Kurt Vonnegut- Ironic Interpreter on the Human Condition

“I do believe evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can’t help thinking that.. and this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why and where evolution is headed and thats why we’ve got Giraffe’s and Hippopotami and the clap.”- Kurt Vonnegut
The last words, that Kurt Vonnegut wrote, was:
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.”
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 at 11 April, 2007 in Manhattan.
What do you get if you hybrid satire, dark humor, science fiction, and pessimism? You get Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a man who wrote about catastrophically  horrendous moments but made them so amusing that he became one of the twentieth century’s leading American authors. Certainly, Vonnegut was allowed to write about tragedy: his mother committed suicide on Mother’s Day while he was home on leave during WWII; he was one of only seven American POW survivors during the firebombing of Dresden; his sister, Alice, died of cancer just days after her husband died in a train accident; and Vonnegut himself attempted suicide on at least one occasion. He managed, however, to blend his bleak view of the world with a dry, sharp sense of humor that continues to entertain and engage reading audiences today.
I started reading Vonnegut when I was a teenager and I read as many as I could get my hands on. One after another. They were full of wit and imagination but also humanity.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis. His father, Kurt Sr., was a architect. In GALÁPAGOS (1985) Vonnegut wrote: “When I got to be sixteen, though, I myself had arrived at the conclusion my mother and the neighbors had reached so long ago: that my father was a repellent failure, his work appearing only in the most disreputable publications, which paid him almost nothing. He was an insult to life itself, I thought, when he went on doing nothing with it but writing and smoking all the time - and I mean all the time.” For the ten years before World War II Vonnegut’s father was almost constantly unemployed, and anti-German feelings and cultural prejudices were later seen in Vonnegut’s novel SLAPSTICK(1976).
In 1940 Vonnegut started to study biochemistry at Cornell; his father, who funded his education, had recommend that he should study chemistry rather that the humanities. However, Vonnegut also wrote satirical anti-war articles for the student newspaper Cornell Sun. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Vonnegut volunteered in 1943 for military service. “Good! They will teach you to be neat!” his father said.
Vonnegut was sent to Europe. He was taken as a prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. After being transported to Dresden, an old cultural town, he worked there making a diet supplement for pregnant women. Between February 13 and 14 the Royal Air Force and United States Air Force made heavy raids on Dresden. At that time Vonnegut was a prisoner in a meat-locker under a slaughterhouse, and was among the few people to survive the total destruction of the city. Later he was employed by the Germans to dig out corpses. Dresden was occupied in 1945 by Soviet troops and Vonnegut was repatriated to the United States.
After the war Vonnegut studied anthropology at Chicago University from 1944 to 1947, but his M.A. thesis ‘Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales’ was rejected. However, in 1971 the anthropological department accepted his novel CAT’S CRADLE (1963) in lieu of a thesis and Vonnegut war awarded the degree. In the book Vonnegut explores destructive rationality of Western science and the turn towards mysticism, which was just then beginning to take hold among students in the USA and Europe. In 1945 Vonnegut married a childhood friend. They had two daughters and a son, and also adopted the three children of Vonnegut’s sister, who died of cancer in 1958.

Mr. Vonnegut and his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.

To support his writing career, Vonnegut held a variety of jobs on the side.  He worked in public relations, was a teacher, and sold automobiles.

Vonnegut worked for over three years as a public relations man for General Electric’s research laboratory. His first science fiction story, ‘Report on the Barnhouse Effect’ was published in Collier’s Weekly in September 1950. After selling also other stories, Vonnegut quit his “goddam nightmare job”, as he described it in a letter to his father, and moved with his family to Cape Cod (the Cape), Massachusetts. Between 1950 and 1963 Vonnegut published 45 stories, which appeared in such publications as The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and the Ladies’ Home Journal. “During most of my freelancing,” Vonnegut recalled in 1969 in an interview, “I made what I would have made in charge of the cafeteria at a pretty good junior-high school.” Vonnegut’s short fiction has been collected in CANARY IN A CAT HOUSE (1961), WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE (1968) and BAGOMBO SNUFF BOX (1999).

