Brandon Paynito 
                                                                English III-H Pre-AP A-3
                                                                February 12, 1997 




Kurt Vonnegut: A Common Man with an Uncommon Talent for Narrative 





     Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., what does this name bring to mind? For years he could be dismissed as a writer of the lowest rank, a
science-fiction writer. He endorsed every good novel so that through cover blurbs "Vonnegut" would become a household
name.1 When he received the acclaim his works deserved he was dismissed by many critics as merely a popular writer. He
gained recognition abroad and college students rediscovered him. In the Soviet Union his works considered anti-American and
were allowed to be read and performed. Now Kurt Vonnegut is published in every European language, and most of his novels
have been translated into Japanese.2 Millions have enjoyed reading the books of the interconnected Vonnegut canon, all of
which reflect his philosophy, and which contain a multitude of parallels to his life and to each other; in addition his book
Slaughterhouse-Five has become a classic which will be read and reread for a great many years to come.
Many of the events of Kurt Vonnegut's life have happened to millions of American men his own age; he is linked by common
threads of experience to his readers.3 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born on November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana.4 His
father, Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., was a second generation architect. His mother, Edith Vonnegut (née Lieber), had grown up in a
dignified and wealthy Midwest brewing family. Less than three weeks from Vonnegut's seventh birthday, on October 24,
1929, Black Tuesday, the stock market crashed and America was plunged into the Great Depression, a time that shaped the
course of Vonnegut's life. His father went ten years without a commission. Things were so bad that his mother sold her family china and
crystal.5 Vonnegut's career as a published writer began during his junior and senior years in high school. He was an editor of
The Shortridge Daily Echo,6 one of the two high school daily papers in America at that time.7  When the time came for
Vonnegut to spread his wings and leave the nest, as great numbers of Midwesterners do, he headed East, specifically to Illium,
New York's Cornell University.8  He majored chemistry to satisfy his pragmatic father's command to learn something useful.9
Vonnegut continued writing and his satire-filled editorial column, "Well All Right," appeared regularly in the Cornell Daily Sun.
In 1942 he enlisted in the Army. Mother's Day of 1944 brought Vonnegut home on special leave to learn that the previous
night his mother had fatally overdosed on sleeping pills.10  Vonnegut was captured on a reconnaissance mission and interned in
Dresden, Germany where he worked at a factory making a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. "Their address was this:
'Schlachthof-fünf'" (slaughterhouse-five.11  Vonnegut's group of prisoners were housed below ground in schlachthof-fünf
(slaughterhouse-five). Their subterranean location saved the prisoners and three guards when the open city of no strategic
military importance, was fired bombed by allied planes on the night of February 13, 1945.12  Returning to America, Vonnegut
took a position in public relations for General Electric in Illium. He wrote and had short stories published in popular magazines
of the day, such as Collier's and Redbook . Vonnegut then quit General Electric and moved to Cape Cod,13 where he
continues writing even now. 
     The myriad relationships between Vonnegut's life and his writings are plainly visible. Dan Wakefield, another novelist from the
Midwest, has notedthat in all of Vonnegut's novels there is at least one character from the birthplace of Kurt Vonnegut,
Indianapolis.14  Vonnegut attributes his comedy to his boyhood experiences during the Great Depression. Vonnegut has written in his
preface to Between Time and Timbuktu , "I am a barbarian whose deepest cultural debts are to Laurel and Hardy, . . . Jack Benny,
Charlie Chaplin. . . . They made me hilarious during the Great Depression . . . ."15 Vonnegut attempted to come to grips with
his mother's death by writing Breakfast of Champions,16 in which a female character poisons herself by drinking Drano .
Alumni from Vonnegut's days at Cornell are featured in six novels, Player Piano; Cat's Cradle; God Bless You, Mr.
Rosewater; Slapstick; Galapagos; and Hocus Pocus.17  Vonnegut's experiences in the war, helped to fashion his cynicism
and sense of irony, but according to Vonnegut in Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons , critics have portrayed too much of
his character as being formed by Dresden. "If the book (Slaughterhouse-Five ) hadn't been a bestseller, it would seem like a
very minor experience in my life. And I don't think people's lives are changed by short-term events like that."18  A last parallel
is General Electric, on which Illium's massive corporation in Player Piano , General Forge and Foundry, is based;19 and
whose moral-building trips to Association Island are mimicked by the executive retreat in "The Meadows."20
Vonnegut's novels are not only parallels of his life, they are also similar to each other, and, bound by common characters and
themes they may be studied together as en evolution of thought. In several of Vonnegut's novels there is a "modern Everyman
figure, a version of the standard middle class norm of success,"21 whose live is not full or complete or of any real use and who
cannot be content. Billy Pilgrim fills the Everyman position as a successful optometrist in Slaughterhouse-Five , and Dwayne
Hoover is in the same role as the Pontiac dealer of Breakfast of Champions. Tramalfadore first appears in Vonnegut's second novel,
The Sirens of Titan,22
is mentioned throughout his works and reappears as a cardinal setting in Slaughterhouse-Five . Bernard O'Hare appears in
three novels, always a present or former American service man, but each time a totally different character, with his identity
confused by the shift of his middle initial between "B." and "V."23  To those reading the three books together, O'Hare can be
seen as an attempt by Vonnegut to make sense of the complex and puzzling elements of human nature. Howard Campbell,
who through Mother Night is known to be an allied secret agent, when viewed in Slaughterhouse-Five is thought of as a true
Nazi and a traitor to America. Eliot Rosewater of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater reappears in a hospital bed next to Bill
Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. Kilgore Trout is by far Vonnegut's most popular multi-book character, appearing more often
and in far more substantial roles. He appears in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Slaughterhouse-Five; Breakfast of
Champions; and Jailbird. A highly complex relationship exists between Trout and Vonnegut. In earlier novels Trout wrestles
with obscurity, later with fame, mimicking Vonnegut's own career.24 Yet, Trout is not Vonnegut, but rather, the science-fiction
writer as whom Vonnegut refuses to be classified.
     Much of Vonnegut's writing is related to religion and a keen understanding of the author's views of religion and philosophy is
essential to the reading of Vonnegut's works and the study of his persona. Vonnegut's German ancestors who arrived in this
country just prior to the Civil War were atheists; thus, Vonnegut has said:

