Kurt Vonnegut Jr. ( ; November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007) is an American writer. In a career spanning more than 50 years, Vonnegut published 14 novels, three short story collections, five dramas, and five non-fiction works. He is best known for his satirical and best-selling novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).
Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but left in January 1943 and enrolled in the United States Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden and survived the Allied bombing of the city by taking refuge in the meat locker at the slaughterhouse where he was in prison. After the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, with whom she had three children. He then adopted his three sisters' brothers, after he died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident.
Vonnegut published his first novel, Players Piano , in 1952. The novel was reviewed positively but not commercially successful. In the nearly 20 years that followed, Vonnegut published some very few successful novels, such as Cat's Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964). Vonnegut's breakthrough was his sixth successful commercial novel and critical, Slaughterhouse-Five . The anti-war sentiment of this book resonated with its readers in the midst of the ongoing Vietnam War and generally positive reviews. Upon release, The Five-Fifth-Five House went to the top of the New York Times Best Sellers list, prompting Vonnegut to be famous. He was invited to give speeches, lectures, and events across the country and received many honors and honors.
Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essays and short story collections, including Fate Worse Than Death (1991), and A Man Without a Country (2005). After his death, he was hailed as a comical commentator on the society in which he lived and as one of the most important contemporary writers. Son of Vonnegut, Mark publishes his unpublished father's composition compilation, titled Armageddon in Retrospect . In 2017, Seven Stories Press publishes Complete Stories, Vonnegut's short fiction collection including 5 unpublished stories. Full Story was collected and introduced by friends and scholars Vonnegut Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. Many scientific papers have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor.
Video Kurt Vonnegut
Biography
Family and early life
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is the youngest of three children from Kurt Vonnegut Sr and his wife Edith (nÃÆ' Â © e Lieber). His older brother is Bernard (born 1914) and Alice (born 1917). Vonnegut is a descendant of German immigrants who settled in the United States in the mid-19th century; patrilineal paternal grandfather Clemens Vonnegut of Westphalia, Germany, settled in Indianapolis and founded the Vonnegut Hardware Company. Kurt's father, and his father in front of him, Bernard, were architects; architectural firm under Kurt Sr. designing buildings such as Das Deutsche Haus (now called "The AthenÃÆ'Â|um"), Indiana headquarters at Bell Telephone Company, and the Fletcher Trust Building. Mrs. Vonnegut was born in the high society of Indianapolis, because her family, Liebers, was among the wealthiest men in town, their wealth coming from successful brewery ownership.
Although both Vonnegut's parents were fluent in German, the pain of the country during and after World War I caused Vonneguts to leave the culture to show their American patriotism. Thus, they did not teach their youngest German children or introduce them to German literature and traditions, making him feel "unconscious and lacking roots." Vonnegut then praised Ida Young, his chef and his African-American housekeeper for the first 10 years of his life, for raising him and giving him value. "[He] gave me good moral instruction and was very good to me so he was very influential to me as anyone." Vonnegut describes Young as "human and wise," adding that "the aspect of the pardon and forgiveness of his [belief]" came from him.
The financial security and social welfare enjoyed by Vonneguts were destroyed in a matter of years. Liebers beer factory was closed in 1921 after the appearance of Prohibition in the United States. When the Great Depression struck, few people were able to build, causing clients in the architectural firm Kurt Sr. become scarce. Vonnegut's brothers and sisters have completed their primary and secondary education in private schools, but Vonnegut is placed in a public school, called Public School No. 43, now known as the James Whitcomb Riley School. He was not bothered by this, but both his parents were greatly influenced by their economic misfortune. Her father resigned from normal life and became what Vonnegut called "the dream artist". His mother became depressed, resigned, bitter, and rude. He worked hard to regain his wealth and family status, and Vonnegut said that he expressed a "disastrous hatred" as a hydrochloric acid "for her husband. Edith Vonnegut plunged into writing and tried to sell short stories to magazines like Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post without success.
SMA and Cornell
Vonnegut enrolled at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1936. While there, he played a clarinet in a school band and became co-editor (along with Madelyn Pugh) for the Tuesday edition of my Shortener Echo newspaper. Vonnegut says his tenure with Echo allows him to write for a large audience - his fellow students - rather than for a teacher, an experience he says is "fun and easy". "It turns out I can write better than many others," Vonnegut said. "Everyone has something he can do easily and can not imagine why other people have 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 or be an architect like his father, but his father and brother, a scientist, urged him to study "useful" discipline. As a result, Vonnegut majored in biochemistry, but he had little expertise in this field and did not care about his studies. Since his father had been a member at MIT, Vonnegut was entitled to join the Delta Upsilon fraternity, and did so. He overcame a tough competition for a place in the university's independent newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, first serving as a staff writer, then as an editor. At the end of his first year, he wrote a column titled "Innocents Abroad" which reuses jokes from other publications. He then wrote a piece, "Well All Right", focusing on pacifism, the reason he was very supportive, arguing against US intervention in World War II.
