Numerous religious traditions have taken a stance on abortion
but few are absolute. These stances span a broad spectrum, based on
numerous teachings, deities, or religious print, and some of those views
are highlighted below.
People of all faiths and religions use reproductive health care services. Abortion is perceived as murder by many religious conservatives. Anti-abortion advocates believe that legalized abortion is a threat to social, moral, and religious values. Religious people who advocate abortion rights generally believe that life starts later in the pregnancy, for instance at quickening, after the first trimester.
The religious influence over the population of the country tends
to be one of the massive determining factors on the legality of
abortion.
Baháʼí Faith
Abortion, merely for the purpose of eliminating an unwanted child, is strongly deprecated in the Baháʼí Faith,
although medical reasons may warrant it. Among the possible reasons for
terminating a pregnancy are rape, incest, lack of viability of the
fetus, and health of the mother. Though Shoghi Effendi,
the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, considered the intentional
termination of a pregnancy as the ending of a life, there are no
specific teachings in the Bahá’í sacred texts addressing it; the Universal House of Justice
has thus concluded that it is not quite the same as murder and
therefore within the purview of the Universal House of Justice to
legislate on it, at a future date, if it so decides. At present, Baháʼís are encouraged to decide based on their own
conscience in light of general guidance found in Baháʼí writings and
medical advice.
There is no single Buddhist view concerning abortion. Some traditional sources, including some Buddhist monastic codes, hold
that life begins at conception, and that abortion, which would then
involve the deliberate destruction of life, should be rejected. Complicating the issue is the Buddhist belief that "life is a continuum with no discernible starting point". Among Buddhists, there is no official or preferred viewpoint regarding abortion.
The Dalai Lama
has said that abortion is "negative", but there are exceptions. He
said, "I think abortion should be approved or disapproved according to
each circumstance."
Inducing or otherwise causing an abortion is regarded as a serious matter in the monastic rules followed by both Theravada and Vajrayana monks; monks and nuns must be expelled for assisting a woman in procuring an abortion. Traditional sources do not recognize a distinction between early- and
late-term abortion, but in Sri Lanka and Thailand the "moral stigma"
associated with an abortion grows with the development of the foetus. While traditional sources do not seem to be aware of the possibility of
abortion as relevant to the health of the mother, modern Buddhist
teachers from many traditions – and abortion laws in many Buddhist
countries – recognize a threat to the life or physical health of the
mother as an acceptable justification for abortion as a practical
matter, though it may still be seen as a deed with negative moral or
karmic consequences.
There is scholarly disagreement on how early Christians felt about
abortion and whether explicit prohibitions of abortion exist in either
the Old Testament or New Testament books of the Christian Bible. Abortion is not specifically mentioned anywhere in the Bible, nor is there any specific commandment against it. Some scholars have concluded that early Christians took a nuanced
stance on what is now called abortion and that at different times, and
in separate places, early Christians have taken different stances. Other scholars have concluded that early Christians considered abortion
a sin at all stages; although there is disagreement over their thoughts
on what type of sin it was,and how grave a sin it was held to be, it was seen as at least as grave as sexual immorality. Some early Christians believed that the embryo did not have a soul from conception, and consequently, opinion was divided as to whether or not early abortion was murder or ethically equivalent to murder.
Early church councils punished women for abortions that were
combined with other sexual crimes, as well as makers of abortifacient
drugs, but, like some early Church Fathers such as Basil of Caesarea, did not make a distinction between "formed" and "unformed" foetuses. While Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor held that human life already began at conception, Augustine of Hippo affirmed Aristotle's concepts of ensoulment occurring some time after conception, after which point abortion was to be considered a homicide, while still maintaining the condemnation of abortion at any time from conception onward. Aquinas reiterated Aristotle's views of successive souls: vegetative,
animal, and rational. This would be the Catholic Church's position until
1869, when the limitation of automatic excommunication to abortion of a
formed foetus was removed, a change that has been interpreted
as an implicit declaration that conception was the moment of ensoulment. Most early penitentials
imposed equal penances for abortion whether early-term or late-term,
but later penitentials in the Middle Ages normally distinguished between
the two, imposing heavier penances for late-term abortions and a less
severe penance was imposed for the sin of abortion "before [the foetus]
has life".
Contemporary Christian denominations have nuanced positions, thoughts, and teachings about abortion, especially in extenuating circumstances. The Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church,Oriental Orthodoxy, and most Evangelical Protestants
oppose deliberate abortion as immoral while allowing what is sometimes
called indirect abortion, namely, an action that does not seek the death
of the foetus as an end or a means, but that is followed by the death
as a side effect. Evangelical Protestants have some of the most opposed views on the
topic of abortion, especially compared to those of traditional
religions. More specifically, the religious philosophy of both the Catholic Church
and many Evangelical Christians denominations is that life begins at
conception, and both groups have strong moral prohibitions against
abortion, equating it to murder. These two denominations are the primary
participators in interest advocacy groups and are strongly associated
with anti-abortion activities. This group behavior can include lobbying,
activism, protesting, as well as education and campaign contributions. However, states with a higher percentage of Catholics or a higher
percentage of the population classified as fundamentalist or
conservative Protestant are not more likely to have abortion
restrictions in their state legislature. States or countries with a higher Catholic or Evangelical Christian
presence than other denominations have more resources and votes in favor
of restrictive abortion laws as well as influence over legislators'
perception on the issue of abortion.
The more religiously devout and those with more religious
engagement tend to hold stronger opinions overall, especially on the
abortion debate in regard to religions take on abortion's morality. An individual's religious conservatism has a higher likelihood to
oppose abortion. However, members of a denomination can have deviating
opinions from vocal religious leaders' beliefs.
Most classical Hindu texts strongly condemn abortion, although the Sushruta Samhita recommends it if the fetus is defective. The British Broadcasting Corporation
writes, "When considering abortion, the Hindu way is to choose the
action that will do least harm to all involved: the mother and father,
the foetus and society." The BBC goes on to state, "In practice,
however, abortion is practiced in India, because the religious ban on
abortion is sometimes overruled by the cultural preference for sons.
This can lead to abortion to prevent the birth of girl babies, which is called 'female foeticide'." Hindu scholars and women's rights advocates have supported bans on
sex-selective abortions. Some Hindus support abortion in cases where the
mother's life is at imminent risk or when the foetus has a
life-threatening developmental anomaly.
Some Hindu theologians and Brahma Kumaris
believe personhood begins at three months and develops through to five
months of gestation, possibly implying permitting abortion up to the
third month and considering any abortion past the third month to be
destruction of the soul's current incarnate body.
The Quran and Hadith describe God's creation of man in the womb and condemn infanticide. A verse in the Quran refers to pregnant women who abort their pregnancies upon the day of judgment. Each of the four Sunni Islam schools of thought—Hanafi, Shafi‘i, Hanbali and Maliki— have their own reservations on if and when abortions are permissible in Islam. The Maliki
madhhab holds "that the fetus is ensouled at the moment of conception"
and thus "most Malikis do not permit abortion at any point, seeing God's
hand as actively forming the fetus at every stage of development." On the other hand, some Hanafi scholars believe that abortion before
the hundred twenty day period is over is permitted, though some Hanafi
scholars teach that an abortion within 120 days is makruh (disapproved, i.e. discouraged). The other Islamic schools of thought agree abortion is recommended when
the mother's life is in danger, because the mother's life is
paramount.
