28- ] American Literature
Kurt Vonnegut 1922 – 2007Kurt
Vonnegut was an American writer who published fourteen novels, three short
story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction. He is most famous
for his novel ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ (1969) which has become an American
classic. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel based on his experience as a
prisoner of war who survived the allies’ bombing of Dresden.
Kurt
Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic
artist. He was recognized as New York State Author for 2001-2003.
He
was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. He attended
Cornell University from 1941 to 1943, where he wrote a column for the student
newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a
journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II.
Mr.
Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, a fourth-generation German-American
and the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His
mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut’s brother,
Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.
During
the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and
Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. “When my mother went off
her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as
gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted
by ideas or information,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act
that haunted her son for the rest of his life.
He
had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once
telling him, “ ‘All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.’ ”
“My
theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,” he wrote.
Mr.
Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army
before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie
Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) in Pittsburgh and the University
of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.
In
1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw
combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered
behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner
of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.
Assigned
by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners
in an underground meat locker when British and American war planes started
carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved
his life.
Afterward,
he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.
“The
corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented
such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by
flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted
or identified,” he wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death.” When the war ended, Mr.
Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart,
Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children:
Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband
died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts
adopted their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.
In
Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the Chicago City News
Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University
of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in
Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university
finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him
to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)
In
1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the
General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story,
“Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided to move his
family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and
The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally
disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started an
auto dealership.
Later career and life
After
Slaughterhouse-Five was published, Vonnegut embraced the fame and financial
security that attended its release. He was hailed as a hero of the burgeoning
anti-war movement in the United States, was invited to speak at numerous
rallies, and gave college commencement addresses around the country. In
addition to briefly teaching at Harvard University as a lecturer in creative writing
in 1970, Vonnegut taught at the City College of New York as a distinguished
professor during the 1973–1974 academic year. He was later elected vice
president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and given honorary
degrees by, among others, Indiana University and Bennington College. Vonnegut
also wrote a play called Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which opened on October 7,
1970, at New York's Theatre de Lys. Receiving mixed reviews, it closed on March
14, 1971. In 1972, Universal Pictures adapted Slaughterhouse-Five into a film,
which the author said was "flawless".
Meanwhile,
Vonnegut's personal life was disintegrating. His wife Jane had embraced
Christianity, which was contrary to Vonnegut's atheistic beliefs, and with five
of their six children having left home, Vonnegut said that the two were forced
to find "other sorts of seemingly important work to do". The couple
battled over their differing beliefs until Vonnegut moved from their Cape Cod
home to New York in 1971. Vonnegut called the disagreements "painful"
and said that the resulting split was a "terrible, unavoidable accident
that we were ill-equipped to understand". The couple divorced but remained
friends until Jane's death in late 1986. Beyond his marriage, he was deeply
affected when his son Mark suffered a mental breakdown in 1972, which
exacerbated Vonnegut's chronic depression and led him to take Ritalin. When he
stopped taking the drug in the mid-1970s, he began to see a psychologist
weekly.
Vonnegut's
difficulties materialized in numerous ways; most distinctly though, was the
painfully slow progress he was making on his next novel, the darkly comical
Breakfast of Champions. In 1971, Vonnegut stopped writing the novel altogether.
When it was finally released in 1973, it was panned critically. In Thomas S.
Hischak's book American Literature on Stage and Screen, Breakfast of Champions
was called "funny and outlandish", but reviewers noted that it
"lacks substance and seems to be an exercise in literary
playfulness". Vonnegut's 1976 novel Slapstick, which meditates on the
relationship between him and his sister (Alice), met a similar fate. In The New
York Times's review of Slapstick, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said that Vonnegut
"seems to be putting less effort into [storytelling] than ever before"
and that "it still seems as if he has given up storytelling after
all". At times, Vonnegut was disgruntled by the personal nature of his
detractors' complaints.