World War II
The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the US into war. Vonnegut is a member of the Reserve Assistance Training Corps, but the bad grades and the satellified articles in Cornell's newspaper have made him lose his place there. He was placed in an academic probation period in May 1942 and out in January next. No longer eligible for student delays, he faces the possibility of conscription to the United States Army. Instead of waiting to be drafted, he enlisted in the army and in March 1943 reported to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for basic training. Vonnegut was trained to fire and retain howitzers and then receive instruction in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee as part of the Army Special Training Program (ASTP). In early 1944, ASTP was canceled because of 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 was trained as a reconnaissance. She lives so close to her home that she "can sleep in the [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 night before with an overdose of sleeping pills.
Three months after her mother committed suicide, Vonnegut was sent to Europe as an intelligence seeker with the 106th Infantry Division. In December 1944, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the last German offensive in the war. During the battle, the 106th Infantry Division, which had just reached the front and was assigned to the "quiet" sector due to inexperience, was controlled by German armored forces. More than 500 division members were killed and more than 6,000 arrested.
On December 22, Vonnegut was arrested along with about 50 other American soldiers. Vonnegut was taken by carriage to a prison camp in southern Dresden, in Saxony. During the trip, the Royal Air Force bombed an inmate train and killed about 150 people. Vonnegut was sent to Dresden, "the first luxury city [he has ever seen]". She lives in a slaughterhouse when she arrives in town, and works in a factory that makes malt syrup for pregnant women. Vonnegut recalls the sirens that explode whenever other cities are bombed. Germany did not expect Dresden to be bombed, Vonnegut said. "There are very few air attack shelters in the city and no war industry, only cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories."
On 13 February 1945 Dresden was the target of Allied forces. In the hours and days that followed, the Allies were involved in a violent city bombardment. The attack subsided on February 15, with about 25,000 civilians killed in the bombing. Vonnegut was amazed at the level of destruction in Dresden and the secrecy that came to him. He survived by taking shelter in a three-story underground meat locker. "It's cold there, with corpses hanging around", says Vonnegut. "When we arrived, the city was gone... They burned the whole damn city." Vonnegut and other American detainees immediately worked after the bombing, digging bodies from the rubble. He described the activity as "a very complicated Easter egg hunt".
American war prisoners were evacuated on foot to the border of Saxony and Czechoslovakia after General George S. Patton arrested Leipzig. With prisoners abandoned by their guard, Vonnegut reached the repatriation camp of war-prisoners in Le Havre, France, before the end of May 1945, with the help of the Soviets. He returned to the United States and continued to serve in the Army, stationed in Fort Riley, Kansas, typing letters for other soldiers. Soon after he was awarded a Purple Heart that he told me "I myself was awarded the second lowest decoration in my country, Purple Heart for an ice bite." He left the US Army and returned to Indianapolis.
Marriage, University of Chicago, and initial job
After he returned to the United States, 22-year-old Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, his high school boyfriend and classmate since kindergarten, on September 1, 1945. The couple moved to Chicago; there, Vonnegut enrolled at the University of Chicago at G.I. Bill, as an anthropology student in an unusual five-year unilateral graduate/postgraduate program that bestows a master's degree. He supplemented his income by working as a reporter for City News Bureau of Chicago at night. Jane received a scholarship from the university to study Russian literature as a graduate student. Jane quit the program after becoming pregnant with the couple's first child, Mark (born May 1947), while Kurt also left the University without a degree (despite completing his undergraduate education) when his master's thesis on the Gharial Dance religious movement was unanimously rejected by the department.
Shortly after, General Electric (GE) employs Vonnegut as a publicist for the company, Schenectady, New York, a research laboratory. Although the work required a bachelor's degree, Vonnegut was hired after claiming to hold a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. His brother, Bernard, had worked at GE since 1945, contributed significantly to the iodine-based cloud seed project. In 1949, Kurt and Jane had a daughter named Edith. Still working for GE, Vonnegut has his first work, entitled "Report on Barnhouse Securities", published in the Feb. 11 issue of 1950 Collier's , which he received $ 750. Vonnegut wrote another story, having been trained by a fictional editor at Collier's Knox Burger and again selling it to a magazine, this time for $ 950. Burger suggests he quit GE, a course he has reflected on before. Vonnegut moved with his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts to write full-time, and left GE in 1951.
First novel
On Cape Cod, Vonnegut makes the most of his money for magazines like Collier's The Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan . He also did the job as an English teacher, wrote copies for advertising agencies, and opened the first Saab USA dealer, which ultimately failed. In 1952, Vonnegut's first novel, Piano Player , was published by Scribner's. This novel has a post-End World War three setting, where factory workers have been replaced by machines.
