Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007). Biography and Creativity

Known for his wit, comically absurd works, and humanitarian vision, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.— perhaps the greatest American satirist since Mark Twain—became an icon for the “baby-boomer” generation, those born during post-World War II years. Idolized by the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, Vonnegut spoke to a generation disillusioned by ineffective institutions, the nuclear arms race, and the Vietnam War.

Significantly, although some consider him to be a period writer, Vonnegut’s works continue to be read and taught, especially his powerful testimony to the bombing of Dresden, Slaughterhouse-Five. Although often labeled a science fiction writer, a designation that Vonnegut abhorred, he created experimental, fantastic worlds populated with grotesque characters to address contemporary sociopolitical concerns. As Vonnegut said, “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ . . . and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal” (Wampeters 1).

Questioning who we are, why we are here, and what it is that we as social beings should be doing, Vonnegut’s often- scathing, bitterly satirical works depict a world in which God is strangely absent, a place where stock characters and fantastical creations negotiate a world of chance. There, amid alien creatures and with the aid of time-traveling machines and horrific forms of technology, Vonnegut’s creations bear witness to the various shortcomings that make us fallible, comic creatures.

They often touch upon the limits of reason, the illusion of progress, the horrors of war, the absurdity of nuclear proliferation, the reality of class differences, the construct of race, and the need for human beings to erect meaning-making systems, such as the facetious religion of Bokonon in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. Combining high hilarity with what some consider pessimistic depictions of humanity’s frailty and self-centered tendencies, Vonnegut commented upon the delusions that round our lives and often distract us from real, pressing social concerns. By showing us who we are through a distorted, funhouse mirror, by lauding the power of fiction to reenvision our place in the world, and by challenging us to create a better, more humane society, Vonnegut earned himself a secure place in the canon of postmodern American fiction.

Born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Edith and Kurt Vonnegut, German Americans who already had two children, Vonnegut grew up in an upper-class home. His father was an architect; his mother was the daughter of a wealthy brewer, Peter Lieber. Vonnegut’s older brother and sister had many advantages, including a live-in governess and private schooling. Yet, with the advent of Prohibition, which banned alcohol consumption, and the beginning of the Great Depression, the Von- negut family could not afford these same luxuries for Kurt, Jr. During this time Vonnegut’s father, the first to be licensed as an architect in Indiana, had no work for 10 years, although the family, as a result of the Lieber fortune, never went without.

Nevertheless, Vonnegut was aware of the many hopes and dreams that were dashed during that period, a theme he would return to time and time again in books that often show the futility of the American dream, whose myth of self-ascendancy, as witnessed in both the Lieber and Vonnegut families, rarely held true for other Americans. Vonnegut’s grandfathers both immigrated to America in 1848, German immigrants during a wave of immigration that marked mid-19th-century America. While both men became prosperous, they and their families knew the sort of discrimination often experienced by emigres and sought refuge in the tight-knit German community of Indianapolis. Thus, even at an early age, Vonnegut developed both a sensitivity to social conditions and an awareness for others’ needs despite his own family’s relative well-being.

At an early age Vonnegut established himself as a man of letters, writing for the first daily high school paper in the United States, serving as both a correspondent and editor. From 1940 to 1942 Vonnegut attended Cornell University, where he majored in biochemistry and wrote for the school’s newspaper, the Sun, where he often opposed U.S. intervention in World War II. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, however, Vonnegut enlisted in the army. He was educated as an engineer by the army and then sent to serve as an infantry scout with the 106th Infantry Division in Europe.

There, Vonnegut took part in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was captured by the Germans, taken to a prison camp, and later forced to labor in Dresden, a German city laid to waste during the devastating firebombing by Allied forces on the evening of February 13, 1945. With his fellow prisoners Vonnegut helped pull bodies from the debris and took them to be cremated. This event became a foundational experience to which Vonnegut would return time and time again, most notably in his mas- terwork, Slaughterhouse-Five. Yet, before Dresden’s bombing Vonnegut experienced another devastating loss when his mother, Edith, a longtime depression sufferer, committed suicide during a specially arranged Mother’s Day visit home.