In
1979, Vonnegut married Jill Krementz, a photographer whom he met while she was
working on a series about writers in the early 1970s. With Jill, he adopted a
daughter, Lily, when the baby was three days old. In subsequent years, his
popularity resurged as he published several satirical books, including Jailbird
(1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galápagos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), and Hocus
Pocus (1990). Although he remained a prolific writer in the 1980s, Vonnegut
struggled with depression and attempted suicide in 1984. Two years later,
Vonnegut was seen by a younger generation when he played himself in Rodney
Dangerfield's film Back to School. The last of Vonnegut's fourteen novels,
Timequake (1997), was, as University of Detroit history professor and Vonnegut
biographer Gregory Sumner said, "a reflection of an aging man facing
mortality and testimony to an embattled faith in the resilience of human
awareness and agency". Vonnegut's final book, a collection of essays
entitled A Man Without a Country (2005), became a bestseller.
Writing
Debut: 'Player Piano' and 'Cat's Cradle'
Showing
Vonnegut's talent for satire, his first novel, Player Piano, took on corporate
culture and was published in 1952. More novels followed, including The Sirens
of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), and Cat's Cradle (1963). War remained a
recurring element in his work, and one of his best-known works,
Slaughterhouse-Five, draws some of its dramatic power from his own experiences.
The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a young soldier who becomes a prisoner of
war and works in an underground meat locker, not unlike Vonnegut, but with a
notable exception: Pilgrim begins to experience his life out of sequence and
revisits different times repeatedly. He also has encounters with the
Tralfamadorians. This exploration of the human condition mixed with the
fantastical struck a chord with readers, giving Vonnegut his first best-selling
novel.
Further
Success
Emerging
as a new literary voice, Vonnegut became known for his unusual writing
style—long sentences and little punctuation—as well as his humanist point of
view. He continued writing short stories and novels, including Breakfast of
Champions (1973), Jailbird (1979) and Deadeye Dick (1982). Vonnegut even made
himself the subject of Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (1981).
Despite
his success, Vonnegut wrestled with his own personal demons. Having struggled
with depression on and off for years, he attempted to take his own life in
1984. Whatever challenges he faced personally, Vonnegut became a literary icon
with a devoted following. He counted writers such as Joseph Heller, another
WWII veteran, as his friends.
First
novel
In
1952, Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, was published by Scribner's. The
novel has a post-Third World War setting, in which factory workers have been
replaced by machines. Player Piano draws upon Vonnegut's experience as an
employee at GE. He satirizes the drive to climb the corporate ladder, one that
in Player Piano is rapidly disappearing as automation increases, putting even
executives out of work. His central character, Paul Proteus, has an ambitious
wife, a backstabbing assistant, and a feeling of empathy for the poor. Sent by
his boss, Kroner, as a double agent among the poor (who have all the material goods
they want, but little sense of purpose), he leads them in a machine-smashing,
museum-burning revolution. Player Piano expresses Vonnegut's opposition to
McCarthyism, something made clear when the Ghost Shirts, the revolutionary
organization Paul penetrates and eventually leads, is referred to by one
character as "fellow travelers".
In
Player Piano, Vonnegut originates many of the techniques he would use in his
later works. The comic, heavy-drinking Shah of Bratpuhr, an outsider to this
dystopian corporate United States, is able to ask many questions that an
insider would not think to ask, or would cause offense by doing so. For
example, when taken to see the artificially intelligent supercomputer EPICAC,
the Shah asks it "what are people for?" and receives no answer.
Speaking for Vonnegut, he dismisses it as a "false god". This type of
alien visitor would recur throughout Vonnegut's literature.
The
New York Times writer and critic Granville Hicks gave Player Piano a positive
review, favorably comparing it to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Hicks called
Vonnegut a "sharp-eyed satirist". None of the reviewers considered
the novel particularly important. Several editions were printed—one by Bantam
with the title Utopia 14, and another by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book
Club—whereby Vonnegut gained the repute of a science fiction writer, a genre
held in disdain by writers at that time. He defended the genre and deplored a
perceived sentiment that "no one can simultaneously be a respectable
writer and understand how a refrigerator works".
