Kurt Vonnegut was a famous American novelist who mixed war narrative with science-fiction. Through this, he presented the atrocities which take place during the war and the inhuman side of human beings. Vonnegut was himself a war survivor, prisoner-of-war, and a traumatic who was a witness to the wicked bombings of allied forces on Dresden.
His novels are wryly satirical where ironies of the postmodern period are portrayed. Vonnegut’s works are influenced by famous satirists, and a worthy name in this category is Jonathan Swift. Swift’s A Tale of a Tub is one of the formative forces behind Vonnegut’s masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five.
His works are the presentation of a fatalistic worldview. Still, there are humanist beliefs embraced in his works. Vonnegut had a prolific career, and he published three short story collections, fourteen novels, five works of nonfiction, five plays in fifty years of his literary career. Some of his works remained unpublished till his death and were published posthumously.
His most famous work, Slaughterhouse-Five, is a darkly satirical and criticizes the war mania of so-called developed nations like the United States and its allies in the West. Vonnegut presented his firsthand experiences of World War II and mixed realistic narrative with a fictional narrative.
Along with his novels, his short stories also have traces of autobiographical elements. He was one of the most hailed writers of the twentieth century and is considered a black-humor commentator. His works are a critique of modern society, and for this reason, his works have attracted special attention from critics. His influence in war-related writing is much influential and serves as an example for other works.
He is considered the premier novelist of the counterculture and the New York Times dubbed him as the ‘counterculture novelist.’ He was influenced by Mark Twain’s work, and he questioned the basic facts about human life.
Due to the discussion of controversial issues, his works have been severally censored or removed from various institutions’ libraries. Though his works have gathered much fame, they became the focus of serious study very recently. He wanted to promote antiwar sentiment and for this reason, wanted the writer to deglamorize war instead of glamorizing it.
This sentiment remained the main impulse behind all his major works and continued from Slaughterhouse-Five till A Man Without a Country. He was a non-religious person, and he promoted this belief in his works. His several interviews support this fact.
Kurt created a utopian world in many of his works, and his special feature in writing is writing from a survivor’s perspective. This makes his writing lucid and fascinating. Kurt didn’t have any particular political affiliations; he didn’t support either liberals or conservatives.
He referred to this division as overly simplistic. He has inclinations towards socialism, and from this system, he extracted a more favorable from Social Darwinism. He has made this political ideology a part of his fictional writing.
For his science-fiction writing, Kurt Vonnegut was inducted to Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame posthumously in 2015. An asteroid, 25399, was named in honor of Kurt Vonnegut. He has received several awards for both his fictional and non-fictional works.
A Short Biography of Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11th, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was the third child of Edith Lieber Vonnegut and Kurt Vonnegut Sr. He had two elder siblings Bernard and Alice. His family members were successful architects in the area where they resided. His ancestors were of German descent. His patrilineal grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, was an immigrant from Westphalia, Germany.
His maternal side was one of the wealthiest families in Indianapolis and successful brewers. Due to their German lineage, his parents were fluent German speakers and had a taste for German literature and art. The growing hatred towards Germany during and after World War I led his parents to abandon their culture. He wasn’t taught this language, and throughout his life, he felt rootless for this reason.
His family had an African-American cook and housekeeper, Ida Young, for more than ten years. Kurt described her as the most influential person in his life, and from her, he inherited the forgiving quality and humane behavior. Though he belonged to a well-to-do family, they suffered a great setback during the Great Depression.
For this reason, he was admitted to a public school, unlike his elder siblings who were enrolled in private schools. He was admitted at Shortridge High School, Indianapolis. This place polished his abilities; there, he participated in literary magazines and playing the clarinet.
He graduated from Shortridge in 1940 and was admitted to Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. He took biochemistry majors at the insistence of his father and elder brother though he was not interested in this subject. He withdrew from there due to his low grades and pneumonia.
Before leaving Cornell, he had enlisted to join the military and was inducted in the US Army in November 1942. He was called for training in 1943, and he studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute. He was admitted to Camp Atterbury, and he visited his home on weekends. This year his mother died due to an overdose of sleeping pills.