After the war Vonnegut returned to Indianapolis; married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox; and then moved to Chicago, where he pursued a graduate degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked as a police reporter. When the university rejected his thesis, which he later described as “my prettiest contribution to my culture” (Palm Sunday 312), Vonnegut took a job with General Electric in Schenectady, New York, where he worked as a public relations copywriter.

These years led Vonnegut to disdain corporate institutions, which he viewed as inhumane, and taught him about the destructive potential of science, two obsessions he explored in numerous works, including his first published story, “The Barnhouse Effect” (1950), and his first novel, Player Piano (1952). Strongly autobiographical, Player Piano transpires in a dystopian future where the protagonist rebels against the Illium works, a thinly guised depiction of General Electric and corporate America. Here, and throughout his corpus, Vonnegut often intervenes in the text, interjecting commentary through the creation of a writer-character—in this case, Ed, and in later works often Kilgore Trout, a hack science fiction writer whose works appear in pornographic magazines—who reflects upon the action at hand and its significance while parodying the role of the author in creating the text.

Vonnegut’s disillusionment with his General Electric job led him in 1951 to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he devoted his life to writing, sustaining himself with short stories he submitted to numerous popular magazines, including Collier’s, which published his first story. In Cape Cod, Vonnegut and Jane had three children, whom the author raised with the income he garnered as a writer. When the market demand for short stories waned in the late 1950s, Vonnegut turned to novel writing, publishing The Sirens of Titan (1959)—the story of Malachi Constant, a wealthy playboy who eventually travels to space, gets lost on Mercury, returns to Earth, and ultimately is banished to Titan.

Such absurd works dealing with science in a nonrealistic manner caused many critics to identify Vonnegut as a science fiction writer, an ironic characterization because the novel can also be read as a parody of the genre. Vonnegut defied this mischaracterization with his next novel, Mother Night (1962), whose name Vonnegut lifted from a speech Mephistopheles gives in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808). Written in the form of a memoir by Howard W. Campbell, Jr., who is an Allied spy during World War II posing as a Nazi propagandist, Mother Night provides a more realistic plot and setting, thus departing from the more fantastical worlds of his first two works.

With Cat’s Cradle (1963) Vonnegut first received a wide readership. An apocalyptic novel about an island society with a comic figure, Bokonon, who creates a religion the islanders know is all “lies” (foma) and writes the “The Books of Bokonon,” Cat’s Cradle includes a comic retelling of the Genesis creation story, descriptions of sacred foot rituals, and many fictive terms such as wampeter, duprass, and harass that appear throughout the novel. As his cult following grew, Cat’s Cradle propelled Vonnegut into the mainstream, eventually becoming required reading in many high schools and colleges. While Cat’s Cradle is certainly more than a period piece, the novel spoke to a generation disillusioned with war, institutions, and religious dogma. In this way the novel fostered the counterculture of the 1960s.

At stake in the novel are the increasing paranoia over the cold war and the very real threat of nuclear annihilation. Thus, the substance that ends the world, Ice-Nine, can be understood as an example of the sort of technology that, in attempting to better the world, actually has the power to end all life on the planet. Again, Vonnegut draws on his own life in Schenectady, mirroring the science-obsessed researchers he encountered at General Electric with Dr. Felix Hoenikker and Vonnegut’s own family with the three Hoenikker children. As with other works Vonnegut embeds a writer in the text, in this case, the narrator, Jonah/ John, who is writing a book that mirrors both Cat’s Cradle and the Books of Bokonon, called The Day the World Ended.

Vonnegut’s next work, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), is a story devoid of science fiction elements yet filled with Vonnegut grotesquerie in which a sexual eunuch, Eliot Rosewater, describing himself as “a drunkard, a Utopian dreamer, a tinhorn saint, an aimless fool,” gives out money by the droves from the millions of dollars he has inherited. Rosewater is a comical figure, a satirical image of the “bleeding-heart” liberal turned philanthropist. Described through a series ofvignettes that chronicle Eliot’s life among the citizens of Rosewater County, Indiana, Rosewater is a tool for Vonnegut to lampoon social injustice, especially economic inequality and the illusion of welfare that self-promoting philanthropists often create.

