Kurt Vonnegut

Submitted by cathy n on 19 April, 2007 - 4:06

Despite a career as a playwright and essayist, it is as a novelist that Kurt Vonnegut will be most remembered. A social and moral critic, his writing held a mirror up to humanity and showed us all absurdity, the cruelty and plain insanity of the world. Any socialist worth their salt should read at least one, preferably all of his novels.

His books, like that of another American writer, Philip K. Dick, sometimes used the conventions of science fiction, and sometimes not, to convey his points, and like Dick, mixed the surreal with the everyday. His characters were those you might meet anywhere, and his heroes were always everyman, often caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Billy Pilgrim, the main character in Slaughterhouse-Five, transported across the galaxy as an exhibit for an intergalactic zoo, is a chaplain’s assistant who learns about the horror of war, and like most other characters in Vonnegut’s novels, cannot really be described as a hero.

Vonnegut’s writing was touching, and also extremely funny. His most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade, was based on his experiences during World War II, when he was captured by the Germans and assigned to work in a prisoner-of-war camp near Dresden when it was destroyed by Allied bombing. Afterwards he was among those forced to clear the bodies.

“You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” says one of the characters in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”

Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, was hugely influential on a whole generation of young people who found a novel that expressed some of their frustration and bewilderment with the sheer inhumanity that human beings were capable of toward each other for no good reason at all, summed up in the phrase “So it goes,” a recurrent motif throughout his novels. He was hugely influential on fellow science fiction writers; his influence on the New Wave of the 60s and 70s was enormous. He also earned mainstream critical success, counting Graham Greene as an admirer.

His early novels, such as Sirens of Titan and Cat’s Cradle are classics of twentieth-century literature. However, after the success of Slaughterhouse-Five, he stopped writing science fiction; but his later novels were still as irreverently hilarious, still filled with characters who find their lives may not be their own, or maybe they are…

A very funny later novel is Galapagos, about the future descendants of humanity who have devolved into furry seals, featuring a character called Leon Trotsky Trout. Although never overtly political, Kurt Vonnegut appealed to that sense in all of us as we look around and ask “why?”, “why is the world like this, this is insane, it doesn’t make sense”. If you haven’t read any of his novels yet, then make it the next thing you do. Your life will be a little bit richer for it.

Maxine Vincent

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