Piano Players refers to Vonnegut's experience as an employee at GE. He quipped the drive to climb the corporate ladder, which on the Piano Player quickly disappeared as automation increased, putting even executives out of work. The main character, Paul Proteus, has an ambitious wife, a traitor's assistant, and a feeling of empathy for the poor. Sent by his superior, Kroner, as a double agent among the poor (who owns all the material goods they want, but little sense of purpose), he leads them in a machine-smashing-engine-burning revolution. The Piano Players declared Vonnegut's rejection of McCarthyism, something that was clarified when the Ghost Shirt, Paul's revolutionary organization pierced and ultimately led, called by one character as "the same traveler."
In Piano Players, Vonnegut derives many techniques that will be used in his later works. Shah of Bratpuhr, a heavy drinker, an immigrant from the dystopian American company, was able to ask many questions that no insider would ask, or would cause a violation by doing so. For example, when taken to see the supercomputer EPICAC intelligent supercomputer, Shah asked "what are people for?" and did not receive an answer. Speaking for Vonnegut, he considered it a "false god". This type of foreign visitor will reappear throughout the Vonnegut literature.
The New York Times author and critic Granville Hicks gave Piano Player positive reviews, better compare it to Aldous Huxley Brave New World . Hicks calls Vonnegut a "sharp-eyed satirist". None of the reviewers thought the novel was so important. Several editions were printed - one by Bantam under the title Utopia 14 , and the other by the Doubleday Sci-fi Book Science Club - where Vonnegut earned the reputation of a science fiction writer, a genre favored by the author at the time. He defended the genre, and deplored the perceived feeling that "no one can be an honorable writer and understand how the refrigerator works."
Fighting writer
After the Piano Players, Vonnegut continues to sell short stories to various magazines. In 1954, the couple had a third child, Nanette. With a growing family and no financially successful novel, Vonnegut's short story supports the family. In 1958, his sister, Alice, died of cancer two days after her husband, James Carmalt Adams, was killed in a train accident. Vonnegut adopted three sons Alice - James, Steven, and Kurt, respectively aged 14, 11, and 9 years old.
Grappling with family challenges, Vonnegut continues to write, publishing a very different novel in terms of plot. The Sirens of Titan (1959) features the invasion of Mars Earth, as experienced by bored billionaires, Malachi Constant. He meets Winston Rumfoord, an almost omnipotent, but trapped, arbitrator in space that enables him to appear on Earth every 59 days. Billionaire learned that his actions and events of all history are determined by the robotic alien race of the planet Tralfamadore, which requires a substitute part that only advanced civilizations can make to repair their spacecraft and return home-human history has been manipulated to produce it. Some human structures, such as the Kremlin, are coded signals from aliens to their vessels for how long to wait for repairs to occur. Reviewers are not sure what to think of the book, with one comparing it with Offenbach opera The Tales of Hoffmann .
Rumfoord, based on Franklin D. Roosevelt, also physically resembles the former president. Rumfoord was described, "he put a cigarette in a long bone cigarette case, lit it, he thrust his jaw in. The cigarette holder pointed straight up." William Rodney Allen, in his guidance for the works of Vonnegut, states that Rumfoord gives an indication of fictitious political figures who will play a leading role in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Jailbird .
Mother Night , published in 1961, received little attention at the time of publication. Howard W. Campbell Jr., the protagonist Vonnegut, was an American who went to Nazi Germany during the war as a double agent for the US Strategic Services Office, and ascended to the highest ranks of the regime as radio propagandists. After the war, the spy agency refused to clear his name and he was eventually jailed by Israel in the same cell block as Adolf Eichmann, and later committed suicide. Vonnegut writes in the preface for the next edition, "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be". The literary critic Lawrence Berkove considers the novel, like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn Adventure, to describe the tendency for "imitators to get carried away by their imitation, to be what they imitate and therefore to live in a world of illusion".
Also published in 1961 is Vonnegut's short story, "Harrison Bergeron", set in a dystopic future where all are equal, even if it means disfiguring beautiful people and forcing the strong or intelligent to use devices that negate their strengths. Fourteen-year-old Harrison is a genius and athlete forced to wear record-breaking and imprisoned "defects" for trying to overthrow the government. He escapes to a television studio, removes his restraints, and frees the ballerina from its main weight. When they dance, they are killed by Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers. Vonnegut, in a later letter, suggested that "Harrison Bergeron" may have come from envy and self-pity as a high school incompatibility. In his 1974 biography of Vonnegut, Stanley Schatt suggested that this short story shows "in any leveling process, what is truly missing, according to Vonnegut, is beauty, elegance, and wisdom." Darryl Hattenhauer, in his 1998 journal article on "Harrison Bergeron", theorized that his story is a satire of the American Cold War misconception of communism and socialism.
