily versatile, equally skillful at taking the parts, successively, of Henry VIII, Abe Lincoln, and Queeg in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Now the Mask and Wig Club has voted to do Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire for the spring production. The director asks Harry to take a part. “Who am I this time?” he asks, eager