RSSKurt Vonnegut 1922-2007
Apr 12
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Kurt Vonnegut passed away yesterday at 84 years old. As one of the authors that molded my literary perspective as a teenager -- and at the top of that list no less -- I feel the need to honor his impact.
Vonnegut had a vision and more than anything, I think that is what people respond to when they read Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat’s Cradle. He also had an enemy (culture, history, society -- take your pick.) People empathize when there is someone to punch, and in his novels, no matter how twisted and non-linear they could be, there was always someone to punch. And Vonnegut had an agenda, that could probably best be described as “how soon are humans going to destroy the world?”
All of those elements made his stories superb even though Vonnegut the author danced to a decidedly different drummer. He wasn’t a particularly prolific novelist. He only wrote a handful of books each decade, and later in his career focused mostly on essays and public speaking. His best known work, the aforementioned Slaughterhouse-Five, was a synthesis of his time spent in Dresden during World War II. When they firebombed Dresden, Vonnegut and other POWs hid inside an underground meat locker called slaughterhouse-five.
I was too young to really appreciate Slaughterhouse-Five when I first read it, and I read Cat’s Cradle at 14 and it scared me shitless. Basically, the world ends because of an invention called ice-nine. I failed to see the humor in it. So it goes that the two novels of his I liked the most as a teenager just happened to be the two published while I was a teenager, Hocus Pocus and Timequake. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that part of the reason I didn’t connect with the other novels early on was because I had never lived through a world war -- the closest I got in my teens was the Gulf War, which wasn’t so much a war as the United Nations deciding to beat on Iraq.
As Vonnegut tells us, Hocus Pocus was written on scraps of paper and pieced together by Vonnegut to make a somewhat cohesive narrative. The book asks the question, how much of what happens to us is by our own initiative, and how much of our lives is a random sequence of events leading up the inexorable moment when it finally forms a coherent sum? As Vonnegut suggests it, the answer is self-evident.
He used humor in his novels to shield some of us, those who don’t want to face the truth, from the reality of war, and the repercussions of science, and our own damning lifestyle. He had no doubt we were going to destroy ourselves, it was only a matter of how it happened. Humor in his novels wasn’t meant to soften the blow -- it was more of a nervous reflex.
All of which makes his works as important today as they were in the era he wrote them. American society reflects all of the foibles that Vonnegut was pointing out in the sixties on politics, science and society. If anything, his themes of self-delusion and self-interest are more poignant today. Society is inordinately occupied with the minutiae of every day distractions and egotistical celebrity at the expense of seeing a bigger picture. And that applies as much in politics and war as it does in entertainment. Vonnegut was a visionary, and he wasn’t afraid to speak up about it.
I did a presentation on Kurt Vonnegut in college. I don’t remember much of the specifics, but it is easy to see now that I only engaged his works on a very surface level even then. Now, as I read his writing, I can see a depth to his works that startles me. I’m still scared shitless, but now I can respond to his vision and maybe there is hope that I do have some impact on what happens in the future. Maybe that was his message all along?