With Cat's Cradle (1963), Allen wrote, "Vonnegut hit the full step for the first time". The narrator, John, intends to write Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional fathers of the atomic bomb, is trying to cover up the human side of the scientist. Hoenikker, in addition to the bomb, has developed another threat to humans, ice-9, solid water stable at room temperature, and if the particles fall into the water, all of it becomes ice-9. Much of the second half of the book is spent on the Caribbean fictional island of San Lorenzo, where John explores a religion called Bokononism, whose scriptures (quotations from which it is cited), provide novels not provided by moral core science. After the ocean is converted into ice 9, wiping out most of humanity, John wanders to the frozen surface, trying to have himself and his story endure.
Vonnegut based the title character of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964), to an accountant he knows on Cape Cod, who specializes in clients in difficulties and often has to entertain them. Eliot Rosewater, the rich son of a Republican senator, sought to redeem his wartime killing of non-combat firefighters by serving in volunteer fires, and by giving money to those in trouble or need. The stress of fighting to control the charitable foundation pushed him to the edge, and he was placed in a mental hospital. He recovers, and ends the financial battle by declaring children from his area to be his heirs. Allen considers God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is more "screaming from the heart than novel under the author's full intellectual control", reflecting the family and emotional pressures experienced by Vonnegut at the time.
Five Animal Slaughterhouse
After spending nearly two years at the author's workshop at the University of Iowa, teaching a program each semester, Vonnegut was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Germany. By the time he won it, in March 1967, he became a famous writer. He used the funds to travel in Eastern Europe, including to Dresden, where he found many famous buildings still in ruins. At the time of the bombing, Vonnegut did not appreciate the magnitude of the damage in Dresden; Her enlightenment came slowly as information dribbled out, and based on her early figures it became believed that 135,000 had died there.
Vonnegut has written about his war experience in Dresden since he returned from war, but can never write anything acceptable to himself or his publisher - Chapter 1 of the Five-Five-Cutting House tells of difficulties. Released in 1969, the novel skyrocketed into Vonnegut fame. It tells the story of the life of Billy Pilgrim, who liked Vonnegut born in 1922 and survived the Dresden bombings. The story is told in a non-linear way, with many story climaxes - Billy's death in 1976, the alien abduction of planet Tralfamadore nine years earlier, and the execution of Billy Edgar Derby's friend in Dresden's ashes to steal the teapot-revealed on the first page of the story. In 1970, he was also a correspondent at Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War. The Animal Slaughterhouse-Five received a generally positive review, with Michael Crichton's inscription on The New Republic, "he wrote about the most painful thing his novels have attacked in fear our deepest sense of automation and bombs, our deepest political family, our most intense hatred and love No one else has written a book on these things, they are inaccessible to the normal novelist. "The book went straight to the list of books best selling The New York Times . Vonnegut's previous work has attracted many students, and the Slaughterhouse-Five's anti-war message echoed with the generation marked by the Vietnam War. He then stated that the loss of confidence in the government that led to Vietnam was finally allowed for an honest conversation about events like Dresden.
Later career and event
After the <5> Cut-Five-Fifth was published, Vonnegut embraced financial fame and security attended to his release. He is hailed as a hero of the growing anti-war movement in the United States, invited to speak at demonstrations, and provide lecture addresses across the country. In addition to teaching briefly at Harvard University as a lecturer in creative writing in 1970, Vonnegut taught at City College of New York as a prominent professor during the academic year 1973-1974. He was later elected vice-president of the National Institute of Art and Literature, and was honored with, among others, Indiana University and Bennington College. Vonnegut also wrote a drama entitled Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which opened on October 7, 1970 at Theater de Lys in New York. Receiving mixed reviews, it closed on March 14, 1971. In 1972, Universal Pictures adapted Slaughterhouse-Five into a film that the author claims is "perfect".
Meanwhile, Vonnegut's private life was divided. His wife Jane had embraced Christianity, which contradicted Vonnegut's atheist beliefs, and with five of their six children leaving home, Vonnegut said both were forced to find "other types of work that seemed important to do." The couple fought against their different beliefs until Vonnegut moved from their Cape Cod home to New York in 1971. Vonnegut called the disagreement "painful", and said that the resulting split was "a terrible and inevitable accident that we do not realize to be understood. "The couple divorced and they remained friends until Jane's death in late 1986. Beyond her marriage, she was greatly affected when her son Mark suffered a mental disorder in 1972, which aggravated Vonnegut's chronic depression, and took him to retrieve Ritalin. When he stopped taking drugs in the mid-1970s, he began to see a psychologist every week.