Muslim scholars differ as to when fetus is given a soul: some say 40 days after conception, while others say 120 days. Nevertheless Muslim scholars also assert an embryo's right to be
respected starting at conception, even if it is not yet regarded as
human life. Before 120 days some scholars permit abortion in cases of "great" fetal deformity. Mauritania prohibits abortion under any circumstance. In Shia Islam, abortion is "forbidden after implantation of the fertilised ovum." The leader of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini declared that shari'a forbids abortion
without any reason "even at the earliest possible stage". Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei permitted abortion at 10 weeks in cases of thalassemia. Abortion before 120 days was allowed in cases of rape during the Bosnian war.
After 120 days the fetus is believed to be human life, yet it is
still permissible to abort it to save the life of the mother. This is
because a fetus will die anyway if the mother dies, and the mother is
part of a family and she has responsibilities.
Orthodox Jewish teaching allows abortion if necessary to safeguard the life of the pregnant woman. While the Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative movements openly
advocate for the right to a safe and accessible abortion, the Orthodox
movement is less unified on the issue. Many Orthodox Jews oppose abortion, except when it is necessary to save
a woman's life (or, according to some, the woman's health).
In Judaism, views on abortion draw primarily upon the legal and ethical teachings of the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, the case-by-case decisions of responsa, and other rabbinic literature. Generally speaking, Orthodox Jews oppose abortion after the 40th day, with health-related exceptions, and reform Jews tend to allow greater latitude for abortion. There are rulings that often appear conflicting on the matter. The
Talmud states that a foetus is not legally a person until it is
delivered. The Torah contains the law that, "When men fight, and one of them
pushes a pregnant woman, and a miscarriage results, but no other
misfortune, the one responsible shall be fined...but if other misfortune
ensues, the penalty shall be life (nefesh) for life (nefesh)." (Exodus 21:22–25). That is, causing a woman to miscarry is a crime, but not a capital crime, because the fetus is not considered a person.
Jeremiah 1:5 states that, "Before I formed you in the womb, I
knew you, before you were born, I set you apart; I appointed you as a
prophet to the nations." For some, this verse, while talking specifically about Jeremiah, is an indication that God is aware of the identity of "developing unborn human beings even before they enter the womb", or that for everyone, God has a plan that abortion might be seen as frustrating. Others say that this interpretation is incorrect, and that the verse is
not related to personhood or abortion, as Jeremiah is asserting his
prophetic status as distinct and special.
The Hebrew Bible has a few references to abortion; Exodus 21:22-25 addresses miscarriage by way of another's actions, which it describes as a non-capital offense punishable through a fine. The Book of Numbers in the Hebrew Bible describes the Ordeal of the bitter water (sotah)
to be administered by a priest to a wife whose husband thinks she was
unfaithful. Some scholars interpret the text as involving an abortifacient potion or otherwise that induces a miscarriage if the woman is pregnant with another man's child. Rabbinical scholar Arnold Ehrlich interprets the ordeal such that it ends either harmlessly if the woman is faithful, or with an induced abortion: "the embryo falls".
Sikhism
The SikhSikh Rehat Maryada (code of conduct) does not deal directly with abortion. However, it does explicitly prohibit the practice of 'kuri-mar', a Punjabi term which literally means "girl killing" but also encompasses female foeticide.
The Guru Granth Sahib (primary scripture and source of Sikh religious guidance for Sikhs), does not provide any specific dictate on abortion. Many Sikhs will therefore interpret certain parts of texts and make a
personal decision when confronted with a clearly abnormal fetus.
However, while there is no explicit prohibition in the Guru Granth Sahib or the Sikh Rehat Maryada, abortion is generally viewed by some Sikhs as forbidden because it is said to interfere with the creative work of God. Despite this theoretical viewpoint, abortion is not uncommon among the
Sikh community in India, and there is growing concern that female foetuses are being aborted because of the cultural preference for sons.
Unitarian Universalism
The Unitarian Universalist Church
strongly supports abortion rights. In 1978, the Unitarian Universalist
Association passed a resolution that declared, "...[the] right to choice
on contraception and abortion are important aspects of the right of
privacy, respect for human life, and freedom of conscience of women and
their families". The Association had released earlier statements in 1963 and 1968 favoring the reform of restrictive abortion laws.
Kurt Vonnegut (/ˈvɒnəɡət/VON-ə-gət; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American author known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. His published work includes fourteen novels, three short-story
collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works over fifty-plus
years; further works have been published since his death.
Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano,
in 1952. It received positive reviews yet sold poorly. In the nearly 20
years that followed, several well regarded novels were published,
including The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963), both of which were nominated for the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel of the year. His short-story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, was published in 1968.
Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, on November 11, 1922, the youngest of three children of Kurt Vonnegut Sr. (1884–1957) and his wife Edith (1888–1944; née Lieber). His older siblings were Bernard (1914–1997) and Alice (1917–1958). He descended from a long line of German Americans whose immigrant ancestors settled in the United States in the mid-19th century; his paternal great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, settled in Indianapolis and founded the Vonnegut Hardware Company. His father and grandfather Bernard were architects; the architecture firm under Kurt Sr. designed such buildings as Das Deutsche Haus (now called "The Athenæum"), the Indiana headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company, and the Fletcher Trust Building. Vonnegut's mother was born into Indianapolis's Gilded Age
high society, as her family, the Liebers, were among the wealthiest in
the city based on a fortune deriving from a successful brewery.
Both of Vonnegut's parents were fluent speakers of the German language, but pervasive anti-German sentiment during and after World War I caused them to abandon German culture; many German Americans were told at the time that this was a precondition for American patriotism. Thus, they did not teach Vonnegut to speak German or introduce him to German literature, cuisine, or traditions, leaving him feeling "ignorant and rootless". Vonnegut later credited Ida Young, his family's African-American cook
and housekeeper during the first decade of his life, for raising him and
giving him values; he said, "she gave me decent moral instruction and
was exceedingly nice to me", and "was as great an influence on me as
anybody". He described her as "humane and wise" and added that "the
compassionate, forgiving aspects of [his] beliefs" came from her.
The financial security and social prosperity that the Vonneguts
had once enjoyed were destroyed in a matter of years. The Liebers'
brewery closed down in 1921 after the advent of prohibition. When the Great Depression hit, few people could afford to build, causing clients at Kurt Sr.'s architectural firm to become scarce. Vonnegut's brother and sister had finished their primary and secondary
educations in private schools, but Vonnegut was placed in a public
school called Public School No. 43 (now the James Whitcomb Riley School). He was bothered by the Great Depression, and both his parents were affected deeply by their economic misfortune.
