I am not familiar with most of these but found the mindset of the author quite interesting as much of his writing, looking back, could have been a warning of the future.
How did Vonnegut choose to broadcast his essential message to humanity? Again, his work shuns the lure of the pigeonhole, though something like “hallucinogenic science fiction, tethered to rage at the corruption of American values” might come close. Vonnegut himself described his core mission in life as propagating a “Christ-loving atheism.” He went about this in his own distinctive way. Take, for instance, Slaughterhouse-Five, which more than 50 years after its publication still remains the best (or certainly best-known) delineation of his basic style, fizzing with ideas to the point of genius or idiocy, which solidified the Vonnegut legend.
It is the sort of thing no self-respecting creative writing instructor would ever condone. The novel violates most of the conventions of the form by telling the reader what will happen to each significant character and situation before he or she comes to read the scene. It’s not exactly Agatha Christie, in other words, nor is it the standard peacenik fulmination of fury at the madness of war. It includes a lot of heavy weather of sadness, but no real thunderstorm of anger at the futility and the waste.
Vonnegut’s book went through an unusually long gestation period—a quarter of a century separated the central event of the Dresden bombing and its literary depiction—and a number of false starts. Having finally settled on the autobiographical form, Vonnegut had the morbid good luck to see his book launched at a time of maximum public disenchantment with the Vietnam War. It resonated immediately.
Where does Vonnegut rank today in the American literary pantheon? These matters are necessarily subjective, but perhaps his closest peer would be Joseph Heller, and more specifically the energetically sustained gallows humor of Catch-22. Both authors mined a basic lode of anti-war satire, with a rich seam of absurdism, but Heller was the more slapstick in his approach. His humor was of the pie-in-the-face school, Vonnegut’s more arch and detached. If Heller was Jerry Lewis, then Vonnegut was Dean Martin.
Perhaps it is also worth noting that, in keeping with nearly all the best public humorists, Vonnegut led an essentially humor-free life. And perhaps this was, in turn, the wellspring of his art. Certainly his personal circumstances were almost satirically bleak. His once wealthy family was impoverished by the Great Depression, causing strain in his parents’ marriage. His mother committed suicide. His older sister died of cancer a day after her husband was killed in a train wreck. And then of course there was the matter of his war service, and more specifically the Dresden ordeal, which he somehow survived only to be sent into the smoking ruins as prison labor in order to collect and burn the bodies of the victims.
So perhaps it is not surprising that Vonnegut’s often superficially funny prose was shot through with a sense of despair at humanity’s folly, and that this same essential gloom was never far removed from his work. A writer brought up on the spectacle of charred corpses is likely to have a different perspective on life than one weaned on the products of Walt Disney.
Kurt Vonnegut would still be amused. | America Magazine
How did Vonnegut choose to broadcast his essential message to humanity? Again, his work shuns the lure of the pigeonhole, though something like “hallucinogenic science fiction, tethered to rage at the corruption of American values” might come close. Vonnegut himself described his core mission in life as propagating a “Christ-loving atheism.” He went about this in his own distinctive way. Take, for instance, Slaughterhouse-Five, which more than 50 years after its publication still remains the best (or certainly best-known) delineation of his basic style, fizzing with ideas to the point of genius or idiocy, which solidified the Vonnegut legend.
It is the sort of thing no self-respecting creative writing instructor would ever condone. The novel violates most of the conventions of the form by telling the reader what will happen to each significant character and situation before he or she comes to read the scene. It’s not exactly Agatha Christie, in other words, nor is it the standard peacenik fulmination of fury at the madness of war. It includes a lot of heavy weather of sadness, but no real thunderstorm of anger at the futility and the waste.
Vonnegut’s book went through an unusually long gestation period—a quarter of a century separated the central event of the Dresden bombing and its literary depiction—and a number of false starts. Having finally settled on the autobiographical form, Vonnegut had the morbid good luck to see his book launched at a time of maximum public disenchantment with the Vietnam War. It resonated immediately.
Where does Vonnegut rank today in the American literary pantheon? These matters are necessarily subjective, but perhaps his closest peer would be Joseph Heller, and more specifically the energetically sustained gallows humor of Catch-22. Both authors mined a basic lode of anti-war satire, with a rich seam of absurdism, but Heller was the more slapstick in his approach. His humor was of the pie-in-the-face school, Vonnegut’s more arch and detached. If Heller was Jerry Lewis, then Vonnegut was Dean Martin.
Perhaps it is also worth noting that, in keeping with nearly all the best public humorists, Vonnegut led an essentially humor-free life. And perhaps this was, in turn, the wellspring of his art. Certainly his personal circumstances were almost satirically bleak. His once wealthy family was impoverished by the Great Depression, causing strain in his parents’ marriage. His mother committed suicide. His older sister died of cancer a day after her husband was killed in a train wreck. And then of course there was the matter of his war service, and more specifically the Dresden ordeal, which he somehow survived only to be sent into the smoking ruins as prison labor in order to collect and burn the bodies of the victims.
So perhaps it is not surprising that Vonnegut’s often superficially funny prose was shot through with a sense of despair at humanity’s folly, and that this same essential gloom was never far removed from his work. A writer brought up on the spectacle of charred corpses is likely to have a different perspective on life than one weaned on the products of Walt Disney.
Kurt Vonnegut would still be amused. | America Magazine
Perhaps the only thing I remember about that professor and her class.