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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
American Novelist
1922-2007
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Lauded as one of America's most respected novelists, Kurt Vonnegut was virtually ignored by critics at the beginning of his writing career. In Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary Fiction, Jerome Klinkowitz observes that "Vonnegut's rise to eminence coincides precisely with the shift in taste which brought a whole new reading public--and eventually critical appreciation--to the works of Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski, and others. Ten years and several books their elder, Vonnegut by his long exile underground was well prepared to be the senior member of the new disruptive group, and the first of its numbers to be seriously considered for the Nobel Prize. By 1973, when Breakfast of Champions appeared, . . . there was little doubt that a fiction widely scorned only six years before was now a dominant mode in serious contemporary literature."
While such early works as Piano Player and The Sirens of Titan were at first categorized as science fiction, Vonnegut's books go far beyond the realm of most pure SF. Ernest W. Ranly explains in Commonweal: "Vonnegut at times adds fantasy to his stories, whereas pure sci-fi permits only what is possible within a given scientific hypothesis. Vonnegut adds humor, a wild black humor, while most sci-fi is serious to the point of boredom. Vonnegut, generally, adds a distinctive sense and literary class. And, finally, Vonnegut seems pre-occupied with genuine human questions, about war, peace, technology, human happiness. He is even bitterly anti-machine, anti-technology, anti-science."
Mother Night, Vonnegut's third novel, is the story of an American playwright living in Germany at the outbreak of World War II who is persuaded by the Allies to remain in Germany as a spy while posing as a radio propagandist. After the war he fades into obscurity in the United States until, with his wartime cover still intact, he is kidnapped by Israeli agents to stand trial for his crime. Michael Wood remarks in the New York Review of Books, "What is impressive about Mother Night is its extraordinary tone which allows Vonnegut to be very funny without being crass or unfeeling. . . . [ Mother Night] is not an attempt to defeat an enemy by ridicule, but an attempt to contemplate horror by means of laughter, because laughter, of all our inappropriate responses to total, terminal horror, seems the least inappropriate, the least inhuman."
Mother Night is Vonnegut's first novel to be written with a first-person narrator, and is also the first in which technology and the future play no significant part. For this reason it is seen by many as a "transitional" novel between Vonnegut's early and later work. Perhaps most obvious, in comparison with the first two novels, Mother Night relies very little on time shifts, resulting in a more unified or "conventional" book. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. author Peter J. Reed describes it as "Vonnegut's most traditional novel in form. Paradoxically, perhaps, that also accounts for the relative weaknesses of the book. For Mother Night lacks some of the excitement and verve of The Sirens of Titan, for example, and it is sometimes less likely to carry its reader along than that earlier, more wandering fantasy."
If one single point must be chosen for the transition of Vonnegut from "cult figure" to "popular author" it would most probably be a statement by Graham Greene calling the author's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle "one of the three best novels of the year by one of the most able living writers." Cat's Cradle is as autobiographical as any of Vonnegut's work up to that point. The Hoenikker family of the novel closely parallels Vonnegut's own family, consisting of an elder son who is a scientist, a tall middle daughter, and a younger son who joins Delta Upsilon. The narrator is again a writer who, in this case, is working on a book called The Day the World Ended, about the bombing of Hiroshima. Since its publication, Cat's Cradle has consistently appeared on high school and college reading lists; Reed says that it might be the most widely read of Vonnegut's novels among young people. He explains that "to 'the counter-culture' it should appeal as a book which counters almost every aspect of the culture of our society. To a generation which delights in the 'put on,' parody and artifice, often as the most meaningful expressions of deeply held convictions in a world which they see as prone to distortion, Cat's Cradle's play with language, symbol and artifice should find accord."
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine introduces a theme that crops up repeatedly in the later novels and which is often considered to be the essence of all of Vonnegut's writing. It is expressed by the main character, Eliot Rosewater, in the motto "Goddamn it, you've got to be kind." John R. May comments in a Twentieth-Century Literature review that it is the author's "most positive and humane work. . . . We may not be able, Vonnegut is saying, to undo the harm that has been done, but we can certainly love, simply because there are people, those who have been made useless by our past stupidity and greed, our previous crimes against our brothers. And if that seems insane, then the better the world for such folly." Book Week contributor Daniel Talbot writes: "It's a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. that he has covered such a large territory of human follies in so short a book. . . . The net effect is at once explosively funny and agonizing."
In Slaughterhouse Five; or, the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut finally delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse, where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Vonnegut, who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished--more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: "Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them." The reviewer concludes that "Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread."
The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital to the late 1960s: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions: New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees larger reasons for the book's success: "Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact which may be the fairest example of American cultural change. . . . Shunned as distastefully low-brow . . . and insufficiently commercial to suit the exploitative tastes of high-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazine and pulp paperback circulation. Then in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age."
Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut "avoids framing his story in linear narration, choosing a circular structure. Such a view of the art of the novel has much to do with the protagonist . . . Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist who provides corrective lenses for Earthlings. For Pilgrim, who learns of a new view of life as he becomes 'unstuck in time,' the lenses are corrective metaphorically as well as physically. Quite early in the exploration of Billy's life the reader learns that 'frames are where the money is'. . . . Historical events like the bombing of Dresden are usually 'read' in the framework of moral and historical interpretation." McGinnis feels that the novel's cyclical nature is inextricably bound up with the themes of "time, death, and renewal," and goes on to say that "the most important function of 'so it goes' [a phrase that recurs at each death in the book], . . . is its imparting a cyclical quality to the novel, both in form and content. Paradoxically, the expression of fatalism serves as a source of renewal, a situation typical of Vonnegut's works, for it enables the novel to go on despite--even because of--the proliferation of deaths."
After the publication of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut entered a period of depression during which he vowed, at one point, never to write another novel. He concentrated, instead, on lecturing, teaching, and finishing a play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, that he had begun several years earlier. The play, which ran off-Broadway from October, 1970 to March, 1971, received mixed reviews. Newsweek's Jack Kroll wrote that "almost every time an American novelist writes a play he shows up most of our thumb-tongued playwrights, who lack the melody of mind, the wit, dash and accuracy of Saul Bellow and Bruce Jay Friedman. And the same thing must be said of the writing in Happy Birthday, Wanda June . . . Vonnegut's dialogue is not only fast and funny, with a palpable taste and crackle, but it also means something. And his comic sense is a superior one; Wanda June has as many laughs as anything by Neil Simon." On the other hand, in the New Republic Stanley Kauffmann called it "a disaster, full of callow wit, rheumatic invention, and dormitory profundity. . . . The height of its imagination is exemplified by a scene in Heaven between a golden-haired little girl and a Nazi Gauleiter in which they discuss the way Jesus plays shuffleboard."
Breakfast of Champions marked the end of Vonnegut's depression and a return to the novel; in honor of this event, Vonnegut subtitled the work, Goodbye Blue Monday. Nora Sayre writes in the New York Times Book Review that "in this novel Vonnegut is treating himself to a giant brain-flush, clearing his head by throwing out acquired ideas, and also liberating some of the characters from his previous books. Thus, he has celebrated his fiftieth birthday in the same spirit that made Tolstoy release his serfs and Thomas Jefferson free his slaves. Once again, we're back on the people-grid; major and minor personae from other novels resurface in this one, their lives ridiculously entangled. . . . This explosive meditation ranks with Vonnegut's best."
Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, from brain injuries sustained after a fall.
For more information visit his page at Literature
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Prepared by Matthew Horowitz '10