Slaughterhouse-Five
After
spending almost two years at the writer's workshop at the University of Iowa,
teaching one course each term, Vonnegut was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for
research in Germany. By the time he won it, in March 1967, he was becoming a
well-known writer. He used the funds to travel in Eastern Europe, including to
Dresden, where he found many prominent buildings still in ruins. At the time of
the bombing, Vonnegut had not appreciated the sheer scale of destruction in
Dresden; his enlightenment came only slowly as information dribbled out, and
based on early figures, he came to believe that 135,000 had died there.
Vonnegut
had been writing about his war experiences at Dresden ever since he returned
from the war, but had never been able to write anything acceptable to himself
or his publishers—chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse-Five tells of his difficulties.
Released in 1969, the novel rocketed Vonnegut to fame. It tells of the life of
Billy Pilgrim, who like Vonnegut was born in 1922 and survives the bombing of
Dresden. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, with many of the story's
climaxes—Billy's death in 1976, his kidnapping by aliens from the planet
Tralfamadore nine years earlier, and the execution of Billy's friend Edgar
Derby in the ashes of Dresden for stealing a teapot—disclosed in the story's
first pages. In 1970, he was also a correspondent in Biafra during the Nigerian
Civil War.
Slaughterhouse-Five
received generally positive reviews, with Michael Crichton writing in The New
Republic:
"he
writes about the most excruciatingly painful things. His novels have attacked
our deepest fears of automation and the bomb, our deepest political guilts, our
fiercest hatreds and loves. No one else writes books on these subjects; they
are inaccessible to normal novelists."
The
book went immediately to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list. Vonnegut's
earlier works had appealed strongly to many college students, and the antiwar
message of Slaughterhouse-Five resonated with a generation marked by the
Vietnam War. He later stated that the loss of confidence in government that
Vietnam caused finally allowed an honest conversation regarding events like
Dresden.
His
first novel was “Player Piano,” published in 1952. A satire on corporate life —
the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses — it also carries echoes
of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus,
who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric.
Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines
that they think are taking over the world.
“Player
Piano” was followed in 1959 by “The Sirens of Titan,” a science fiction novel
featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published
“Mother Night,” involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on
charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut’s other early novels,
they were published as paperback originals. And like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in
1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, “Mother Night” was adapted for
film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.
In
1963, Mr. Vonnegut published “Cat’s Cradle.” Though it initially sold only
about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The
novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare
the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named
Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a
book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the
world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to
freeze at room temperature.
Mr.
Vonnegut shed the label of science fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was),
who discovers the horror of war. “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here,
and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an
English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by
babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God —
I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”
As
Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin
supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from
Allied bombing.
In
“Slaughterhouse-Five,” Mr. Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of
Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature
Vonnegut phrase.
“Robert
Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year
round,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, “was shot two nights ago. He
died last night. So it goes.
“Martin
Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my
Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam.
So it goes.”
One
of many Zen-like words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut’s books, “so
it goes” became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.
“Slaughterhouse-Five”
reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some
schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough
language and scenes of violence.
After
the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into severe depression and vowed
never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In
1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.
“The
child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical
solution to any problem,” he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in
the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, “Eden Express:
A Memoir of Insanity.”
Forsaking
novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, “Happy
Birthday, Wanda June,” opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around
this time he separated from his wife, Jane, and moved to New York. (She
remarried and died in 1986.)
In
1979 Mr. Vonnegut married the photographer Jill Krementz. They have a daughter,
Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.
Mr.
Vonnegut returned to novels with “Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue
Monday” (1973), calling it a “tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly
old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” This time his alter ego is
Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto
dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout,
who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a
robot.
In
1997, Mr. Vonnegut published “Timequake,” a tale of the millennium in which a
wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on
an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, “a stew” of plot
summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a
character. “If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Mr. Vonnegut said in
defense of his “recycling,” “I would never have gotten around to calling
attention to things that really matter.”
Though
it was a bestseller, it also met with mixed reviews. “Having a novelist’s free
hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride,” R.
Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York
Times Book Review, wrote: “The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut’s transforming
his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and
fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with
the furor over novel versus memoir.” Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to
“Timequake” that it would be his last novel. And so it was.