Vonnegut's difficulties manifest in various ways; But the most obvious is, the very slow progress he made on the next novel, the very funny Breakfast of Champions . In 1971, Vonnegut stopped writing the novel altogether. When it was finally released in 1973, it was scanned critically. In the book Thomas S. Hischak the American Literature on the Stage and the Screen , Breakfast of Champions is called "funny and weird", but reviewers note that it "has no substance and it seems an exercise in a literary excitement. "Novel 1976 Vonnegut Slapstick, contemplating the relationship between him and his sister (Alice), meets with the same fate. In The New York Times about Slapstick , Christopher Lehmann-Haupt says Vonnegut "seems less trying [storytelling] than ever", and that's still stop telling stories. "Sometimes Vonnegut is dissatisfied with the personal nature of the complaints of his traitors.
In 1979, Vonnegut married Jill Krementz, a photographer he met while he was working on a series of writers in the early 1970s. With Jill, she adopted a girl, Lily, when the baby was three days old. In subsequent years, his popularity reemerged when he published several satirical books, including Jailbird <1972>, Deadeye Dick (1982), GalÃÆ'¡pagos (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 alone in Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School . The last of the fourteen Vonnegut novels, Timequake (1997), is, as a University of Detroit professor of history and Vonnegut biographer, Gregory Sumner said, "a reflection of an old man facing mortality and testimony to belief which is fought in the resilience of human consciousness and agency. "Vonnegut's last book, a collection of essays entitled A Man Without a Country (2005), became a bestseller.
Death and inheritance
In the 2006 Rolling Stone interview, Vonnegut with Sardonic stated that he would sue Brown & amp; Tobacco company Williamson, the cigarette maker Pall Mall brand he smoked since he was twelve or fourteen, for false advertising. "And do you know why?" he says. "Because I'm 83 years old, lying bastards! On the Brown & Williamson package promised to kill me." He died on the night of 11 April 2007 in Manhattan, as a result of a brain injury that occurred weeks earlier from the fall at his brownstone house in New York. His death was reported by his wife Jill. Vonnegut is 84 years old. At the time of his death, Vonnegut has written fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays and five non-fiction books. A book consisting of unpublished pieces of Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect, was compiled and posthumously published by Vonnegut's son Mark in 2008.
When asked about Vonnegut's influence on his work, author Josip Novakovich states that he has "learned a great deal from Vonnegut - how to compress something and not compromise them, how to deviate into history, to quote from historical records, and not to restrain narratives. "The Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez says that the author will" be remembered as a ridiculous social critic and the ultimate novelist of the counter ", and Dinitia Smith of The New York Times
Vonnegut has inspired many posthumous posthumous works. In 2008, Kurt Vonnegut Society was established, and in November 2010, the Kurt Vonnegut Warning Library was opened in the town of Vonnegut in Indianapolis. The Library of America published a summary of the Vonnegut composition between 1963 and 1973 in the following April, and another summary of his previous work in 2012. The end of 2011 saw the release of two Vonnegut biographies, Gregory Sumner's Unstuck in Time and Charles J. Shields Dan So It Goes . The Shields biography of Vonnegut created some controversy. According to The Guardian , this book describes Vonnegut as far, cruel and mean. "Cruel, nasty and scary is the common word used to describe him by friends, colleagues, and Shields family quotations," says The Daily Beast's Wendy Smith. "Towards the end he was very weak, very depressed and almost depressed," said Jerome Klinkowitz of the University of Northern Iowa, who has examined Vonnegut in depth.
Vonnegut's work has provoked outrage on several occasions. Her most prominent novel, Slaughterhouse-Five , has been rejected or removed at various institutions in at least 18 cases. In the case of Trees School District v. Pico , the United States Supreme Court ruled that the school district ban on Slaughterhouse-Five - which the council called "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain dirty" - and eight other novels are unconstitutional. When the school board in the Republic, Missouri decided to pull the Vonnegut novel from its library, Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library offered free copies to all students in the district.
Tally, writing in 2013, points out that Vonnegut has recently been the subject of serious study rather than fan praise, and much remains to be written about him. "The time for scholars to say 'This is why Vonnegut is worth reading' has come to a definitive end, thankfully We know he is worth reading Now let us know the things we do not know." Todd F. Davis noted that Vonnegut's work remained alive by his loyal readers, who had a "significant influence as they continued to buy Vonnegut's work, passed it on to the next generation and kept the whole canon in print - an impressive list of over twenty books [Dell Publishing] keep updating and hawk with new cover designs. "Donald E. Morse noted that Vonnegut," is now firmly, if somewhat controversial, taking shelter in American and world literary canons as well as in secondary schools, colleges and graduate curricula ". Tally wrote the work of Vonnegut:
Vonnegut's 14 novels, while each doing its own thing, together remain an experiment in the whole same project. Experimenting with the shape of the American novel itself, Vonnegut engages in a vast modernist effort to understand and describe the fragmented, unstable, and troubling experiences of postmodern America... That he has not succeeded in representing the socially shifting diversity. experience is the point. What matters is the effort, and the recognition that... we must try to map this unstable and dangerous field, even if we know in advance that our efforts will fail.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inaugurated Vonnegut posthumously in 2015.
