Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – A Prolific Author Remembered

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By Brandon T. Bisceglia
Staff Writer

I first chanced upon the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in the fifth grade, when my class read the short story, “Harrison Bergeron.” It was the story of a society that had decided to literally cater to the lowest common denominator in every possible way. Strong people were laden with weights. Intelligent people had buzzers in their ears to periodically interrupt the reasoning process. But one man overcame these shackles, finding that working against them made him more powerful than he could otherwise be. In a world of restraints, he refused to acquiesce.

This tale of freedom was not only uplifting -- it was told with an intriguingly imaginative flair. Soon after reading the story, I began wading through Vonnegut’s other quirky novels: Cat’s Cradle, Galapagos, Timequake, and so on. Each book had a serious poignancy that shone through his amusingly anecdotal style. It kept me looking for more from the talented, if cracked, writer.

The most personal and controversial of his fiction works was Slaughterhouse-Five, which was in part a fictionalized account of Vonnegut’s experiences in Germany during World War II. There, an extremely fortunate event occurred – he was captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war. This was fortunate because his duties incidentally saved him from annihilation when the Americans firebombed Dresden, a cultural hub with no conceivable military significance beyond being in Germany.

For years, Slaughterhouse-Five was banned from schools and libraries for its gruesome imagery and anti-American sentiments. It inadvertently raised him to the status of counter-culture icon. The catch phrase (oft repeated in the novel), “So it goes,” became timelessly popular in literary circles. Today, the book is required reading in many classrooms.

On April 11, 2007, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died. He had suffered brain injuries from a fall in his Manhattan home a few weeks prior. He was 84.

The spirit of this irascible man would be impossible to reproduce. In his own time, there were few authors with the same inventive, curiously dark humor. He scribbled pictures of wide-open beavers – both kinds – in his novels. He dubbed Manhattan, “Skyscraper National Park,” because it seemed to him as if New York City had sprouted from the ground. He smoked, calling his habit a, “fairly certain, somewhat dignified, form of slow suicide.”

Though he primarily wrote fiction during the 1960s and 70s, his focus during the last 20 years of his life shifted heavily to non-fiction. In 2000, he taught advanced writing at Smith College, and in November of the same year, was given the title “State Author of New York.” He had, by then, over 20 books in print. He had taught at Harvard, been awarded an MA by the University of Chicago (for Cat’s Cradle’s contribution to cultural anthropology), and acted as President of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He had adopted his sister’s children when she and her husband had died suddenly. He had been married several times, and had once attempted suicide with alcohol and sleeping pills. There was little the man had not experienced.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was not unfamiliar with death. He had written about it in many ways. On one notable occasion, he wrote a secular requiem. He told a reporter from New York Magazine that he wanted to present something that didn’t require the fear-provoking notions of heaven and hell. Instead, he built it around the idea that, “There’s nothing to fear in the afterlife, so I just had everybody sleep, ‘cause I like sleep.”

What made him a true satirist and an inspiring human was the underpinning optimism he retained within his dark attitude. He claimed that he wanted his epitaph to read: “The only proof he needed of the existence of god was music.”

It is a shame he did not live to see it.

So it goes.