Soon after his mother’s death, he was sent to the war front in Bulge, and there he, along with other soldiers, was captured. He was sent to Dresden as a POW and worked in a food production factory. During his imprisonment there he saw the allied forces’ atrocious bombing of the city. His famous novel Slaughterhouse-Five is based on this experience.
Spending two years in war and earning a Purple Heart he arrived back in the US in May 1945 and soon married Jane Cox. They moved to Chicago where he earned a degree in Anthropology and worked at several places.
He, along with his wife and newly born son, moved to New York and worked as a public relations officer for General Electric. During this job there he wrote his first novel, but it wasn’t a major success. He did quit the job in the early 1950s and dedicated himself to pursue a career as a fulltime writer. He wrote fictional works for magazines, and through them, he earned his livelihood.
He had three children, and they adopted his elder sister’s children as well when their parents died. He wrote several works, but the actual energy came from his teaching job at the University of Iowa.
His most famous work came in 1969, and it freed him of the financial problems. He separated from Jane in 1971 and married a photographer Jill Krementz. He struggled with depression throughout his life and even tried to attempt suicide. He survived a house fire in 2000. He was an antiwar activist and this continued throughout his life. He died on April 11th, 2007 due to brain injuries.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Writing Style
Kurt Vonnegut’s significant works are science-fiction or anti-war writings. This genre determines his writing style, which is dry and minimalist. There is the utilization of short sentences, and lengthy, run-on sentences are avoided. One of the features of writing, which he highly regarded in simplicity.
He was of the belief that it can best convey the emotions a writer wants to convey. He was influenced by William Shakespeare and James Joyce’s simplicity, and he promoted it in his works. His novels are easily identifiable because of his use of certain literary devices. These include repetition and his point of view. He uses a third-person narrative in his famous novels.
Through this, he conveys the meaning that the protagonist is not narrating the story. The author himself plays the role of the narrator and can be heard but not seen.
He mixes fact with fiction, and in his novels, we see that Kurt Vonnegut, his friends are present as characters. This brings the story to a more personal level. There are certain phrases in his works that make the author identifiable due to repetition. Though his writing is simple, it is sometimes poetic. The unchronological time sequence in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five makes his writing distinct among other writers.
Melancholy
In most of his novels, Vonnegut’s attitude towards social structures is satiric. Vonnegut is a novelist of ideas and his enterprises to solve social problems. In Breakfast of Champions, he considers the implications of treating human beings as machines. Impasses are created through presuppositions about people and consideration of the nature of reality.
Through the presupposition, the intellectual quest is derailed, and thus the forward motion is dissipated into stasis. Thus this situation is supplanted by the melancholy of emotion. His presuppositions, the problems he tackles, and dynamics are transformed into emotions.
He projects randomness in his world, and this makes him famous for absurdity. This random world has created helpless human beings. In Timequake we see a contraction in the universe, and thus every person has to relive ten years. These ten years are lived the same way as they had done previously, and thus human beings are reduced to mere actors.
His most significant presupposition is the loneliness of his characters, and this makes his fictional world melancholy.
History and Story: Double Narrative
Vonnegut’s novel, Galapagos imagines a world a million years later from the twentieth century. The people in this world are the chosen few who have survived due to their fitness. For this purpose, he has chosen a narrator who is omniscient and is a ghost. This narrator chooses to penetrate the mind of a person and gets information this way from whomever he wants. He has chosen the narrator from his previous novel, Leon Trotsky Trout, son of Kilgore Trout. There are two narratives in this novel which are Trout’s own history and the record of Santa Rosalians, the residents of Galapagos.
The narrative which describes his own life is briefer and is a detail of his life before his death. The one which describes Santa Rosalians is longer. The narrator has constructed a lunatic life that lacks any human affections and familial life. Along with the absence of these feelings, he has excluded the ills of the twentieth-century society.
