Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut -- an

Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut -- an Introduction to His Life, Works, Character, and Unique Contribution to American Fiction Kurt Vonnegut's novels such as Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five have a reputation both as great literary classics and great works of underground fiction.

One high school English teacher observed that he almost hated to teach Vonnegut to his students, not because the author's works were not worthy of serious consideration, but to truly understand Vonnegut's playful and subversive intent, the books should be discovered, and read furtively away from the eyes of teachers and parents, rather than out in the open. This was the experience of reading Vonnegut for the author's first eager readers, when he penned his classics in the 1960s. "Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction.

But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and '70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States" (Smith 2007). Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse Five, is also regarded his most personal. He was a prisoner of war in Germany during the Allied firebombing of the town in 1945.

"His experience in Dresden was the basis of Slaughterhouse Five, which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval" (Smith 2007). Vonnegut used the absurd situation of an American soldier held by the German enemy yet being bombed by his own side, to highlight the ridiculous nature of war in general. This was a message that resonated profoundly with America in his day and age, given America's embroilment in the conflict in Vietnam.

When asked why it took him twenty-five years to write about World War II, the writer said: "I think it [the Vietnam War] had not only freed me, I think it freed writers...because the Vietnam War made our leadership and our motives so scruffy and essentially stupid, that we could finally talk about something bad that we did to the worst people imaginable, the Nazis. And what I saw, what I had to report, made war look so ugly.

You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff" (Inskeep, Montagne, & Ulaby, 2007). Although this stress on the truth might seem strange for an author who made frequent use of the genre of science fiction and often wrote in an ambiguous style, Vonnegut strove to use fantasy and extreme situations and characters to highlight the truth about reality, not to transport readers into a fantastic and more pleasant existence. People close to the author called Vonnegut's memories as a young man in Dresden the defining moments of his life.

"Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated," in the real bombings of the city, later dramatized in Slaughterhouse Five (Smith, 2007). With typical use of ambiguous yet memorable language, Vonnegut wrote: "The firebombing of Dresden.. was a work of art....a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany" (Smith, 2007).

On work detail, Vonnegut was assigned to make vitamin supplements in underground meat lockers for the famished Germany. His cell was called Slaughterhouse Five. This meat locker, a place of death, provided protection, however unintentionally for the POWs on their assignment and saved the young Vonnegut's life. Vonnegut's sense of absurdity in Germany was also acute because he was born in Indianapolis in 1922 to a fourth-generation German-American family.

He had thus grown up amongst German culture and the German language since birth, though he was fighting Germany as an enemy when captured overseas. "His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut's brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms" (Smith, 2007). Thus science and discussions of scientific phenomena with his brother also formed the backdrop to his early life, another reason why technology featured so prominently in his literary works.

Vonnegut is credited with helping to elevate the genre of science fiction, once considered a staple of pulp magazine racks, to that of high art. Cat's Cradle tells the tale of scientists trying to create 'ice-nine,' a crystal that could turn all water solid and thus destroy all life on the earth.

In 1963, Cat's Cradle slowly developed a readership as Cold War Americans were increasingly receptive to a book that showed the dangerous potential of science and technology to develop faster than ethics and morality ("Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84," CNN.com, 2007) the novel, takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string (Smith, 2007). Although its first printing sold only 500 copies, it has become a staple of English classes all over America today (Smith, 2007).

His literary style is unmistakable and transgressive on the page: "Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics" (Smith, 2007). Although read in high school classes and colleges today, during the early years of his literary production, some readers and even professional reviewers found his style confusing, even "incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms" (Smith, 2007).

A more serious charge is that his books are misogynistic, which some people trace to the fact that his mother suffered from mental illness, the source of many painful memories. She later committed suicide. In typical acerbic fashion, Vonnegut observed: "My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide.

And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children" ("Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84," CNN.com, 2007) Vonnegut not only ignored his critics, he also attempted to defy anyone who would narrowly pigeonhole any aspect of his work as autobiographical. Although he returned again and again to his POW experience, he wrote in Fates Worse than Death, his 1991 autobiography: "The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I.