His
last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man Without a
Country.” It, too, was a best seller.
In
concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has these
closing lines:
When
the last living thing
has
died on account of us,
how
poetical it would be
if
Earth could say,
in
a voice floating up
perhaps
from
the floor
of
the Grand Canyon,
“It
is done.”
People
did not like it here.
While
Vonnegut remained prolific throughout the 1980s, he struggled with depression
and in 1984 attempted suicide. His later novels include Deadeye Dick (1982),
which revisits characters and settings from Breakfast of Champions; Galápagos
(1985), a fantasy of human evolution told from a detached future perspective;
Bluebeard (1987), the fictional autobiography of an aging painter; Hocus Pocus
(1990), about a college professor turned prison warden; and Timequake (1997), a
loosely structured meditation on free will.
Vonnegut
also wrote several plays, including Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970; film
1971); several works of nonfiction, such as the collection Wampeters, Foma
& Granfalloons (1974); and several collections of short stories, chief
among which was Welcome to the Monkey House (1968). In 2005 he published A Man
Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America, a collection
of essays and speeches inspired in part by contemporary politics. Vonnegut’s
posthumously published works include Armageddon in Retrospect (2008), a
collection of fiction and nonfiction that focuses on war and peace, and a
number of previously unpublished short stories, assembled in Look at the Birdie
(2009) and While Mortals Sleep (2011). We Are What We Pretend to Be (2012)
comprised an early unpublished novella and a fragment of a novel unfinished at
his death. A selection of his correspondence was published as Letters (2012).
Complete Stories (2017) collects all of his short fiction.
Vonnegut
was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1973. In
2010 the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library opened in Indianapolis. In addition to
promoting the work of Vonnegut, the nonprofit organization served as a cultural
and educational resource center, including a museum, an art gallery, and a
reading room.
After
the war, he attended University of Chicago as a graduate student in
anthropology and also worked as a police reporter at the City News Bureau of
Chicago. He left Chicago to work in Schenectady, New York in public relations
for General Electric. He attributed his unadorned writing style to his
reporting work.
His
experiences as an advance scout in the Battle of the Bulge, and in particular
his witnessing of the bombing of Dresden, Germany whilst a prisoner of war, would
inform much of his work. This event would also form the core of his most famous
work, Slaughterhouse-Five, the book which would make him a millionaire. This
acerbic 200-page book is what most people mean when they describe a work as
"Vonnegutian" in scope.
Vonnegut
was a self-proclaimed humanist and socialist (influenced by the style of
Indiana's own Eugene V. Debs) and a lifelong supporter of the American Civil
Liberties Union.
The
novelist is known for works blending satire, black comedy and science fiction,
such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of
Champions (1973) .
Later
Years and Death
His
last novel was Timequake (1997), which became a best-seller despite receiving
mixed reviews. Vonnegut chose to spend his later years working on nonfiction.
His last book was A Man Without a Country, a collection of biographical essays.
In it, he expressed his views on politics and art, and shed more light on his
own life.
Vonnegut
died on April 11, 2007, at the age of 84, as a result of head injuries
sustained in a fall at his home in New York a few weeks earlier. He was
survived by his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz, their adopted
daughter, Lily, and six children from his first marriage.
Kurt
Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like
“Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught
the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died Wednesday
night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on
Long Island.
His
death was reported by Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr.
Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.
Kurt
Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84
Mr.
Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that
became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol,
particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of
his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on
campuses throughout the United States.
Like
Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human
existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense
of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them
well?
He
also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote
in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,”
“finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He
denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”
Not
all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular
writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the
banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the
environment.
His
novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images
and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the
Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula
(places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as
religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based
on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with
bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).
The
defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany,
by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner
of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to
death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a
work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the
rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the
indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”
His
experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was
published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and
cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz,
“so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure
became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”
A
90-Year-Old Tortoise Named Mr. Pickles Is a New Dad of Three
To
Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent
meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his
1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” summed up his philosophy:
“Hello,
babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s
round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred
years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve
got to be kind.’ ”
Mr.
Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a
mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs,
exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able
of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary
type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and
elevating it to serious literature.
He
was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some
readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than
a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.
With
his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often
looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his
conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a
certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan
and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow
war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.
Writing
Influences
Vonnegut's
writing was inspired by an eclectic mix of sources. When he was younger,
Vonnegut stated that he read works of pulp fiction, science fiction, fantasy,
and action-adventure. He also read the classics, such as the plays of
Aristophanes—like Vonnegut's works, humorous critiques of contemporary society.
Vonnegut's life and work also share similarities with that of Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn writer Mark Twain. Both shared pessimistic outlooks on
humanity and a skeptical take on religion and, as Vonnegut put it, were both
"associated with the enemy in a major war", as Twain briefly enlisted
in the South's cause during the American Civil War, and Vonnegut's German name
and ancestry connected him with the United States' enemy in both world wars. He
also cited Ambrose Bierce as an influence, calling "An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge" the greatest American short story and deeming any who
disagreed or had not read the story "twerps".
Vonnegut
called George Orwell his favorite writer and admitted that he tried to emulate
Orwell. "I like his concern for the poor, I like his socialism, I like his
simplicity", Vonnegut said. Vonnegut also said that Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley heavily influenced his debut
novel, Player Piano, in 1952. Vonnegut commented that Robert Louis Stevenson's
stories were emblems of thoughtfully put together works that he tried to mimic
in his own compositions. Vonnegut also hailed playwright and socialist George
Bernard Shaw as "a hero of [his]" and an "enormous
influence". Within his own family, Vonnegut stated that his mother, Edith,
had the greatest influence on him. "[My] mother thought she might make a
new fortune by writing for the slick magazines. She took short-story courses at
night. She studied writers the way gamblers study horses."
Early
on in his career, Vonnegut decided to model his style after Henry David
Thoreau, who wrote as if from the perspective of a child, allowing Thoreau's
works to be more widely comprehensible. Using a youthful narrative voice
allowed Vonnegut to deliver concepts in a modest and straightforward way. Other
influences on Vonnegut include The War of the Worlds author H. G. Wells and
satirist Jonathan Swift. Vonnegut credited American journalist and critic H. L.
Mencken for inspiring him to become a journalist.
Style
and technique
The
book Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and his longtime
friend and former student Suzanne McConnell, published posthumously by Rosetta
Books and Seven Stories Press in 2019, delves into the style, humor, and
methodologism employed by Vonnegut, including his belief that one should
"Write like a human being. Write like a writer."
In
his book Popular Contemporary Writers, Michael D. Sharp describes Vonnegut's
linguistic style as straightforward; his sentences concise, his language
simple, his paragraphs brief, and his ordinary tone conversational. Vonnegut
uses this style to convey normally complex subject matter in a way that is
intelligible to a large audience. He credited his time as a journalist for his
ability, pointing to his work with the Chicago City News Bureau, which required
him to convey stories in telephone conversations. Vonnegut's compositions are
also laced with distinct references to his own life, notably in
Slaughterhouse-Five and Slapstick.
Vonnegut
believed that ideas, and the convincing communication of those ideas to the
reader, were vital to literary art. He did not always sugarcoat his points:
much of Player Piano leads up to the moment when Paul, on trial and hooked up
to a lie detector, is asked to tell a falsehood, and states: "every new
piece of scientific knowledge is a good thing for humanity". Robert T.
Tally Jr., in his volume on Vonnegut's novels, wrote: "rather than tearing
down and destroying the icons of twentieth-century, middle-class American life,
Vonnegut gently reveals their basic flimsiness". Vonnegut did not simply
propose utopian solutions to the ills of American society, but showed how such
schemes would not allow ordinary people to live lives free from want and
anxiety. The large artificial families that the US population is formed into in
Slapstick soon serve as an excuse for tribalism, with people giving no help to
those not part of their group, and with the extended family's place in the
social hierarchy becoming vital.
