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The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

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The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr THE NOVELS OF KURT VONNEGUT, JR. sV David H Goldsmith A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY June 1970 Approved by Doctoral Committee ii ABSTRACT This study was a detailed examination of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a writer who was ignored by both critics and public until recently, but who now is attract­ ing considerable notice. Formerly dismissed as a science- fiction writer, Vonnegut in the past few years has been accorded a respectable place in contemporary literature. This study attempted to account for that phenomenon. Research for the project consisted mainly of reading the primary sources and book reviews, because there was still little available in the way of valuable critical material on the author. For this reason, there are no footnotes except explanatory ones in the paper. It was a work of original criticism. Vonnegut was found to be a novelist whose subjects are serious ones, but whose technique is comic. A chrono­ logical study of his novels indicated a trend away from pessimism toward a more sanguine view of life. An analysis of his technique showed it to be, if not innovative, fresh and imaginative, leading to a novel which is actually a pastiche of what are normally considered non-narrative materials. Since Vonnegut is probably still in mid-career, only tentative conclusions could be reached about his work. 1X1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ......................................... 1 SUMMARIES OF THE SIX NOVELS............................14 Player Piano ................................... 14 The Sirens of Titan. ............. 24 Mother Night ................................... 36 Cat * s Cradle . ................................. 46 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater................. .56 Slaughterhouse-Five.............................. 69 VONNEGUT’S THEMES...................................... 79 VONNEGUT'S HUMOR..................................... 100 VONNEGUT'S TECHNIQUE................................. 110 1 INTRODUCTION The elevation of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to a respectable place among contemporary American novelists has been one of the most encouraging literary phenomena of the past decade. For years considered nothing more than a science- fiction hack, Vonnegut has recently been praised by some of the most important critics of modern literature, and his works have become common sights both on bookstore shelves and in college classrooms. Articles about him have begun to appear not only in such popular periodicals as Time and Esquire but in the scholarly journals also, although his popular success still runs ahead of his crit­ ical acceptance; at this writing no study of his work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies or American Literature. Nevertheless, Graham Greene and Leslie Fiedler have cham­ pioned him, and it seems only a matter of time before he achieves the status now accorded to such contemporaries as Bellow, Malamud, and Barth. This study will attempt to explain some of the reasons for Vonnegut's acceptance as a writer of importance by a detailed examination of his novels, their themes, techniques, and humor. It must be acknowledged at this point that because Vonnegut, at forty seven, is still in mid-career, some of the conclusions reached will have to be tentative; but since he has such a considerable body of work behind him—six novels and two 2 volumes of stories, nearly all of which deal with the same few themes—it seems safe to make certain assertions about his work up to the present and perhaps a few well- qualified speculations about his future production. Since Vonnegut’s personal life plays such an impor­ tant part in his work, it is first necessary to recount briefly the major events in it which have shaped his career. Vonnegut—the name comes from a German river called the Vonne—was born into a successful middle-class family in Indianapolis in 1922. His father and one of his grand­ fathers were architects, while his other grandfather owned a brewery. An older brother became a physicist. Following a typical midwestern boyhood and graduation from high school, Vonnegut enlisted in the army as an infantry private during World War II. He served as a battalion scout and was cap­ tured by the Germans while on patrol. They put him to work in a factory in Dresden making malt syrup for pregnant women, and while there he survived the fire-bombing raid of February 13» 1945. After the war he attended Cornell, Carnegie Tech, and the Universities of Tennessee and Chicago, with indif­ ferent results. For a time he worked as a public relations man for General Electric in Schenedtady, New York, the ’'Ilium” of his novels. In 1949 he determined to make a living as a writer, and quickly began publishing short stories in such periodicals as Collier's, Cosmopolitan, The Lady’s Home Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post, and science-fiction magazines 3 such as Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction. Vonnegut did not take this work seriously; he did it ”in order to finance the writing of novels,” the first of which appeared in 1952, Player Piano. In the eighteen years since then he has published five others, The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and two volumes of short stories, Canary in a, Cathouse (1956), and Welcome to the Monkey House (1968). He presently lives with his wife, their three children and the three children of his deceased sister, in the village of Barnstable on Cape Cod. Three events stand out in this history, and find their way into Vonnegut's writing: his unhappy college experiences, his work for General Electric, and, most important, his wartime adventures. From his academic training and a later stint as a teacher at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop in 1965-6, Vonnegut developed a distrust of academe and became convinced of the need for individual rather than corporate solutions to man's problems. His brush with science, tangential though it was, instilled in him a pro­ found dislike of technology as panacea; it is possible that his brother's proofession has influenced him also in this respect. Most important of all, the Dresden bombing, sense­ less and nightmarish, spelled doom for the comfortable middle—class ideologies of his Indianapolis upbringing. Not 4 generally known about even today in the United States, the fire-bombing raid on Dresden was probably the most ghastly atrocity committed by the Allies during the war. Dresden had so little strategic importance that it was never bombed prior to the r&id, and the citizens (and prisoners) assumed it never would be. As Vonnegut describes it, . the city was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It was sup­ posedly an "open” city, not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or war industries there. But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling add drive fire­ men underground. And then hundreds of thousands of tiny in­ cendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep the firemen in their holes, and all the little fires grew, joined one an­ other, became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto: fire storm. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. And so what? We didn’t get to see the fire storm. We weee in a cool meat-locker under a slaughter­ house with our six guards and ranks and ranks of dressed cadavers of cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep. We heard the bombs walking around up there. Now and then there would be a gentle shower of calcimine. If we had gone above to take a1"look, we would have been turned into arti­ facts characteristic of fire storms: seeming pieces of charred firewood two or three feet long—ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will. The-malt syrup factory was gone. Everything was gone-but the cellars where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men. So we were put to work as corpse miners, breaking 5 into shelters, bringing bodies out. And I got to see many German types of all ages as death had found them, usually with valuables in their laps. Sometimes relatives would come to watch us dig. They were interesting, too. This was a unique if grisly experience, like being an American at ground-zero at Hiroshima, and what made it even more horrible to Vonnegut, was that, as a priso­ ner, he was ironically protected from the bombs and the fire. Planes from- his country did the bombing, and he, perpetrator, observer, and target all at the same time, survived. Little wonder that Malachi Constant, the Ameri­ can millionaire in The Sirens of Titan, would later state, "Somebody up there likes me.” And less wonder that Winston Niles Rumfoord would cause him to change the phfease to read, ”1 was»a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all. » Rarely has a single incident so dominated the work of a writer. The guilt Vonnegut felt about Dresden stuck to him like a Lord Jim complex. He tried unsuccessfully for nearly twenty-five years to write a novel about this ex­ perience, always putting it off in favor of other projects, but he was never able to exclude it entirely. Fire and fire departments appear in all of his novels. (Vonnegut was himself* a volunteer fireman for a time.) In The Sirens i of Titan hei examines the possible reasnns for mass execution of the sort accomplished at Dresden by having nearly 200,000 6 Martians slaughtered by Earthlings according to a prear­ ranged plan known only to one man.
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