Significantly, this novel is the first of Vonnegut’s works to include the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, whom Eliot greatly admires; the narrative makes Trout into a messianic figure. As it describes social inequity, the absurdity of the legal system, and the consequences of selfinterest, Rosewater challenges us to look beyond the hypocrisy found in modern society and to see the need for compassion in a world bent on economic gain. While Vonnegut earned his living from novels, he continued to write short stories and collected previously written, intertwined stories in Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), which contains stories ranging from the well-known “Harrison Bergeron” to “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” and “EPICAC.”

In Slaughterhouse-Five: or, The Children’s Crusade (1969), Vonnegut recalls the foundational absurd experience that formed his vision of the world: the bombing of Dresden. Through Billy Pilgrim, the novel’s protagonist, who becomes “unstuck” in time, traveling to the future and being abducted by aliens who place him in a zoo cage with a porn star, Montana Wildhack, for their own entertainment, Vonnegut creates a world equally absurd. Additionally, Vonnegut ends the novel by referencing key current events that take place at the time he was writing the novel, including the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Vietnam War. In this way Vonnegut points out the cyclical nature of violence, the way history is repeating itself.

Like Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five is an antinovel, one that challenges linear conceptions of time and the conventions of narrative fiction we normally associate with verisimilitude, the appearance of reality. Yet, although Pilgrim is not real, the view he affords of human history and the destructive potential of humanity underscores many of the themes he explored in previous works and will elaborate upon for the remainder of his career: the need for fiction to engage moral issues, to represent suffering, and to serve as a foil for the confusing state of modernity, which often seems to be a lost cause. A novel about the inhumanity of war, about fiction, and about Vonnegut’s own life experiences, it remains the exemplar against which all of his other works have been judged.

After the publication of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, the two most widely taught of Vonnegut’s works, the author continued to be prolific, writing over a dozen novels, collections of essays, two plays, and short stories and working as an artist. While Vonnegut’s works have often received mixed critical reviews, the novels have sold well and remain in print. Notably, Breakfast of Champions (1973) showcases Vonnegut the visual artist, who provides hand-drawn artwork in a narrative that connects the lives of two comic characters: Dwayne Hoover, a Pontiac dealer, and Kilgore Trout, the recurring Vonnegut alter ago found in so many of his books.

Vonnegut married his second wife, Jill Krementz, a photographer, in 1979; with her he had a daughter. His last work, published in 2005, was a best-selling, politically charged collection of autobiographical essays that show Vonnegut at his satirical best, offering wry observations about everyday life; making bold, often controversial claims about politics; lambasting President George W. Bush; and employing the dark humor seen by some as pessimism for which he is known. When the collection sold well, Vonnegut referred to it as “a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.”

Vonnegut wrestled with demons throughout this life, born both of his emotional disposition and of cataclysmic events: the bombing of Dresden, the suicide of his mother, the tragic death of his sister and her husband in a 48-hour period, and his own attempted suicide in 1984. Nevertheless, he managed to generate meaning from his own personal struggles. His language was humorous, imaginative, and whimsical, and yet the hallmark of his postmodern style was simplicity rather than complexity.

Thus, we can read Vonnegut quickly and easily, often consuming entire works in one sitting. In this way Vonnegut is a model contemporary stylist who shapes language so that it can be read with alacrity in a world where the speed of communication demands writing that can be processed with ease. Here it is worth quoting Vonnegut’s advice on “How to Write with Style” from a 1981 issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications, which can be found on the Internet:

Find a subject you care about.
Do not ramble, though.
Keep it simple.
Sound like yourself.
Say what you mean to say.
Pity the readers.
For really detailed advice . . . I commend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White. (Macmillan, 1979)

In pairing down word choices, in writing concisely, in directly engaging the reader, Vonnegut targeted a wide audience. His work continues to attract readers all over the world. His major themes are the mechanized world and the way it determines our lives, the way the desire for material goods controls us, the failures of religion and science to improve our lot, the nature of art as artifice rather than truth, and the way events occur randomly in a world where we desperately grasp for order and meaning.