His father withdrew from normal life and became what Vonnegut called a
"dreamy artist". His mother became depressed, withdrawn, bitter, and abusive. She
labored to regain the family's wealth and status, and Vonnegut said that
she expressed hatred for her husband that was "as corrosive as hydrochloric acid". She often tried in vain to sell short stories she had written to Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines.
Vonnegut enrolled at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1936. While there, he played clarinet in the school band and became a co-editor (along with Madelyn Pugh) of the Tuesday edition of the school newspaper, The Shortridge Echo. Vonnegut said that his tenure with the Echo
allowed him to write for a large audience—his fellow students—rather
than for a teacher, an experience, he said, which was "fun and easy". "It just turned out that I could write better than a lot of other
people", Vonnegut observed. "Each person has something he can do easily
and can't imagine why everybody else has so much trouble doing it."
After graduating from Shortridge in 1940, Vonnegut enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He wanted to study the humanities and had aspirations of becoming an architect like his father, but his father and brother Bernard, an atmospheric scientist, urged him to study a "useful" discipline. As a result, Vonnegut majored in biochemistry, but he had little proficiency in the area and was indifferent towards his studies. As his father had been a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity at MIT, Vonnegut was entitled to join and did so. He overcame stiff competition for a place at the university's independent newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, first serving as a staff writer, then as an editor. By the end of his first year, he was writing a column titled "Innocents
Abroad", which reused jokes from other publications. He later penned a
piece titled "Well All Right" focusing on pacifism, a cause he strongly supported, arguing against US intervention in World War II.
In early 1944, the ASTP was canceled due to the Army's need for soldiers to support the D-Day invasion, and Vonnegut was ordered to an infantry battalion at Camp Atterbury, south of Indianapolis in Edinburgh, Indiana, where he trained as a scout. He lived so close to his home that he was "able to sleep in [his] own bedroom and use the family car on weekends".
On May 14, 1944, Vonnegut returned home on leave for Mother's Day weekend to discover that his mother had committed suicide the previous night by overdosing on sleeping pills. Possible factors that contributed to Edith Vonnegut's suicide include
the family's loss of wealth and status, Vonnegut's forthcoming
deployment overseas, and her own lack of success as a writer. She was
inebriated at the time and under the influence of prescription drugs.
Three months after his mother's suicide, Vonnegut was sent to Europe as an intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division. In December 1944, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, one of the last German offensives of the war. On December 22, Vonnegut was captured with about 50 other American soldiers. Vonnegut was taken by boxcar to a prison camp south of Dresden, in the German province of Saxony. During the journey, the Royal Air Force mistakenly attacked the trains carrying Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners of war, killing about 150 of them. Vonnegut was sent to Dresden, the "first fancy city [he had] ever
seen". He lived in a slaughterhouse when he got to the city, and worked
in a factory that made malt syrup
for pregnant women. Vonnegut recalled the sirens going off whenever
another city was bombed. The Germans did not expect Dresden to be
bombed, Vonnegut said. "There were very few air-raid shelters in town
and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet
factories."
Dresden in 1945. More than 90% of the city's center was destroyed.
On February 13, 1945, Dresden became the target of Allied forces. In the hours and days that followed, the Allies engaged in a firebombing of the city. The offensive subsided on February 15, with about 25,000 civilians
killed in the bombing. Vonnegut marveled at the level of both the
destruction in Dresden and the secrecy that attended it. He had survived
by taking refuge in a meat locker three stories underground. "It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around", Vonnegut said.
"When we came up the city was gone ... They burnt the whole damn town
down." Vonnegut and other American prisoners were put to work immediately after the bombing, excavating bodies from the rubble. He described the activity as a "terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt".
The American POWs were evacuated on foot to the border of Saxony and Czechoslovakia after U.S. General George S. Patton's 3rd Army captured Leipzig. With the captives abandoned by their guards, Vonnegut reached a prisoner-of-war repatriation camp in Le Havre, France, in May 1945, with the aid of the Soviets. Sent back to the United States, he was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, typing discharge papers for other soldiers. Soon after, he was awarded a Purple Heart, about which he remarked: "I myself was awarded my country's second-lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frost-bite." He was discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to Indianapolis.
Marriage, University of Chicago, and early employment
After
he returned to the United States, 22-year-old Vonnegut married Jane
Marie Cox, his high-school girlfriend and classmate since kindergarten,
on September 1, 1945. The pair moved to Chicago; there, Vonnegut
enrolled in the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill, as an anthropology student in an unusual five-year joint undergraduate/graduate program that conferred a master's degree. He studied under anthropologist Robert Redfield, his "most famous professor". He also worked as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago.
Jane, who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore, accepted a scholarship from the university to study Russian literature as a graduate student. Jane dropped out of the program after becoming pregnant with the couple's first child, Mark
(born May 1947), while Kurt also left the university without any degree
(despite having completed his undergraduate education). Vonnegut failed
to write a dissertation, as his ideas had all been rejected. One abandoned topic was about the Ghost Dance and Cubist movements. A later topic, rejected "unanimously", had to do with the shapes of stories. Vonnegut received his graduate degree in anthropology 25 years after he left, when the university accepted his novel Cat's Cradle in lieu of his master's thesis.
Shortly thereafter, General Electric (GE) hired Vonnegut as a technical writer, then publicist, for the company's Schenectady, New York, News Bureau, a publicity department that operated like a newsroom. His brother Bernard had worked at GE since 1945, focusing mainly on a silver-iodide-based cloud seeding project that quickly became a joint GE–U.S. Army Signal Corps program, Project Cirrus. In The Brothers Vonnegut, Ginger Strand
draws connections between many real events at General Electric,
including Bernard's work, and Vonnegut's early stories, which were
regularly being rejected everywhere he sent them. Throughout this period, Jane Vonnegut encouraged him, editing his
stories, strategizing about submissions and buoying his spirits.
In 1949, Kurt and Jane had a daughter named Edith. Still working for GE, Vonnegut had his first piece, titled "Report on the Barnhouse Effect", published in the February 11, 1950, issue of Collier's, for which he received $750. The story concerned a scientist who fears that his invention will be
used as a weapon, much as Bernard was fearing at the time about his
cloudseeding work. Vonnegut wrote another story, after being coached by the fiction editor at Collier's,
Knox Burger, and again sold it to the magazine, this time for $950.
While Burger supported Vonnegut's writing, he was shocked when Vonnegut
quit GE as of January 1, 1951, later stating: "I never said he should
give up his job and devote himself to fiction. I don't trust the
freelancer's life, it's tough." Nevertheless, in early 1951 Vonnegut moved with his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to write full time, leaving GE behind. He initially moved to Osterville, but he ended up purchasing a home in Barnstable.
First novel
In 1952, Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, was published by Scribner's. The novel has a post-World War III setting, in which factory workers have been replaced by machines. Player Piano
draws upon Vonnegut's experience as an employee at GE. The novel is set
at a General Electric-like company and includes many scenes based on
things Vonnegut saw there. He satirizes the drive to climb the corporate ladder, one that in Player Piano
is rapidly disappearing as automation increases, putting even
executives out of work. His central character, Paul Proteus, has an
ambitious wife, a backstabbing assistant, and a feeling of empathy for
the poor. Sent by his boss, Kroner, as a double agent among the poor
(who have all the material goods they want, but little sense of
purpose), he leads them in a machine-smashing, museum-burning
revolution. Player Piano expresses Vonnegut's opposition to McCarthyism,
something made clear when the Ghost Shirts, the revolutionary
organization Paul penetrates and eventually leads, is referred to by one
character as "fellow travelers".
