Kurt Vonnegut is celebrated as one of the most successful novelist in the Post-Second World War period in the America. His literary works have had varied impacts on American culture, including the use of the word “karass” amongst college students, the naming of the pop groups “Ice Nine Kills” and “The Billy Pilgrims”, and the frequent use of the term “So it goes” as written in Vonnegut’s obituary on the New York Times (Farrell, p.ix). This article examines the impacts of Vonnegut’s on his literary work. It reviews the influences of his childhood experiences, his education, service in the army, and employment at various settings on his work as a writer. His work caught the attention of a larger audience due his simplicity and humor which underlined the seriousness of the social and philosophical issues he was handling in the twentieth century (Morse, p.15). Vonnegut’s literary works are also acclaimed for ushering in the postmodern era in the American art. Together with a number of contemporary novelists like Andy Warhol, Vonnegut’s work illustrates socio-cultural struggles in the postmodern era (Farrell, p.ix).
Vonnegut’s literary works, although conveyed in humorous tone and cartoonist characters, seeks to explain the purpose of human beings’ existence and their pursuits in daily life. As recognized by Farrell:
“He frequently used the techniques of metafiction (fiction that calls to attention to its own artificiality) to examine questions of narrative and the relationship between art and reality. But perhaps most important, Vonnegut’s fiction offers a scathing critique of social injustice, war, and environmental degradation while managing simultaneously to express love and compassion for the weak, bewildered, and often ...
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Works Cited
Allen, William. Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.
Farrell, Susan. Critical Companion to Kurt Vonnegut: A Literary Reference to his Life and Work. New York, NY: Facts on File Press, 2008.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. Kurt Vonnegut. London,UK: Methuen, 1982.
Krementz, Jill. Kurt Vonnegut. Viewed on April 20, 2011 http://salempress.com/store
/pdfs/vonnegut.pdf.
Lee, Robert. Timequake, New York, NY: Westminster Press, 1982
Morse, Donald. Kurt Vonnegut. San Bernardino California: Borgo Press, 1992.
Sickles, William. Natural history of the mind: (new views on the relatedness of life),
Mahwah, NJ: Nova Publishers, 1997
Vonnegut, Kurt. (a) Palm Sunday: An autobiographical Collage. New York: Delacorte Press, 1981.
Vonnegut, Kurt. (b) A man without a country, Ontario, CA: Seven Stories Press, 2005
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five (1969) has been acclaimed by scholars for decades specifically for Vonnegut’s iconic, albeit unusual use of voice, cohesion, and rhythm. In Slaughterhouse-five Vonnegut uses a very unique voice that has come to define most of Vonnegut’s work, specifically his use of dark humor, meta-fiction, informality, disassociation; and the famous line, “So it goes” that appears 106 times in the novel. Vonnegut’s cohesion, or more accurately lack thereof, is unique to Slaughterhouse-five as the story is told in a nonlinear order that uses various flashbacks, time travel, and “sticking” in and out of time and space to tell the tale of the main character
New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1997. Vit, Marek. Kurt Vonnegut Corner: Kurt Vonnegut Essay Collection. http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/kv_essays.html
Kurt Vonnegut places his experiences and his views in the text. He begins the book by stating, “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true...I’ve changed all of the names.” Viewing war as a sen...
So it goes. Vonnegut allows us to laugh out loud, despite the tragedies of war and the anxiety of the post-modern world. His picture of the modern man is simultaneously dismal and hopeful. His unique style, satiric overview and astute ability to capture the multiple faces of mankind, properly placed him in the realm of the most accomplished authors of the Twentieth Century. Works Cited Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.
Festa, Conrad. “Vonnegut’s Satire.” Vonnegut in America: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut. Vol. 5. 1977. 133-50. The GaleGroup. Web. 10 March. 2014.
Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional novel “Cat’s Cradle”, indirectly explores issues that parallels into topics such as religion, scientific/technological advancements, political power and much more. Vonnegut’s novel is narrated by a character named Jonah (John). He, Jonah, sets out to write an anthropological book based off of what key people were doing on the day that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Throughout Vonnegut’s novel it can clearly represents how a writer can become a very destructive person to society. As for this novel, it shows through the uses of parallels that a writer can become a very destructive person to society, these parallels are reflects to real world issues throughout his novel to show this claim, that a writer too can be a destructive person to society.
One can only imagine the intense emotional scarring that one would suffer after exiting an underground shelter with a dozen other men to find a city destroyed and its people dead, corpses laying all around. These feelings are what prompted Kurt Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse-Five as he did. The main character of this novel mirrors the author in many ways, but the striking similarity is their inability to deal with the events of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945. Section Two- Critical Commentaries Kurt Vonnegut's work is nothing new to critics, but Slaughterhouse-Five is considered to be his best work.
Reed, Peter J. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Writers for the 70's). New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1972
Slaughterhouse Five is not a book that should be glanced over and discarded away like a dirty rag. Slaughterhouse Five is a book that should be carefully analyzed and be seen as an inspiration to further improve the well-being of mankind. Vonnegut makes it clear that an easy way to improve mankind is to see war not as a place where legends are born, but rather, an event to be avoided. Intelligent readers and critics alike should recognize Vonnegut’s work and see to it that they make an effort to understand the complexities behind the human condition that lead us to war.
...s. Vonnegut points out truth in the small diversionsof life like the Boko-maru while pointing out the absurdity and falsehood of the large diversions.
Kurt Vonnegut, a modern American writer, composed stories about fictional situations that occurred in futuristic versions of today’s world. His stories included violence, both upon oneself and one another, and characters who sought out revenge. In “2BR02B” and “Harrison Bergeron”, Vonnegut conveys physical violence most likely experienced while a prisoner of World War 2, as a way to show how war brings pain and destruction.
Vonnegut powers uniformity on America in the regions of excellence, quality, and insight. He makes a world in which lovely individuals wear veils to cover their countenances and solid
"In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.' The reviewer concludes that 'Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.' "The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital to the late sixties: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions.New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees larger reasons for the book's success: 'Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact which may be the fairest example of American cultural change. . . . Shunned as distastefully low-brow . . . and insufficiently commercial to suit the exploitative tastes of high-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazine and pulp paperback circulation. Then in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age. '"Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut 'avoids framing his story in linear narration, choosing a circular structure.
... Vonnegut’s writing is unique because “the narrator offers a very different kind of war story—one which combines fact and fiction” (Jarvis 98). With the combination of fact and fiction, Vonnegut successfully connected events from WWII to the political references and societal conflicts during the Vietnam War. Works Cited Barringer, Mark, and Tom Wells. “The Anti-War Movement in the United States.”
Throughout his career, Kurt Vonnegut has used writing as a tool to convey penetrating messages and ominous warnings about our society. He skillfully combines vivid imagery with a distinctly satirical and anecdotal style to explore complex issues such as religion and war. Two of his most well known, and most gripping, novels that embody this subtle talent are Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. Both books represent Vonnegut’s genius for manipulating fiction to reveal glaring, disturbing and occasionally redemptive truths about human nature. On the surface, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five are dramatically different novels, each with its own characters, symbols, and plot. However, a close examination reveals that both contain common themes and ideas. Examining and comparing the two novels and their presentation of different themes provides a unique insight into both the novels and the author – allowing the reader to gain a fuller understanding of Vonnegut’s true meaning.