Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922 – 2007), was a popular American novelist, short story writer and essayist. His most prominent work, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), is based on his personal experiences as a prisoner of war trapped in Dresden as the Allies bombed the city (during World War II). Breakfast of Champions (1973) was his most commercially successful book, though it was not as acclaimed by critics. His lesser-known Mother House is considered a masterpiece.

Early life[edit]

Vonnegut was born to a prominent family in Indianapolis, Indiana. His eight great-grandparents (father's surname "Funnegut" changed to "Vonnegut"^[1]) immigrated from Germany to America in the mid-19th century.^[2] His father's family regarded themselves as atheists, Vonnegut styling them "Free Thinkers", one of his ancestors arranging to have his disbelief in life after death expressed at his funeral oration.^[3]

His parents' wedding was held in 1913 as a grand event in Indianapolis, attended by those in the highest social circles there.^[4] His father was trained as an architect at MIT^[5], and Vonnegut recounts he would often tell true stories with what he felt were unusual outcomes and that stood on their own merit as worth telling.^[6]

Vonnegut was one of three children, his brother Bernard growing up to become an esteemed atmospheric physicist.^[7] Like so many in America when the Great Depression hit, his family suffered from financial insecurity, and in his family it took the form of an unemployment of his architect father lasting over a decade.

In 1932 when his father brought over a businessman offering a suspicious investment that gave his father hope of regaining a greater financial security, the precocious younger Vonnegut questioned the issuer, much to the consternation of his father, but the businessman later ended up cheating many in Indianapolis out of their wealth when his scheme turned out to be fraudulent.^[8]

Vonnegut recounted growing up in Indianapolis with a fondness for reading Mark Twain and the kind of pranks often found in his works. When he was a high school sophomore, his socialist uncle gave him a copy of Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, critical of the empty prestige found among wealthy Americans, which he "loved".^[9] This grew into a talent for writing, and when Vonnegut attended Cornell University he became an editor of the Cornell Daily Sun^[10], despite failing his classes by his junior year (1942) after having taken an accelerated schedule, shortly before he was conscripted into the Army during World War II. Vonnegut pulled a prank during his battalion enlistment muster, however, ensuring he would remain a private for most of the war.^[11]

Vonnegut admitted later in life that, possibly in part due to stress from motherhood and the ordeals involved in the Great Depression that his mother, daughter of a millionaire playboy, would lapse into intense fits of rage^[12], and that she eventually committed suicide in May 1944^[13], her cause of death being publicly covered up. Vonnegut would struggle with depression himself throughout his life.^[14]

Service during World War II[edit]

While serving as a US Army infantry scout, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and sent to a POW camp in Dresden in December 1944. By day he was forced to work in a factory and by night he was confined in the basement meat locker of a slaughterhouse. It was in the safety of this locker, some 60 feet underground, that he and some of his fellow prisoners were able to survive the firebombing of Dresden on February 13-15, 1945.^[15]

In the aftermath, Vonnegut describes:

Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A fire storm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large open areas in the city which weren’t filled with rubble. The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease.^[16]

As the Allies advanced into Germany, his group of POW survivors were marched out of Dresden, only to be abandoned by their guards “somewhere in rural Southeastern Germany, near the border with Czechoslovakia.” Vonnegut eventually made his way to a repatriation camp in Le Havre, France, before the end of May 1945, with the aid of the Soviets. When he returned to America, Vonnegut was awarded a Purple Heart for his service.^[17]

Short story writer and aspiring novelist[edit]

Later, using a coarse expression, he described his lack of marriage prospects upon returning to Indianapolis, but that year, he married and soon had a son.

Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago, attaining master's level work in anthropology but failed to receive a master's degree when his master's dissertation was rejected. He was much later awarded the degree by the university substituting his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle for the dissertation.

Vonnegut sold his first humorous short story in 1950, "Report on The Barnhouse Effect", with the assistance of an editor named Knox Burger, to whom he dedicated his second collection of short stories in 1968. He was to sell many more during the rest of the decade, some to The Saturday Evening Post, a journal which would only publish some of them after he became famous, and others which he considered inferior publications, possibly in which to conceal some hack work.