In Player Piano, Vonnegut originates many of the
techniques he would use in his later works. The comic, heavy-drinking
Shah of Bratpuhr, an outsider to this dystopian
corporate United States, is able to ask many questions that an insider
would not think to ask, or would cause offense by doing so. For example,
when taken to see the artificially intelligentsupercomputer
EPICAC, the Shah asks it "what are people for?" and receives no answer.
Speaking for Vonnegut, he dismisses it as a "false god". This type of
alien visitor would recur throughout Vonnegut's later novels.
The New York Times writer and critic Granville Hicks gave Player Piano a positive review, favorably comparing it to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Hicks called Vonnegut a "sharp-eyed satirist". None of the reviewers
considered the novel particularly important. Several editions were
printed—one by Bantam with the title Utopia 14, and another by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club—whereby Vonnegut gained the reputation as a writer of science fiction,
a genre held in disdain by writers at that time. He defended the genre
and deplored a perceived sentiment that "no one can simultaneously be a
respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works".
Struggling writer
Vonnegut with his wife Jane and children (from left to right): Mark, Edith and Nanette, in 1955
After Player Piano, Vonnegut continued to sell short stories to various magazines. Contracted to produce a second novel (which eventually became Cat's Cradle),
he struggled to complete it, and the work languished for years. In
1954, the couple had a third child, Nanette. With a growing family and
no financially successful novels yet, Vonnegut's short stories helped to
sustain the family, though he frequently needed to find additional
sources of income. In 1957, he and a partner opened a Saab automobile dealership on Cape Cod, but it went bankrupt by the end of the year. He designed a World War II–themed board game called "GHQ" (General Headquarters), but publishers did not buy it.
In 1958, his sister, Alice, died of cancer two days after her husband, James Carmalt Adams, was killed in a train accident. The Vonneguts took in three of the Adamses' young sons—James, Steven, and Kurt, aged 14, 11, and 9, respectively. A fourth Adams son, Peter, age 2, also stayed with the Vonneguts for
about a year before being given to the care of a paternal relative in
Georgia.
Grappling with family challenges, Vonnegut continued to write, publishing novels vastly dissimilar in terms of plot.
The Sirens of Titan
(1959) features a Martian invasion of Earth as experienced by a bored
billionaire, Malachi Constant. He meets Winston Niles Rumfoord, an
aristocratic space traveler, who is virtually omniscient but stuck in a
time warp that causes him to appear on Earth only every 59 days. The
billionaire learns that his actions and the events of all of history are
determined by a race of robotic aliens from the planet Tralfamadore,
who need a replacement part that can only be produced by an advanced
civilization in order to repair their spaceship and return home. Human
history has been manipulated to produce it. Some human structures, such
as the Kremlin,
are coded signals from the aliens to their ship as to how long it may
expect to wait for the repair to take place. Reviewers were uncertain
what to think of the book, with one comparing it to Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann.
Rumfoord, who is based on Franklin D. Roosevelt,
physically resembles the former president. Rumfoord is described this
way: he "put a cigarette in a long, bone cigarette holder, lighted it.
He thrust out his jaw. The cigarette holder pointed straight up." William Rodney Allen,
in his guide to Vonnegut's works, stated that Rumfoord foreshadowed the
fictional political figures who would play major roles in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Jailbird.
Mother Night,
published in 1961, received little attention at the time of its
publication. Howard W. Campbell Jr., Vonnegut's protagonist, is an
American who is raised in Germany from age 11 and joins the Nazi Party during the war as a double agent for the US Office of Strategic Services,
rising to the regime's highest ranks as a radio propagandist. After the
war, the spy agency refuses to clear his name, and he is eventually
imprisoned by the Israelis in the same cell block as Adolf Eichmann.
Vonnegut wrote in a foreword to a later edition, "We are what we
pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be". Literary critic Lawrence Berkove considered the novel, like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
to illustrate the tendency for "impersonators to get carried away by
their impersonations, to become what they impersonate and therefore to
live in a world of illusion".
Also published in 1961 was Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron",
set in a dystopic future where all are equal, even if that means
disfiguring beautiful people and forcing the strong or intelligent to
wear devices that negate their advantages. Fourteen-year-old Harrison is
a genius and athlete forced to wear record-level "handicaps" and
imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the government. He escapes to a
television studio, tears away his handicaps, and frees a ballerina from
her lead weights. As they dance, they are killed by the Handicapper
General, Diana Moon Glampers. Vonnegut, in a later letter, suggested that "Harrison Bergeron" might
have sprung from his envy and self-pity as a high-school misfit. In his
1976 biography of Vonnegut, Stanley Schatt suggested that the short
story shows that "in any leveling process, what really is lost,
according to Vonnegut, is beauty, grace, and wisdom". Darryl Hattenhauer, in his 1998 journal article on "Harrison Bergeron", theorized that the story was a satire on American Cold War understandings of communism and socialism.
With Cat's Cradle (1963), Allen wrote, "Vonnegut hit full stride for the first time". The narrator, John, intends to write of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional fathers of the atomic bomb,
seeking to cover the scientist's human side. Hoenikker, in addition to
the bomb, has developed another threat to mankind, "ice-nine", which is
solid water stable at room temperature but more dense than liquid water.
If a particle of ice-nine is dropped in water, all of the surrounding
water becomes ice-nine. Felix Hoenikker is based on Bernard Vonnegut's
boss at the GE Research Lab, Irving Langmuir,
and the way ice-nine is described in the novel is reminiscent of how
Bernard Vonnegut explained his own invention, silver-iodide
cloudseeding, to Kurt. Much of the second half of the book is spent on the fictional Caribbean
island of San Lorenzo, where John explores a religion called Bokononism,
whose holy books (excerpts from which are quoted) give the novel the
moral core science does not supply. After the oceans are converted to
ice-nine, wiping out most of humankind, John wanders the frozen surface,
seeking to save himself and to make sure that his story survives.
Vonnegut based the title character of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
(1964) on an accountant he knew in Cape Cod who specialized in clients
in trouble and often had to comfort them. Eliot Rosewater, the wealthy
son of a Republican senator, seeks to atone for his wartime killing of
noncombatant firefighters by serving in a volunteer fire department
and giving away money to those in trouble or need. Stress from a battle
for control of his charitable foundation pushes him over the edge, and
he is placed in a mental hospital. He recovers and ends the financial
battle by declaring the children of his county to be his heirs. Allen deemed God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
more "a cry from the heart than a novel under its author's full
intellectual control", that reflected family and emotional stresses
Vonnegut was going through at the time.