Asteroid 25399 Vonnegut is named in his honor.
Maps Kurt Vonnegut
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War
In the introduction Cut-Five-Fifth House Vonnegut recounts meeting filmmaker Harrison Starr at a party asking if his upcoming book is an anti-war novel - "I think" Vonnegut replied. Starr replied, "Why do not you write an anti-glacier novel?". This underscores Vonnegut's conviction that war, unfortunately, is inevitable, but it is important to ensure that the fighting war is only a war.
In 2011, NPR wrote, "Kurt Vonnegut's mix of anti-war and satire sentiments made him one of the most popular writers of the 1960s." Vonnegut stated in a 1987 interview that "my own feelings are civilizations that ended in World War I, and we are still trying to recover from it", and that he wanted to write works that focus on war without glorifying the war itself. Vonnegut did not intend to publish anymore, but his anger against the George W. Bush administration made him write A Man Without a Country.
The Five-Fifth-Five-House is Vonnegut's most famous novel for its antiwar theme, but the author expresses his belief in ways beyond the description of Dresden's destruction. She has one character, Mary O'Hare, argues that "war is driven partly by books and movies," made by "Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of the other warlike, war-loving, and dirty old men". Vonnegut made a number of comparisons between Dresden and the Hiroshima bombings at Slaughterhouse-Five and wrote in Palm Sunday 1991 that "I learned how cruel it can become when an atom bomb is dropped in Hiroshima ".
Nuclear war, or at least nuclear weapons spread, is mentioned in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. In Piano Players, EPICAC computers are given control over nuclear weapons, and are accused of deciding whether to use nuclear weapons or high explosions. In Cradle Cat , John's initial goal in setting pen to paper was to write a report on what a prominent American had done when Hiroshima was bombed.
Religion
Vonnegut is an atheist and humanist, serving as honorary president of the American Humanist Association. In an interview for Playboy, he stated that his ancestors who came to the United States did not believe in God, and he learned atheism from his parents. But he does not underestimate those who seek comfort from religion, calling church associations as a type of extended family. Like Clemens great-grandfather, Vonnegut is a free thinker. He occasionally attends Unitarian church, but with little consistency. In his autobiography of Palm Sunday, Vonnegut says he is "agnostic of the worship of Christ"; in a speech at the Unitarian Universalist Association, he calls himself an "atheist who loves Christ". However, he is keen to emphasize that he is not a Christian.
Vonnegut is an admirer of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, especially the Beatitudes, and incorporated it into his own doctrines. He also calls it in many of his works. In his 1991 less fate than death, Vonnegut states that during the Reagan administration, "anything that sounds like the Sermon on the Mount is socialistic or communistic, and therefore anti-American". At Palm Sunday , he writes that "The Sermon on the Mount shows compassion that can never falter or fade." However, Vonnegut has a deep dislike for certain aspects of Christianity, often reminding his readers of the bloody history of the Crusades and other religiously inspired violence. He hates televangelists by the end of the 20th century, feeling that their thinking is narrow-minded.
Religion often appears in Vonnegut's work, both in his novel and elsewhere. He lured a number of his speeches with religion-focused rhetoric, and tended to use phrases like "God forbid" and "thank God". He once wrote his own version of the Requiem Mass, which was later translated into Latin and arranged into music. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian , Vonnegut went to heaven after he was euthanized by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Once in heaven, he interviewed 21 celebrities who have died, including Isaac Asimov, William Shakespeare, and Kilgore Trout - the last fictional character of some of his novels. Vonnegut's work is filled with figures who establish new beliefs, and religion often serves as a major plot tool, for example in the Piano Players, The Sirens of Titan and Cradle Cat In The Sirens of Titan , Rumfoord proclaims the Lord's Church that really does not care. The Five-Fifth-Five House saw Billy Pilgrim, lacking his own religion, but became an assistant clergyman in the military and displayed a large cross on his bedroom wall. In Cradle Cat , Vonnegut discovered the religion of Bokononism.
Politics
Vonnegut is less sympathetic to liberalism or conservatism, and thinks of the simplicity of American politics. "If you want to take my gun from me, and you all to kill the fetus, and love it when homosexuals marry each other [...] you are liberal.If you fight the deviation and for the rich you are a conservative.What is more simple? political parties, Vonnegut said, "Two real political parties in America are Winners and Losers, people do not recognize this, they claim membership in two imaginary parties, Republicans and Democrats, instead."
Vonnegut ignores the more prominent political ideology that supports socialism, which he says can provide a valuable substitute for what he sees as social Darwinism and the "survival of the fittest" spirit of American society, believing that "socialism will be good for the common man." Vonnegut often returns to 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 have it." As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free. "Vonnegut expressed disappointment that communism and socialism seem to be a bad topic for most Americans, and believe that they can offer a useful substitute for contemporary social and economic systems.