Vonnegut’s first novel, PLAYER PIANO(1952), was a tale of black humour. The story is set in the future, where scientists and engineers of vast corporations attempt to automate everything. As a result, the functions of human beings are gradually taken over by machines. Noteworthy, Vonnegut also prophesied the collapse of the Soviet Union under the impact of American know-how. This work labelled Vonnegut as a sciece-fiction writer, although the author himself though that he had written a novel about people and machines. Noteworthy, MOTHER NIGHT, originally published in paperback in 1961, and republished in 1965 in hardcover, was a non-sf novel about the “true” identity of a double agent.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s best known work is SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE (1969), which was based on his experiences in Dresden, Germany, where he was a prisoner-of-war at the destruction of the town in 1945. Vonnegut used fantasy and science fiction to examine the horrors and absurdities of 20th century civilization. His constant concern about the effects of technology on humanity led some critics to consider him a science fiction writer, but the author himself rejected this label.
Before his breakthrough novel Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut wrote THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959). It featured a character for whom the events of history take place simultaneously. Cat’s Craddle, his fourth novel, which also gained attention among the broad readership, was about a scientist who creates a chemical, Ice-Nine, that turns all water into ice. Absentmindedly he is responsible for the end of the world. Slaughterhouse Five combined historical facts and science fiction. “Thank God I was in Dresden when it was burned down,” Vonnegut once said, meaning he had something to write about that he had experienced himself. Vonnegut depicts the Allied firebombing of Dresden, seen through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a kind of descendant of Voltaire’s Candide. Billy finds peace of mind after being kidnapped by Tralfamadorians. He learns that time is not necessarily moving in a liner fashion and that the secret of life is to live only in the happy moments. Billy lives on Earth and on the distant planet Tralfamadore, responding to events with the resignated slogan “So it goes”.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence.

For roughly twenty years, from 1950 to 1970, Vonnegut led, much as his fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout, the anonymous life of a drugstore-rack writer, who is said to have been modelled on the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. A novel attributed to Kilgore Trout, written by Philip José Farmer, was published in 1975 under the title Venus on the Half-Shell. In 1979 Vonnegut divorced his first wife and married the photographer Jill Krementz.An innate pessimism, central to Vonnegut’s oeuvre, has not made the author’s later years any easier. In 1984 he made a suicide attempt. Vonnegut does not specify the culprit responsible for the ills of the world, but he views misfortunes as a part of our common nature or coming by chance.
Since BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS (1973) Vonnegut used self-consciously and mockingly his public personality as the author-narrator in his books. In JAILBIRD (1979) and DEADEYE DICK (1983) he explored idealized Mid-western middle-class values and the social and political course of American history in this century. Vonnegut’s commandments for a better world are simple: honor the Sermon of the Mount, stop exploiting and killing people, be kind to everyone. Sometimes his opinions are intentionally controversial,: “Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch: everything stops.” HOCUS POCUS, the author’s thirteenth novel, appeared in 1990. It was set in the years following the defeat of the Vietnam war.
Vonnegut’s other works include plays, essays, critics, and TV plays. His later novels received mixed reviews and he was accused of recycling essentially the same ideas. “And what is literature, Rabo,” he argued on the art of writing in BLUEBEARD (1987), “but an insider’s newsletters about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called ‘thought.’” With TIMEQUAKE (1997) Vonnegut struggled for ten years. Instead of throwing it away, the author published it with fragments of autobiography. The novel was again about Kilgore Trout, thrown into a world set back ten years, from February 13, 2001 to February 17, 1991. Inside the story Vonnegut makes comments on all kinds of matters between heaven and earth.
Although Vonnegut announced that Timequake would be his last book, he started again another novel, IF GOD WERE ALIVE TODAY, about a stand-up comedian. His essays, written after Timequake, Vonnegut collected in A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY (2005). On January 2000 Vonnegut was hospitalized for smoke inhalation after a fire at his home. Vonnegut had tried to extinguish the flames with a blanket. The fire broke out on the top floor of his townhouse at East 48th Street where he reportedly had been watching the Super Bowl in his study. Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, in Manhattan, New York, after suffering irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall at his home.

In addition to being one of the top-selling American authors of the twentieth century, Vonnegut is an accomplished graphic artist. He has produced illustrated editions of Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions, and he even created an album cover for the progressive rock band Phish.
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story. The first and presumably most important is this: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
He majored in biochemistry, mechanical engineering, and anthropology at various colleges but never completed a degree in any of them.
A contemporary classic, Slaughterhouse Five was named after his holding cell as a POW during WWII.
He has an asteroid named in his honor—asteroid 25399 vonnegut.

Enjoy!

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