In the mid-1960s, Vonnegut contemplated abandoning his writing career. In 1999, he wrote in The New York Times,
"I had gone broke, was out of print and had a lot of kids..." But then,
on the recommendation of an admirer, he received a surprise offer of a
teaching job at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, employment that he likened to the rescue of a drowning man.
After spending almost two years at the writer's workshop at the University of Iowa, teaching one course each term, Vonnegut was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
for research in Germany. By the time he won it, in March 1967, he was
becoming a well-known writer. He used the funds to travel in Eastern
Europe, including to Dresden, where he found many prominent buildings
still in ruins.
Vonnegut had been writing about his war experiences at Dresden
ever since he returned from the war, but unable to write anything that
was acceptable to himself or his publishers; chapter one of Slaughterhouse-Five tells of his difficulties.Released in 1969, the novel rocketed Vonnegut to fame. It tells of the life of Billy Pilgrim, who like Vonnegut was born in
1922 and survives the bombing of Dresden. The story is told in a
non-linear fashion, with many of the story's climaxes—Billy's death in
1976, his kidnapping by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore nine years
earlier, and the execution of Billy's friend Edgar Derby in the ashes of
Dresden for stealing a teapot—disclosed in the story's first pages.
he writes about the most excruciatingly painful things.
His novels have attacked our deepest fears of automation and the bomb,
our deepest political guilts, our fiercest hatreds and loves. No one
else writes books on these subjects; they are inaccessible to normal
novelists.
The book went immediately to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list. Vonnegut's earlier works had appealed strongly to many college students, and the antiwar message of Slaughterhouse-Five resonated with a generation marked by the Vietnam War.
He later stated that the loss of confidence in government that Vietnam
caused finally allowed an honest conversation regarding events like
Dresden.
New York, 228 East 48th Street (center), Kurt Vonnegut's house from 1973 to 2007
After Slaughterhouse-Five was published, Vonnegut embraced the
fame and financial security that attended its release. He was hailed as
a hero of the burgeoning anti-war movement in the United States, was
invited to speak at numerous rallies, and gave college commencement addresses around the country. In addition to briefly teaching at Harvard University as a lecturer in creative writing in 1970, Vonnegut taught at the City College of New York as a distinguished professor during the 1973–1974 academic year. He was later elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and given honorary degrees by, among others, Indiana University and Bennington College. Vonnegut also wrote a play called Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which opened on October 7, 1970, at New York's Theatre de Lys. Receiving mixed reviews, it closed on March 14, 1971. In 1972, Universal Pictures adapted Slaughterhouse-Five into a film, which the author said was "flawless".
Requiem (ending)
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.
Vonnegut's difficulties in his personal life thereafter materialized
in numerous ways, including the painfully slow progress made on his next
novel, the darkly comical Breakfast of Champions. In 1971, he stopped writing the novel altogether. When it was finally released in 1973, it was panned critically. In Thomas S. Hischak's book American Literature on Stage and Screen, Breakfast of Champions
was called "funny and outlandish", but reviewers noted that it "lacks
substance and seems to be an exercise in literary playfulness". Vonnegut's 1976 novel Slapstick, which meditates on the relationship between him and his sister (Alice), met a similar fate. In The New York Times's review of Slapstick, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
said that Vonnegut "seems to be putting less effort into [storytelling]
than ever before" and that "it still seems as if he has given up
storytelling after all". At times, Vonnegut was disgruntled by the personal nature of his detractors' complaints.
In subsequent years, his popularity resurged as he published several satirical books, including Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galápagos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), and Hocus Pocus (1990). Although he remained a prolific writer in the 1980s, Vonnegut struggled with depression and attempted suicide in 1984. Two years later, Vonnegut was seen by a younger generation when he played himself in Rodney Dangerfield's film Back to School. The last of Vonnegut's fourteen novels, Timequake (1997), was, as University of Detroit history professor and Vonnegut biographer Gregory Sumner
said, "a reflection of an aging man facing mortality and testimony to
an embattled faith in the resilience of human awareness and agency". Vonnegut's final book, a collection of essays entitled A Man Without a Country (2005), became a bestseller.
Personal life
Vonnegut
married his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, in 1945. She later embraced
Christianity, which was contrary to Vonnegut's atheistic beliefs;
further, after five of their six children had left home, Vonnegut said
that the two were forced to find "other sorts of seemingly important
work to do". The couple battled over their differing beliefs until
Vonnegut moved from their Cape Cod home to New York in 1971. Vonnegut
called the disagreements "painful" and said that the resulting split was
a "terrible, unavoidable accident that we were ill-equipped to
understand". The couple divorced but remained friends until Jane's death in late 1986.
Beyond his failed marriage, Vonnegut was deeply affected when his son Mark suffered a mental breakdown in 1972, which exacerbated Vonnegut's chronic depression and led him to take Ritalin. When he stopped taking the drug in the mid-1970s, he began to see a psychologist weekly.
In 1979, Vonnegut married Jill Krementz,
a photographer whom he met while she was working on a series about
writers in the early 1970s. With Jill, he adopted a daughter, Lily, when
the baby was three days old. They remained married until his death.
Death and legacy
Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom, is
such that reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that
everything else is rank hypocrisy. His opinion of human nature was low,
and that low opinion applied to his heroes and his villains alike—he was
endlessly disappointed in humanity and in himself, and he expressed
that disappointment in a mixture of tar-black humor and deep despair. He
could easily have become a crank, but he was too smart; he could have
become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he
could never quite suppress; he could have become a bore, but even at his
most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers:
with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction,
whatever it took.
In a 2006 Rolling Stone interview, Vonnegut sardonically stated that he would sue the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, the maker of the Pall Mall-branded
cigarettes he had been smoking since he was around 12 or 14 years old,
for false advertising: "And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old.
The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to
kill me."
Vonnegut died in Manhattan on the night of April 11, 2007, as a result of brain injuries incurred several weeks prior in a fall at his brownstone home. His death was reported by his wife, Jill. He was 84 years old. At the time of his death he had written fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction books. A book composed of his unpublished pieces, Armageddon in Retrospect, was compiled and posthumously published by his son Mark in 2008.
When asked about the impact Vonnegut had on his work, author Josip Novakovich
stated that he has "much to learn from Vonnegut—how to compress things
and yet not compromise them, how to digress into history, quote from
various historical accounts, and not stifle the narrative. The ease with
which he writes is sheerly masterly, Mozartian." Los Angeles Times
columnist Gregory Rodriguez said that the author will "rightly be
remembered as a darkly humorous social critic and the premier novelist
of the counterculture", and Dinitia Smith of The New York Times dubbed Vonnegut the "counterculture's novelist".
Vonnegut has inspired numerous posthumous tributes and works. In 2008, the Kurt Vonnegut Society was established, and in November 2010, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library was opened in Vonnegut's hometown of Indianapolis. The Library of America
published a compendium of Vonnegut's compositions between 1963 and 1973
the following April, and another compendium of his earlier works in
2012. Late 2011 saw the release of two Vonnegut biographies: Gregory
Sumner's Unstuck in Time and Charles J. Shields's And So It Goes. Shields's biography of Vonnegut created some controversy. According to The Guardian,
the book portrays Vonnegut as distant, cruel and nasty. "Cruel, nasty
and scary are the adjectives commonly used to describe him by the
friends, colleagues, and relatives Shields quotes", said The Daily Beast's Wendy Smith. "Towards the end he was very feeble, very depressed and almost morose", said Jerome Klinkowitz of the University of Northern Iowa, who has examined Vonnegut in depth.
Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic
questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a
presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end,
despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
Dinitia Smith, The New York Times, 2007
Vonnegut's works have evoked ire on several occasions. His most prominent novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, has been objected to or removed at various institutions in at least 18 instances. In the case of Island Trees School District v. Pico, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a school district's ban on Slaughterhouse-Five—which
the board had called "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and
just plain filthy"—and eight other novels was unconstitutional. When a
school board in Republic, Missouri,
decided to withdraw Vonnegut's novel from its libraries, the Kurt
Vonnegut Memorial Library offered a free copy to all the students of the
district.
Tally, writing in 2013, suggests that Vonnegut has only recently
become the subject of serious study rather than fan adulation, and much
is yet to be written about him. "The time for scholars to say 'Here's
why Vonnegut is worth reading' has definitively ended, thank goodness.
We know he's worth reading. Now tell us things we don't know." Todd F. Davis notes that Vonnegut's work is kept alive by his loyal
readers, who have "significant influence as they continue to purchase
Vonnegut's work, passing it on to subsequent generations and keeping his
entire canon in print—an impressive list of more than twenty books that
[Dell Publishing] has continued to refurbish and hawk with new cover
designs." Donald E. Morse notes that Vonnegut "is now firmly, if somewhat
controversially, ensconced in the American and world literary canon as
well as in high school, college and graduate curricula". Tally writes of Vonnegut's work:
Vonnegut's 14 novels, while each
does its own thing, together are nevertheless experiments in the same
overall project. Experimenting with the form of the American novel
itself, Vonnegut engages in a broadly modernist attempt to apprehend and
depict the fragmented, unstable, and distressing bizarreries of
postmodern American experience ... That he does not actually succeed in
representing the shifting multiplicities of that social experience is
beside the point. What matters is the attempt, and the recognition
that ... we must try to map this unstable and perilous terrain, even if
we know in advance that our efforts are doomed.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Vonnegut posthumously in 2015. The asteroid 25399 Vonnegut is named in his honor. A crater on the planet Mercury has also been named in his honor. In 2021, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis was designated a Literary Landmark by the Literary Landmarks Association. In 1986, the University of Evansville library located in Evansville, Indiana, where he spoke during the dedication ceremony, was named after Vonnegut.
Views
The
beliefs I have to defend are so soft and complicated, actually, and,
when vivisected, turn into bowls of undifferentiated mush. I am a
pacifist, I am an anarchist, I am a planetary citizen, and so on.
— Kurt Vonnegut
War
In the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five,
Vonnegut recounts meeting the film producer Harrison Starr at a party,
who asked him whether his forthcoming book was an anti-war novel—"Yes, I
guess", replied Vonnegut. Starr responded: "Why don't you write an
anti-glacier novel?" In the novel, Vonnegut's character continues: "What
he meant, of course, is that there would always be wars, that they were
as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars
didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death".
Vonnegut was a pacifist.
A large painting of Vonnegut on Massachusetts Avenue, Indianapolis, blocks away from the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and the Athenæum (Das Deutsche Haus), which was designed by his family's architecture firm
In 2011, NPR wrote, "Kurt Vonnegut's blend of anti-war sentiment and satire made him one of the most popular writers of the 1960s." Vonnegut stated in a 1987 interview, "My own feeling is that civilization ended in World War I, and we're still trying to recover from that", and that he wanted to write war-focused works without glamorizing war itself. Vonnegut had not intended to publish again, but his anger against the George W. Bush administration led him to write A Man Without a Country.
Slaughterhouse-Five is the Vonnegut novel best known for
its antiwar themes, but the author expressed his beliefs in ways beyond
the depiction of the destruction of Dresden. One character, Mary O'Hare,
opines that "wars were partly encouraged by books and movies" starring "Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men". Vonnegut made a number of comparisons in Slaughterhouse-Five between Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima and wrote in Palm Sunday (1991), "I learned how vile that religion of mine could be when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima".
Nuclear war, or at least deployed nuclear arms, is mentioned in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. In Player Piano,
the computer EPICAC is given control of the nuclear arsenal and is
charged with deciding whether to use high-explosive or nuclear arms. In Cat's Cradle,
John's original purpose in setting pen to paper was to write an account
of what prominent Americans had been doing as Hiroshima was bombed.
Religion
Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor
Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a
humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently
without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. ... I
myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in
Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I
would just as soon be a rattlesnake."
Vonnegut was an atheist, a humanist and a freethinker, serving as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association.In an interview for Playboy,
he stated that his forebears who came to the United States did not
believe in God, and he learned his atheism from his parents. Vonnegut did not, however, disdain those who seek the comfort of
religion, hailing church associations as a type of extended family. He occasionally attended a Unitarian church, but with little consistency. In his autobiographical work Palm Sunday, Vonnegut says that he is a "Christ-worshipping agnostic". During a speech to the Unitarian Universalist Association, he called himself a "Christ-loving atheist". However, he was keen to stress that he was not a Christian.
Vonnegut was an admirer of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, particularly the Beatitudes, and incorporated it into his own doctrines. He also referred to it in many of his works. In his 1991 book Fates Worse than Death,
Vonnegut suggests that during the Reagan administration, "anything that
sounded like the Sermon on the Mount was socialistic or communistic,
and therefore anti-American". In Palm Sunday, he wrote that "the Sermon on the Mount suggests a mercifulness that can never waver or fade". However, Vonnegut had a deep dislike for certain aspects of
Christianity, often reminding his readers of the bloody history of the
Crusades and other religion-inspired violence. He despised the televangelists of the late 20th century, feeling that their thinking was narrow-minded.
Religion features frequently in Vonnegut's work, both in his
novels and elsewhere. He laced a number of his speeches with
religion-focused rhetoric and was prone to using such expressions as "God forbid" and "thank God". He once wrote his own version of the Requiem Mass, which he then had translated into Latin and set to music. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Vonnegut goes to heaven after he is euthanized by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Once in heaven, he interviews 21 deceased celebrities, including Isaac Asimov, William Shakespeare, and Kilgore Trout—the last a fictional character from several of his novels. Vonnegut's works are filled with characters founding new faiths, and religion often serves as a major plot device, for example, in Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle. In The Sirens of Titan, Rumfoord proclaims The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Slaughterhouse-Five
sees Billy Pilgrim, lacking religion himself, nevertheless become a
chaplain's assistant in the military and display a large crucifix on his
bedroom wall.[] In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut invented the religion of Bokononism.