In
the introduction to their essay "Kurt Vonnegut and Humor", Tally and
Peter C. Kunze suggest that Vonnegut was not a "black humorist", but
a "frustrated idealist" who used "comic parables" to teach
the reader absurd, bitter or hopeless truths, with his grim witticisms serving
to make the reader laugh rather than cry. "Vonnegut makes sense through
humor, which is, in the author's view, as valid a means of mapping this crazy
world as any other strategies." Vonnegut resented being called a black
humorist, feeling that, as with many literary labels, it allows readers to
disregard aspects of a writer's work that do not fit the label's stereotype.
Vonnegut's
works have, at various times, been labeled science fiction, satire and
postmodern. He also resisted such labels, but his works do contain common
tropes that are often associated with those genres. In several of his books,
Vonnegut imagines alien societies and civilizations, as is common in works of
science fiction. Vonnegut does this to emphasize or exaggerate absurdities and
idiosyncrasies in our own world. Furthermore, Vonnegut often humorizes the
problems that plague societies, as is done in satirical works. However,
literary theorist Robert Scholes noted in Fabulation and Metafiction that
Vonnegut "reject[s] the traditional satirist's faith in the efficacy of
satire as a reforming instrument. [He has] a more subtle faith in the
humanizing value of laughter." Examples of postmodernism may also be found
in Vonnegut's works.
Postmodernism
often entails a response to the theory that the truths of the world will be
discovered through science. Postmodernists contend that truth is subjective,
rather than objective, as it is biased towards each individual's beliefs and
outlook on the world. They often use unreliable, first-person narration, and
narrative fragmentation. One critic has argued that Vonnegut's most famous
novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, features a metafictional, Janus-headed outlook, as
it seeks to represent actual historical events while problematizing the very
notion of doing exactly that. This is encapsulated in the opening lines of the
novel: "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty
much true." This bombastic opening—"All this
happened"—"reads like a declaration of complete mimesis", which
is radically called into question in the rest of the quote and "[t]his
creates an integrated perspective that seeks out extratextual themes [like war
and trauma] while thematizing the novel's textuality and inherent
constructedness at one and the same time". While Vonnegut does use elements
as fragmentation and metafictional elements, in some of his works, he more
distinctly focuses on the peril posed by individuals who find subjective
truths, mistake them for objective truths, then proceed to impose these truths
on others.
Themes
Vonnegut
was a vocal critic of American society, and this was reflected in his writings.
Several key social themes recur in Vonnegut's works, such as wealth, the lack
of it, and its unequal distribution among a society. In The Sirens of Titan,
the novel's protagonist, Malachi Constant, is exiled to Saturn's moon Titan as
a result of his vast wealth, which has made him arrogant and wayward. In God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, readers may find it difficult to determine whether
the rich or the poor are in worse circumstances, as the lives of both groups'
members are ruled by their wealth or their poverty. Further, in Hocus Pocus,
the protagonist is named Eugene Debs Hartke, a homage to the famed socialist
Eugene V. Debs and Vonnegut's socialist views.
In
Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, Thomas F. Marvin states: "Vonnegut
points out that, left unchecked, capitalism will erode the democratic
foundations of the United States." Marvin suggests that Vonnegut's works
demonstrate what happens when a "hereditary aristocracy" develops,
where wealth is inherited along familial lines: the ability of poor Americans
to overcome their situations is greatly or completely diminished. Vonnegut also
often laments social Darwinism and a "survival of the fittest" view
of society. He points out that social Darwinism leads to a society that
condemns its poor for their own misfortune and fails to help them out of their
poverty because "they deserve their fate".
Vonnegut
also confronts the idea of free will in a number of his pieces. In
Slaughterhouse-Five and Timequake the characters have no choice in what they
do; in Breakfast of Champions, characters are very obviously stripped of their
free will and even receive it as a gift; and in Cat's Cradle, Bokononism views
free will as heretical.