This double narrative is a recurrent motif of mental instability in Vonnegut’s works. The resembling characters in other novels are Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, and Eliot Rosewater in God Bless You, and Mr. Rosewater.
Sensational Implications
In the novel Player Piano, Vonnegut has given a concept of the United States being controlled by computers. This system of computers takes control of the life activities of human beings. A character, Shah of Bratpuhr, who visits this AI-controlled United States calls it a society of slaves.
Here computer/machine signifies the technological developments made by the US and describes the resultant transformation in society. This work is a satire of overdependence on technology and control of technocrats on American society.
In the character of Paul Proteus, the anguished situation is portrayed. Characters around him want him to be the ideal character they imagine, and this is resultant in the loss of the original human being he is. This book is a plea to human beings to be the best. Though human beings are frail still they are strong, they fail, but they succeed as well, they both hate and love.
These all traits make human beings in the true essence. This work in the form of the corporation gives a glimpse of utopia, which will deprive human beings of their essential human qualities. The universally accepted wrong belief that if life is made easier, then there will be no problems is questioned in this novel.
Fantastic Novel
Vonnegut’s novels have fantastic elements, and this attribute is most evident in the case of his novel the Breakfast of Champions. This novel is considered the most experimental of all his novels. This novel is self-reflexive, parodies the postmodern novel, and the postmodern fictional devices.
This novel relates to the destruction caused by American society and the despoiling activities of the planet. The narrator is from another galaxy and doesn’t know English very well but understands enough to describe the harm caused.
Some critics refer to his style in this novel as naïve and childish. But through the use of fantastic, he has defamiliarized the reader. In contrast to his other works, Vonnegut satirizes the narrator in this novel. The characters in this novel, including the narrator, are ‘stranded’ in the US where they don’t have an escape or any ‘viable future.’
Breakfast of Champions is considered as a work of exuberant comic dislocation. In Player Piano, the narrator dreams of returning to the world in which he previously lived, and these dreams are recurrent. Through these dreams, the element of fantasy is added into this novel.
Human Will and Chaotic Narrative
In his novel The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut has explored the idea of human free will and as a result, the identity of himself that he/she perceives. This novel shows the shift in narrative due to the influence of shift from the Newtonian view of reality to a postmodern view. This novel shows the conflict between deterministic view and free-will. Through the chaotic narrative, the narrator conveys the message that the individual living in the US is not controlled by him/her.
The choice of free will is available, and it is elaborated through the happenings in this novel. There everything that seems deterministic is the result of manipulation of Rumfoord, and this can be changed if a person tries to go against it.
The Sirens of Titan is considered as a novel that promotes the belief that the universe serves as a prison for human beings. There is no meaning and sense in it, and this leads to the narrative, which is unreliable.
The novel is dominated by the yearning every character has for a total aggrandizing narrative. But the situation leads in a different direction where the chaos overcomes the unified voice. There are similarities between the chaos theory in Physics, and this is applied to human life.
Literature, Ideas, and the reinvention of Reality
The uniqueness of Vonnegut’s works is based on two attributes. These are their value to be read as anonymous texts, and their being part of a larger whole. He has used irony, satire, and black humor to fight existentialism, the malaise of the twentieth century. He has attempted to discover what does it mean to be a human being.
He has used science fiction for this quest as well, and for this use, he has often been called a hack writer. He has studied the impacts of money on human beings in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Parabolic questions are posed, and metaphorical answers are given in this novel.
His works appear to be simple, but if their layers other than surface are dug, there is a lot to know. Through the genre of science fiction, he has defamiliarized reality, and thus, the reader sees it from a different perspective.
Science Fiction is used in his works as a form of salvation for the characters. He presents images that can’t be achieved in reality and thus gives the readers perception that they should not chase illusions.
In Kilgore Trout novels, Vonnegut has constructed postwar reality. These novels are journeys of reinvention, and the author tries to subvert the dominant sci-fi works. A critic comments about Slaughterhouse-Five that in this novel, the author withdraws from reality and ultimately loses sanity.