In 1952 he published his first novel, Player Piano, in the dystopian science fiction genre for which he said he had taken the plot from Brave New World. The novel featured a lengthy scene employing business promotional-style literature, a job at which he hinted he was offered in one of his other short stories.

In 1959 he published a second dystopian science fiction novel, The Sirens of Titan, which combined intense social commentary in outlandish scientific fantasy milieus.

Mother Night was partially inspired by an event that occurred in 1961 that has been overlooked by his biographers: The pessimistic agnostic/atheist Vonnegut wrote a Christmas play for a large-circulation ladies journal. It was after that when he wrote that novel's plot about an American World War II spy's dismay at the outcome of having performed espionage as a propagandist for the Nazis, the plot being a way of carrying out a sort of performative penance toward the contrareity of his atheist beliefs with the Christmas writing assignment he had taken.

The magazine declined to publish the play in Christmas 1961 as Vonnegut had expected but published it the following Christmas instead. But this event, and the sincere appreciation he must have received in the form of letters from women assuming he had written it out of a devoted faith, seemed to have a deep effect on him for the rest of his life.

Afterwards and religious beliefs[edit]

Vonnegut described himself as an agnostic/atheist/secular humanist and in 1992 won the "Humanist of the Year" award (He referred to himself as a "Christ-loving agnostic" and then later as a "Christ-loving atheist" at an event).^[18]

He attributed the affirmation of his agnosticism/atheism to having studied anthropology. Vonnegut's father's family were what he called "Free Thinkers", but Vonnegut said his father didn't tell him of their beliefs, his father claiming he and Vonnegut's mother to have been harshly attacked for their German heritage during World War I, until Vonnegut asked out of curiosity. In 1981, he wrote "How proud I became of our belief, how pigheadedly proud, even, is the most evident thing in my writing, I think."^[19]

In Hocus Pocus one of his characters is disrespectful of those with faith, rebutting the observation of "there were no atheists in foxholes" with the comment, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."^[20] Also, in later writings Vonnegut referred to conservative Christians as "not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians".^[21] Concerning the saying "There are no atheists in foxholes", Vonnegut said, “People say there are no atheists in foxholes. A lot of people think this is a good argument against atheism. Personally, I think it's a much better argument against foxholes.”^[22]

A detailed analysis of Vonnegut's later religious views found him to be a great admirer of Christianity, but not Christian himself. Dan Wakefield observed,

"Except for John Updike, a confessed Christian, and James Baldwin, who had been a junior minister at a Pentecostal church as a boy in Harlem, it is hard to think of any other leading writer of the era who mentioned Jesus at all, except as a curse word."^[23]

Robert Scholes gave this review of the Slaughterhouse-Five in the New York Times Book Review:^[24]

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. ... Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.

Vonnegut's timing was perfect, as America in 1969 was struggling with the Vietnam War and other issues relevant to the book, such as ecology, consumerism and claims of overpopulation.

Vonnegut's last book, Man Without a Country, is a scathing criticism of the Bush Administration and then-contemporary U.S. foreign policy.

Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007 from brain injuries he received in a fall almost five weeks earlier.

Bibliography[edit]

List of Novels

(1952) Player Piano
(1959) The Sirens of Titan
(1961) Mother Night
(1963) Cat's Cradle
(1965) God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine
(1969) Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade
(1973) Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday
(1976) Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More
(1979) Jailbird
(1982) Deadeye Dick
(1985) Galápagos
(1987) Bluebeard
(1990) Hocus Pocus
(1997) Timequake

List of Short Stories or Essays

(1961) Canary in a Cathouse
(1968) Welcome to the Monkey House: A Collection of Short Works
(1974) Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
(1981) Palm Sunday
(1991) Fates Worse than Death
(1999) Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction
(1999) God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
(2005) A Man Without a Country

Posthumously Published

(2008) Armageddon in Retrospect
(2009) Look at the Birdie

References[edit]