Write
Influences
Vonnegut's writing is inspired by a mixture of eclectic sources. When he was younger, Vonnegut stated that he read pulp fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and action adventure. He also reads Classical books, like the works of Aristophanes. Aristophanes, like Vonnegut, wrote a funny critique of contemporary society. The life and work of Vonnegut also have similarities to Mark Twain's Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Both share a pessimistic view of humanity, and a skeptical view of religion, and, as Vonnegut says, both are "linked to enemies in the great war," as Twain pointed out in the South during the American Civil War, and Vonnegut's Name and German ancestors link it to enemy of the United States in both world wars.
Vonnegut referred to George Orwell as his favorite author, and admitted that he tried to imitate Orwell. "I like his attention on the poor, I love his socialism, I like his simplicity," Vonnegut said. Vonnegut also said that Orwell's Einety Eighty-Four, and Boss Aldous Huxley's Orwell Brave New World, was strongly influenced by his debut novel, The Piano Players, in 1952 Vonnegut comments that the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson are symbols of deeply thought-out works he attempts to imitate in his own work. Vonnegut also praised playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw as "her heroes", and "great influence." In his own family, Vonnegut declared that his mother, Edith, had the greatest influence on him. "Mother [I] thought she might make a new fortune by writing for slippery magazines, she took a short story course at night, she studied magazines by the way the gamblers learned the racing form."
Early in his career, Vonnegut decided to model his style after Henry David Thoreau, who wrote as if from a child's perspective, enabling Thoreau's works to become more widely understood. Using a young narrative voice allows Vonnegut to convey the concept in a simple and straightforward way. Other influences on Vonnegut include The War of the Worlds writer H.G Wells, and satirist Jonathan Swift. Vonnegut praised the newspaper king H. L. Mencken for having inspired him to become a journalist.
Style and techniques
In his book Popular Contemporary Writer , Michael D. Sharp describes Vonnegut's linguistic style as something straightforward; the sentence is concise, the language is simple, the paragraphs are brief, and the tone is ordinary. Vonnegut uses this style to deliver usually complex subject material in ways that many audiences can understand. He valued his time as a journalist for his abilities, appointing his work with the Chicago City News Bureau, which required him to tell the story in a telephone conversation. The composition of Vonnegut is also mixed with different references to his own life, especially in Slaughterhouse-Five and Slapstick .
Vonnegut believes that the ideas, and convincing communications of those ideas to the reader, are crucial to the art of literature. He does not always cover up his points: many of the Piano Players lead to the moment when Paul, tried and connected to a lie detector, is asked to tell a lie, and declares, "every new scientific knowledge is a matter of good for humanity ". Robert T. Tally Jr., in his book on Vonnegut novels, writes, "rather than undermining and destroying the ubiquitous icons of middle-class American life in the 20th century, Vonnegut gently reveals their basic simplicity." Vonnegut not only proposes a utopian solution to the diseases of American society, but shows how such a scheme does not allow ordinary people to live free of desires and anxieties. The large artificial family formed by the US population into Slapstick soon serves as an excuse for tribalism, with people not providing assistance to those who are not part of their group, and with a large family place in social hierarchy becoming vital.
In their introductory essay "Kurt Vonnegut and Humor", Tally and Peter C. Kunze state that Vonnegut is not a "black humor", but "frustrated idealist" who uses "comic parables" to teach absurd readers, bitter or hopeless truths, with witticisms gloomy service to make the reader laugh rather than cry. "Vonnegut makes sense through humor, which, in the author's view, as a valid way to map this crazy world as another strategy." Vonnegut does not like to be called a black humorist, feeling that, as with many literary labels, the reader ignores the aspect of the author's work that is inconsistent with the stereotype of the label.
Vonnegut's works, at various times, have been labeled science fiction, satire and postmodern. He also rejects such labels, but his work does contain a common metaphor that is often associated with the genre. In some of his books, Vonnegut envisions foreign societies and civilizations, as is common in science fiction works. Vonnegut does this to emphasize or exaggerate the absurdities and peculiarities in our own world. Furthermore, Vonnegut often makes humorous problems that plague society, as is done in satirical works. However, the literary theorist Robert Scholes notes in Fabulation and Metaphics that Vonnegut "reject [s] traditional satirical beliefs in the effectiveness of satire as an instrument of reform. [He has] a finer faith in humanizing the value of laughter." Examples of postmodernism can also be found in Vonnegut's work. Postmodernism often requires a response to the theory that the truth of the world will be discovered through science. Postmodernists argue that truth is subjective, not objective, because it biases against the beliefs and views of each individual in the world. They often use unreliable first person narratives, and narrative fragmentation. One critic argues that Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, presents a metamorphosed, cool-headed look when looking for both to represent actual historical events while questioning the idea of ​​doing so. This is summarized in the opening sentence of the novel: "All this happened, more or less.. The war part, however, is pretty much true." This bombastic opening - "All this happens" - "reads like a complete mimesis statement" which is radically questioned in the rest of the quotation and "[t] creates an integrated perspective looking for temporary out-of-text themes (such as war and trauma) categorizing the novel textuality and the inherent construction at one and the same time. "While Vonnegut uses elements as fragmentation and metaphysical elements, in some of his works, he more clearly focuses on the dangers posed by individuals who find subjective truth, think of them as objective truth, then proceed to impose this truth on others.
