Obituaries: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Goodbye Blue Monday: 1922 - 2007 by Christine Hall

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a most unlikely counter-cultural hero. By the time he was discovered by the flower children around 1969, a group who vocally vowed to "never trust anyone over thirty," he was pushing fifty. But it was the counter-culture who embraced his novels and introduced Vonnegut's perspective to the rest of the world.

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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

By the time Vonnegut was “discovered,” he'd been publishing novels for a decade and a half, since 1952's Player Piano, and had been publishing short stories since the 1940s. Between 1959, with the publication of The Sirens of Titan and 1973 (Breakfast of Champions), he wrote six of the most important novels of the twentieth century.

The end of this cycle, Breakfast of Champions read like a last novel, with Vonnegut literally saying goodbye to many of his recurring characters, including the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, who had been Vonnegut's caricature of himself. Many of his readers figured that this would be the end of the Vonnegut saga and, in a way, it was, as he would never again produce a novel that was considered to be an essential read.

After that, he wrote novels that were basically parodies of the Vonnegut style, entertaining reads that lacked the power and immediacy of his earlier works. By 1973, it would seem that his story had been told and he had nothing left to say.

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Venus on the Half Shell book cover

In 1974, Vonnegut fans were given hope with the publication, first in the pulp magazine The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and then as a paperback, of Venus On The Half-Shell by Kilgore Trout. Since Vonnegut has set his alter ego Trout free in Champions, it was only natural to assume that he had penned this work.

In fact, the book was written by science fiction writer Philip José Farmer, who had sought and obtained Vonnegut's permission to write and publish a book under the Trout name. It turned out that Vonnegut hated the book, and also hated the fact that the public thought he'd written it. So it goes.

But back to Vonnegut.

His universe was a pretty horrible place. His characters, whether rich, poor or middle-class, were hopeless losers, who knew themselves to be hopeless losers. Hopelessness was key that ran throughout every story. Everything was hopeless. History was hopeless. The future was hopeless. The present was, indeed, hopeless. His humor was painful, not because you laughed until your sides hurt, but because you laughed because laughter was preferable to suicide.

Within this hopeless universe, however, Vonnegut seemed to find redemption through acts of kindness, and this central, simple theme ran through all of his works. In The Sirens of Titan, his second novel, he created a species called Harmoniums, cave dwelling creatures who live on the cool side of Mercury. These harmoniums, who would seem to live meaningless lives, are constantly chattering back and forth, always saying the same thing: “Here I am, here I am, here I am” and “so glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”

In 1969's Slaughterhouse Five, he recounted his own experiences as a prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden. He would later say that, as this was the only bombing he witnessed, he had no idea that it was other than a normal wartime scenario. It wasn't until years later, in the 1960s, that he realized that he'd witnessed destruction that was nearly on the same scale as Hiroshima, which compelled him to write this antiwar novel, which he subtitled The Children's Crusade, because old men start wars and children fight them.

Vonnegut died yesterday, in a manner that would befit a character in one of his books. He had fallen in his Manhattan home several weeks earlier and suffered a brain injury. He died from complications from brain surgery. He was 84. So it goes.

In today's Huffington Post, Joseph A. Palermo wrote about seeing Vonnegut speak at Cornell University in the 1990s. “He told the assemblage at Bailey Hall, filled with fawning professors of English and Comparative Literature, along with their students, that the last place on campus anyone would find a good writer was in the academic departments.

“Vonnegut said the place to look for the important writer would be in the 'boiler room' maintaining the college's furnace, or in the janitorial service, or serving burgers to students in the cafeteria, toiling without recognition.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. might well be the last great American novelist. The modern American novel has lost it's luster. There hasn't been a “must read” novel since Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get The Blues or Irving's The World According To Garp, and those came along too late to really fit the “everybody's got to read this” moniker of the print era.

So it goes.

©Copyright 2007 by AlternativeApproaches.com