The
majority of Vonnegut's characters are estranged from their actual families and
seek to build replacement or extended families. For example, the engineers in
Player Piano called their manager's spouse "Mom". In Cat's Cradle,
Vonnegut devises two separate methods for loneliness to be combated: A
"karass", which is a group of individuals appointed by God to do his
will, and a "granfalloon", defined by Marvin as a "meaningless
association of people, such as a fraternal group or a nation". Similarly,
in Slapstick, the US government codifies that all Americans are a part of large
extended families.
Fear
of the loss of one's purpose in life is a theme in Vonnegut's works. The Great
Depression forced Vonnegut to witness the devastation many people felt when
they lost their jobs, and while at General Electric, Vonnegut witnessed
machines being built to take the place of human labor. He confronts these
things in his works through references to the growing use of automation and its
effects on human society. This is most starkly represented in his first novel,
Player Piano, where many Americans are left purposeless and unable to find
work, as machines replace human workers. Loss of purpose is also depicted in
Galápagos, where a florist rages at her spouse for creating a robot able to do
her job, and in Timequake, where an architect kills himself when replaced by
computer software.
Suicide
by fire is another common theme in Vonnegut's works; the author often returns
to the theory that "many people are not fond of life". He uses this
as an explanation for why humans have so severely damaged their environments
and made devices such as nuclear weapons that can make their creators extinct.
In Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut features the neutron bomb, which he claims is
designed to kill people, but leave buildings and structures untouched. He also
uses this theme to demonstrate the recklessness of those who put powerful,
apocalypse-inducing devices at the disposal of politicians.
"What
is the point of life?" is a question Vonnegut often pondered in his works.
When one of Vonnegut's characters, Kilgore Trout, finds the question "What
is the purpose of life?" written in a bathroom, his response is: "To
be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool."
Marvin finds Trout's theory curious, given that Vonnegut was an atheist, and
thus for him, there is no Creator to report back to, and comments that,
"[as] Trout chronicles one meaningless life after another, readers are
left to wonder how a compassionate creator could stand by and do nothing while
such reports come in". In the epigraph to Bluebeard, Vonnegut quotes his
son Mark and gives an answer to what he believes is the meaning of life:
"We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."
Works
Novels
Player
Piano (1952) , The Sirens of Titan (1959) , Mother Night (1962) , Cat's Cradle
(1963) , God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) , Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) , Breakfast
of Champions (1973) , Slapstick (1976) , Jailbird (1979) ,
Deadeye
Dick (1982) , Galápagos (1985) , Bluebeard (1987) , Hocus Pocus (1990) , Timequake
(1997)
Short
fiction collections
Canary
in a Cat House (1961) , Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) , Bagombo Snuff Box
(1997) , God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999) , Armageddon in Retrospect (2008)
–
Short
stories and essays
Look
at the Birdie (2009) , While Mortals Sleep (2011) , We Are What We Pretend to
Be (2012) , Sucker's Portfolio (2013) , Complete Stories (2017)
Plays
The
First Christmas Morning (1962) , Fortitude (1968) , Happy Birthday, Wanda June
(1970) , Between Time and Timbuktu (1972) , Stones, Time and Elements (A
Humanist Requiem) (1987) , Make Up Your Mind (1993) ,
L'Histoire
du Soldat (1997)
Nonfiction
Wampeters,
Foma and Granfalloons (1974) , Palm Sunday (1981) , Nothing Is Lost Save Honor:
Two Essays (1984) , Fates Worse Than Death (1991) , A Man Without a Country
(2005) , Kurt Vonnegut: The Cornell Sun Years 1941–1943 (2012) , If This Isn't
Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young (2013),
Vonnegut
by the Dozen (2013) , Kurt Vonnegut: Letters (2014) , Pity the Reader: On
Writing With Style (2019) with Suzanne McConnell Love, Kurt: The Vonnegut Love
Letters, 1941–1945 (2020) Editor Edith Vonnegut
Interviews
Conversations
with Kurt Vonnegut (1988) with William Rodney Allen
Like
Shaking Hands with God: A Conversation About Writing (1999) with Lee Stringer
Kurt
Vonnegut: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations (2011)
Children's
books
Sun
Moon Star (1980)
Art
Kurt
Vonnegut Drawings (2014)
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