So I'm not rebelling against organized religion. I never had any. I learned my outrageous opinions 
about organized religion at my mother's knee. My family has always had these.25

In Palm Sunday he writes, "I am an agnostic as some of you may have gleaned 
from my writings."26  Pessimism lingers in all of Vonnegut's work because no resolutions are possible for Vonnegut, or his
protagonists until Vonnegut can believe that in a world without God people can successfully resist becoming appendages to
machines.27  Bokononism, created by Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle embodies some traits of Christianity and parodies others. The
basic trait of Bokononism is order in seeming disorder. An example of this is a Bokononian karass, a group of people, who
may live in various locations and times which are bound together as part of a family in the fourth dimension.28  William Allen
has suggested that in Slaughterhouse-Five , Billy Pilgrim's space travel is Vonnegut's way of describing his imagination's
deviation from the "Christian, linear vision of time to the cosmic perspective of time as the fourth dimension."29  Pilgrim may
also be viewed as a sad excuse for a Christ-figure. On the train to Dresden he clings to the "cross-brace" of the boxcar and
when the train arrives at its destination Vonnegut describes him as "lying at an angle on the corner-brace, self crucified."30
Additionally, through his writings Vonnegut has expressed "his awareness of the loneliness and the despair that cloud the lives
of millions of Americans."31  Vonnegut has written that he plans on "providing all Americans with artificial extended families of
a thousand members or more;"32 The President of the United States in Slapstick attempted the same social experiment.
"What are people for?" is a philosophical question arising in Player Piano; The Sirens of Titan; God Bless You, Mr.
Rosewater; and "Welcome to the Monkey House." Vonnegut has little sympathy for those people who consider money or
machinery of more importance than people.33  A last constant of Vonnegut's philosophy that is reflected by his writings is
ambiguity and flux. In Vonnegut's world nothing can be counted on to stay the same, so people cannot be separated into the
good and the bad, or the sane and the insane, and gold cannot be prevented from "turning to lead."34
     Vonnegut's most famous work, the one that will endure the longest, can be rightly called a classic, and has earned him a place
among the greatest of all contemporary novelists, is Slaughterhouse-Five . The fire-bombing of Dresden is at the novel's
center; Billy is linked to it throughout the book through repressed memories and time travel.35  The tale of Dresden begins,
"Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." At different times all jumbled together the reader views the war and cleanup of
the bodies, Billy just after returning to America, his life in a Tramalfadorian zoo, his apparently successful later life after the war
as an optometrist, and his attempts to correct the faults in the human view of time. It is as if the book was written and then the
pages shuffled like a deck of cards. Shortly after the war Pilgrim suffers a breakdown before graduating from optometry
school. In the mental ward of the veterans hospital the man in the next bed is Eliot Rosewater, who introduces him to the
science fiction of Kilgore Trout.36  After recovering Billy marries the daughter of the dean of the optometry school. His wife is
fat and constantly munches on candy bars, but makes empty promises to lose weight.37  On the night before their daughter's
wedding Billy is taken to Tramalfadore and learns the cosmic view of time, that all events are as they are because that is the
way the moment is structured The Tramalfadorians can view time as a human can view a stretch of the Rocky Mountains- all
at once. Therefore they insist that it is silly to cry at funerals because the person is still very much alive and living- in the past.
When Pilgrim returns to Earth, he is a changed man. He attempts to correct humankind's faulty view of time, just as he had
tried to correct physical vision as an optometrist. 
     It is as Jerome Klinkowitz in the forward to his book, Vonnegut in America , said, "There has never been another writer quite
like Vonnegut, just as there has never been another decade in America quite like the sixties." He is a great author,
among the finest writers of modern literature. Vonnegut's writing is based on his common life experiences, which connect
him to his readers (the Depression, World War II, the sixties,38 but events more unique to him, (his mother's suicide and his
survival when an entire city was massacred by his own countrymen), set him apart and give him the wisdom that makes the
reading of his books worthwhile. Until the end of the world, Vonnegut's books will be worthy of reading, for what they tell us
about our present selves and how they warn of what might be our future.