Themes
Vonnegut is a vocal critic of the society in which he lives, and this is reflected in his writings. Some of the major social themes re-emerged in the works of Vonnegut, such as wealth, its absence, and uneven distribution among society. In The Sirens of Titan, the novel protagonist, Maleakhi Konstan, was separated into one of Saturn's moon, Titan, as a result of his enormous wealth, which made him arrogant and stubborn. In God Bless You, Lord Rosewater, readers may find it difficult to determine whether the rich or the poor are in a worse situation because the lives of both groups are governed by their wealth or their poverty. Furthermore, in Hocus Pocus, the protagonist was named Eugene Debs Hartke, a tribute to the famous socialist Eugene V. Debs and Vonnegut's socialist views. In Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, Thomas F. Marvin states: "Vonnegut suggests that, left unchecked, capitalism will erode the foundation of US democracy." Marvin points out that Vonnegut's works show what happens when the "aristocracy of descent" develops, where wealth is inherited according to the family line: the poor American ability to deal with their situation is greatly diminished. Vonnegut also often regrets social Darwinism, and the "survival of the fittest" view of society. He points out that social Darwinism leads to a society condemning the poor to their own misfortunes, and fails to help them get out of poverty because "they deserve their destiny". Vonnegut also faces the idea of ​​free will in some of his works. At Slaughterhouse-Five and Timequake the characters have no choice in what they do; at the Breakfast of Champions , the characters are very clearly stripped of their free will and even accept them as gifts; and at Cradle Cat , Bokononism views the free will as a heretic.
The majority of Vonnegut characters are estranged from their real families and are trying to build substitutes or extended families. For example, engineers at Piano Players call their managing partner "Mother". In Cradle Cat , Vonnegut devised two separate methods for the loneliness to be fought: A "karass," a group of individuals designated by God to do his will, and the "granfalloon," defined by Marvin as " meaningless associations of people, like fraternities or nations ". Similarly, in Slapstick, the US government codified that all Americans are part of a large family.
The fear of losing one's goals in life is a theme in Vonnegut's work. The Great Depression forced Vonnegut to witness the devastation many felt when they lost their jobs, and while at General Electric, Vonnegut watched machines being built to replace the human workplace. He confronts these things in his works through reference to the growing use of automation and its impact on human society. It is highly represented in its first novel,
Suicide by fire is another common theme in Vonnegut's works; the author often returns to the theory that "many people do not like life." He uses this as an explanation of why humans have severely damaged their environment, and made devices like nuclear weapons that could make their creators extinct. In Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut displays a neutron bomb, which he says is designed to kill people, but leaves buildings and structures untouched. He also uses this theme to demonstrate their carelessness that puts powerful and awakening devices at the disposal of politicians.
"What is the purpose of your life?" is a question Vonnegut often thinks about in his works. When one of the Vonnegut characters, Kilgore Trout, finds the question "What is the purpose of life?" written in the bathroom, the answer is, "To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, stupid." Marvin discovers the curious Trout theory, recalling that Vonnegut was an atheist, and therefore for him, no Creator reported back, and commented that, "[as] Trout tells a life without meaning after another, the reader is left wondering how the compassion for Bluebeard , Vonnegut quotes his son Mark, and gives an answer to what he believes to be the meaning of life: "We are here to help each other through this, whatever it is. "
Work
Unless otherwise noted, the items in this list are taken from Thomas F. Marvin Kurt Vonnegut's 2002 book: A Critical Companion , and the date in brackets is the date the job was first published:
Note
References
Quote
Source
External links
- Kurt Vonnegut on Curlie (based on DMOZ)
- Kurt Vonnegut paper at Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington
- Vonnegut, Kurt in the Library of Congress
- Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library
- Works by Kurt Vonnegut in Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Kurt Vonnegut in the Internet Archive
- Works by Kurt Vonnegut on LibriVox (public domain audiobook)
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on Internet Speculative Fantasy Internet
- Kurt Vonnegut on IMDb
- Appearance in C-SPAN
Further reading
- Oltean-CÃÆ'®mpean, A. A. (2016). "Kurt Vonnegut's Humanism: A Writer's Journey to the Proclamation for Peace." Studii De? tiint? ? i Cultur? , 12 (2), 259-266.
- PÃÆ'¡rraga, J. J. (2013). Kurt Vonnegut's Search for Identity. Revista Futhark, 8185-199
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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