Politics
Vonnegut's thoughts on politics were shaped in large part by Robert Redfield, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, co-founder of the Committee on Social Thought,
and one of Vonnegut's professors during his time at the university. In a
commencement address, Vonnegut remarked that "Dr. Redfield's theory of
the Folk Society ... has been the starting point for my politics, such
as they are". Vonnegut did not particularly sympathize with liberalism or conservatism. Vonnegut also mused on the specious simplicity of American politics,
saying facetiously: "If you want to take my guns away from me, and
you're all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry
each other ... you're a liberal. If you are against those perversions
and for the rich, you're a conservative. What could be simpler?" Regarding political parties, Vonnegut said: "The two real political
parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't
acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the
Republicans and the Democrats, instead."
Vonnegut disdained more mainstream American political ideologies in favor of socialism, which he thought could provide a valuable substitute for what he saw as social Darwinism and a spirit of "survival of the fittest" in American society, believing that "socialism would be a good for the common man". Vonnegut often returned to a quote by socialist and five-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs:
"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a
criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am
not free." Vonnegut expressed disappointment that communism
and socialism seemed to be unsavory topics to the average American and
believed that they offered beneficial substitutes to contemporary social
and economic systems.
Technology
In A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut quipped, "I have been called a Luddite. I welcome it. Do you know what a Luddite is? A person who hates newfangled contraptions." The negative effects of the progress of technology are a constant theme throughout Vonnegut's works, from Player Piano to his final essay collection, A Man Without a Country. Political theorist Patrick Deneen has identified this skepticism about technological progress as a theme of Vonnegut novels and stories, including Player Piano, "Harrison Bergeron", and "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow". Scholars who position Vonnegut as a critic of liberalism reference his pessimism toward technological progress. Vonnegut described Player Piano
some years after its publication as "a novel about people and machines,
and machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will." Loss of jobs due to machine innovation, and thus loss of meaning or
purpose in life, is a key plot point in the novel. The "newfangled
contraptions" Vonnegut hated included the television, which he critiqued
often throughout his nonfiction and fiction. In Timequake,
for example, Vonnegut tells the story of "Booboolings", human analogs
who develop morally through their imaginative formation. However, one
evil sister on the planet of the Booboolings learns from lunatics how to
build televisions. He writes:
When the bad sister
was a young woman, she and the nuts worked up designs for television
cameras and transmitters and receivers. Then she got money from her very
rich mom to manufacture these satanic devices, which made imaginations
redundant. They were instantly popular because the shows were so
attractive and no thinking was involved ... Generations of Booboolings
grew up without imaginations ... Without imaginations, though, they
couldn't do what their ancestors had done, which was read interesting,
heartwarming stories in the faces of one another. So ... Booboolings
became among the most merciless creatures in the local family of
galaxies.
Against
imagination-killing devices like televisions, and against electronic
substitutes for embodied community, Vonnegut argued that "Electronic
communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing
animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something."
Writing
Influences
Vonnegut's writing was inspired by an eclectic mix of sources. When he was younger, Vonnegut stated that he read works of pulp fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and action-adventure. He also read the classics, such as the plays of Aristophanes—like Vonnegut's works, humorous critiques of contemporary society. Vonnegut's life and work also share similarities with that of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn writer Mark Twain.
Both shared pessimistic outlooks on humanity and a skeptical take on
religion and, as Vonnegut put it, were both "associated with the enemy
in a major war", as Twain briefly enlisted in the South's cause during
the American Civil War, and Vonnegut's German name and ancestry connected him with the United States' enemy in both world wars. He also cited Ambrose Bierce as an influence, calling "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" the greatest American short story and deeming any who disagreed or had not read the story "twerps".
Vonnegut called George Orwell
his favorite writer and admitted that he tried to emulate Orwell. "I
like his concern for the poor, I like his socialism, I like his
simplicity", Vonnegut said. Vonnegut also said that Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley heavily influenced his debut novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel also included ideas from mathematician Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Vonnegut commented that Robert Louis Stevenson's stories were emblems of thoughtfully put together works that he tried to mimic in his own compositions. Vonnegut also hailed playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw as "a hero of [his]" and an "enormous influence". Within his own family, Vonnegut stated that his mother, Edith, had the
greatest influence on him. "[My] mother thought she might make a new
fortune by writing for the slick magazines. She took short-story courses
at night. She studied writers the way gamblers study horses."
Early on in his career, Vonnegut decided to model his style after that of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote as if from the perspective of a child, allowing Thoreau's works to be widely comprehensible. Using a youthful narrative voice allowed Vonnegut to deliver concepts in a modest and straightforward way. Other influences on Vonnegut include The War of the Worlds author H. G. Wells and satirist Jonathan Swift. Vonnegut credited American journalist and critic H. L. Mencken for inspiring him to become a journalist.
Style and technique
The book Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style
by Kurt Vonnegut and his longtime friend and former student Suzanne
McConnell, published posthumously by Rosetta Books and Seven Stories
Press in 2019, delves into the style, humor, and methodologies Vonnegut
employed, including his belief that one should "Write like a human
being. Write like a writer."
I've heard the Vonnegut voice described as "manic depressive", and
there's certainly something to this. It has an incredible amount of
energy married to a very deep and dark sense of despair. It's frequently
over-the-top, and scathingly satirical, but it never strays too far
from pathos—from an immense sympathy for society's vulnerable, oppressed
and powerless. But, then, it also contains a huge allotment of warmth.
Most of the time, reading Kurt Vonnegut feels more like being spoken to
by a very close friend. There's an inclusiveness to his writing that
draws you in, and his narrative voice is seldom absent from the story
for any length of time. Usually, it's right there in the
foreground—direct, involving and extremely idiosyncratic.
In his book Popular Contemporary Writers, Michael D. Sharp
describes Vonnegut's linguistic style as straightforward, his sentences
concise, his language simple, his paragraphs brief, and his ordinary
tone conversational. Vonnegut uses this style to convey normally complex subject matter in a
way that is intelligible to a large audience. He credited his time as a
journalist for his ability and pointed to his work with the Chicago
City News Bureau, which required him to convey stories in telephone
conversations. Vonnegut's compositions include distinct references to his own life, notably in Slaughterhouse-Five and Slapstick.
Vonnegut believed that ideas and the convincing communication of
those ideas to the reader were vital to literary art. He did not always
sugarcoat his points; much of Player Piano leads to the moment
when Paul, on trial and hooked to a lie detector, is asked to tell a
falsehood. Paul says, "Every new piece of scientific knowledge is a
good thing for humanity". Robert T. Tally Jr., in his volume on Vonnegut's novels, wrote, "Rather
than tearing down and destroying the icons of twentieth-century,
middle-class American life, Vonnegut gently reveals their basic
flimsiness". Vonnegut did not simply propose utopian solutions to the ills of
American society but showed how such schemes would not allow ordinary
people to live lives free from want and anxiety. The large, artificial
U.S. families in Slapstick soon serve as an excuse for tribalism.
People give no help to those not part of their group; the extended
family's place in the social hierarchy becomes vital.
In the introduction to their essay "Kurt Vonnegut and Humor", Tally and Peter C. Kunze suggest that Vonnegut was not a "black humorist",
but a "frustrated idealist" who used "comic parables" to teach the
reader absurd, bitter or hopeless truths, with his grim witticisms
serving to make the reader laugh rather than cry. "Vonnegut makes sense
through humor, which is, in the author's view, as valid a means of
mapping this crazy world as any other strategies." Vonnegut resented being called a black humorist, feeling that, as with
many literary labels, it allowed readers to disregard aspects of a
writer's work that did not fit the label.
Vonnegut's works have been labeled science fiction, satire and postmodern. He resisted such labels, but his works do contain common tropes
in those genres. In his books, Vonnegut imagines alien societies and
civilizations, as is common in science fiction. He emphasizes or
exaggerates absurdities and idiosyncrasies. Furthermore, Vonnegut makes fun of problems, as satire does. However, literary theorist Robert Scholes noted in Fabulation and Metafiction
that Vonnegut "reject[s] the traditional satirist's faith in the
efficacy of satire as a reforming instrument. [He has] a more subtle
faith in the humanizing value of laughter."
Postmodernism entails a response to the theory that science will reveal truths. Postmodernists contend that truth is subjective rather than objective.
Truth includes bias toward individual beliefs and outlooks on the
world. Postmodernist writers use unreliable, first-person narration, and narrative fragmentation. One critic has argued that Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, features a metafictional, Janus-headed
outlook and seeks to represent historical events while doubting the
ability to represent history. Doubt is evident in the opening lines of
the novel: "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are
pretty much true." The bombastic opening—"All this happened"—"reads like
a declaration of complete mimesis," which is radically called into
question in the rest of the quote and "[t]his creates an integrated
perspective that seeks out extratextual themes [like war and trauma]
while thematizing the novel's textuality and inherent constructedness at
one and the same time." Although Vonnegut does use fragmentation and metafiction in some of his
works, he more distinctly focuses on the peril of individuals who find
subjective truths, mistake them for objective truths, and proceed to
impose these truths on other people.
Themes
Economy
Vonnegut
was a vocal critic of American society, and this was reflected in his
writings. Several key social themes recur in Vonnegut's works, such as
wealth, the lack of it, and its unequal distribution among a society. In
The Sirens of Titan, the novel's protagonist, Malachi Constant, is exiled to Saturn's moon Titan as a result of his vast wealth, which has made him arrogant and wayward. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,
readers may find it difficult to determine whether the rich or the poor
are in worse circumstances, as the lives of both groups' members are
ruled by their wealth or their poverty. Further, in Hocus Pocus, the protagonist is named Eugene Debs Hartke, a homage to the famed socialist Eugene V. Debs and Vonnegut's socialist views.
In Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, Thomas F. Marvin
states: "Vonnegut points out that, left unchecked, capitalism will erode
the democratic foundations of the United States." Marvin suggests that
Vonnegut's works demonstrate what happens when a "hereditary
aristocracy" develops, where wealth is inherited along familial lines:
the ability of poor Americans to overcome their situations is greatly or
completely diminished. Vonnegut also often laments social Darwinism and a "survival of the
fittest" view of society. He points out that social Darwinism leads to a
society that condemns its poor for their own misfortune and fails to
help them out of their poverty because "they deserve their fate".
Ethics in science
Science
and the ethical obligations of scientists are also a common theme in
Vonnegut's works. His first published story, "Report on the Barnhouse
Effect", like many of his early stories, centered on a scientist
concerned about the uses of his own invention. Player Piano and Cat's Cradle
explore the effects on humans of scientific advances. In 1969, Vonnegut
gave a speech to the American Association of Physics Teachers called
"The Virtuous Physicist". Asked afterwards what a virtuous scientist
was, Vonnegut replied, "one who declines to work on weapons."
Life
Vonnegut also confronts the idea of free will in a number of his pieces. In Slaughterhouse-Five and Timequake the characters have no choice in what they do; in Breakfast of Champions, characters are very obviously stripped of their free will and even receive it as a gift; and in Cat's Cradle, Bokononism views free will as heretical.
The majority of Vonnegut's characters are estranged from their
actual families and seek to build replacement or extended families. For
example, the engineers in Player Piano called their manager's spouse "Mom". In Cat's Cradle,
Vonnegut devises two separate methods for loneliness to be combated: A
"karass", which is a group of individuals appointed by God to do his
will, and a "granfalloon", defined by Marvin as a "meaningless association of people, such as a fraternal group or a nation". Similarly, in Slapstick, the US government codifies that all Americans are a part of large extended families.
Fear of losing one's purpose in life is a theme in Vonnegut's
works. During the Great Depression Vonnegut witnessed the devastation
many people felt when they lost their jobs, and while at General
Electric he witnessed machines being built to take the place of human
labor. He confronts these things in his works through references to the
growing use of automation and its effects on human society. This is most
starkly represented in his first novel, Player Piano, where many
Americans are left purposeless and unable to find work, as machines
replace human workers. Loss of purpose is also depicted in Galápagos, where a florist rages at her spouse for creating a robot able to do her job, and in Timequake, where an architect kills himself when replaced by computer software.
Suicide by fire is another common theme in Vonnegut's works; the
author often returns to the theory that "many people are not fond of
life". He uses this as an explanation for why humans have so severely
damaged their environment and made devices such as nuclear weapons that can make their creators extinct. In Deadeye Dick Vonnegut features the neutron bomb,
which is designed to kill people but leave buildings and structures
untouched. He also uses this theme to demonstrate the recklessness of
those who put powerful, apocalypse-inducing devices at the disposal of
politicians.
"What is the point of life?" is a question Vonnegut often
pondered in his works. When one of his characters, Kilgore Trout, finds
the question "What is the purpose of life?" written in a bathroom, his
response is, "To be the eyes and ears and conscience
of the Creator of the Universe, you fool." Marvin finds Trout's theory
curious, given that Vonnegut was an atheist and thus for him, there is
no Creator to report back to, and comments that, "[as] Trout chronicles
one meaningless life after another, readers are left to wonder how a
compassionate creator could stand by and do nothing while such reports
come in". In the epigraph to Bluebeard,
Vonnegut quotes his son Mark and gives an answer to what he believes is
the meaning of life: "We are here to help each other get through this
thing, whatever it is."
Tralfamadore
A fictional planet called Tralfamadore is a recurring motif in Vonnegut's works. A planet by that name is referenced in The Sirens of Titan; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Slaughterhouse-Five; Hocus Pocus; and Timequake. It is variously depicted as being located outside the Milky Way galaxy or being fictional within the fiction itself; in Slaughterhouse-Five, it is implied to be imaginary as a result of the protagonist losing his grip on reality. A recurring characteristic of the inhabitants of Tralfamadore is their low esteem of humanity.According to Julia A. Whitehead, Vonnegut used the concept of an
imagined planet inhabited by beings more enlightened than humans as an
outlet for escapism. By contrast, Lawrence R. Boer rejects the notion that the pessimism and fatalism of the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five reflect the views of the author, and Brian Stableford characterizes the different Tralfamadorian races in that book and The Sirens of Titan as "tiny-minded smartasses".
Unless otherwise cited, items in this list are taken from Thomas F. Marvin's 2002 book Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, and the date in parentheses is the date the work was published:
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