Pengguna:David Wadie Fisher-Freberg/Bak pasir

Views

The beliefs I have to defend are so soft and complicated, actually, and, when vivisected, turn into bowls of undifferentiated mush. I am a pacifist, I am an anarchist, I am a planetary citizen, and so on.

— Kurt Vonnegut

War

In the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut recounts meeting the film producer Harrison Starr at a party, who asked him whether his forthcoming book was an anti-war novel—"Yes, I guess", replied Vonnegut. Starr responded: "Why don't you write an anti-glacier novel?" In the novel, Vonnegut's character continues: "What he meant, of course, is that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death". Vonnegut was a pacifist.

A large painting of Vonnegut on Massachusetts Avenue, Indianapolis, blocks away from the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and the Athenæum (Das_Deutsche_Haus), which was designed by his family's architecture firm

In 2011, NPR wrote: "Kurt Vonnegut's blend of anti-war sentiment and satire made him one of the most popular writers of the 1960s." Vonnegut stated in a 1987 interview: "my own feeling is that civilization ended in World War I, and we're still trying to recover from that", and that he wanted to write war-focused works without glamorizing war itself. Vonnegut had not intended to publish again, but his anger against the George W. Bush administration led him to write A Man Without a Country.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the Vonnegut novel best known for its antiwar themes, but the author expressed his beliefs in ways beyond the depiction of the destruction of Dresden. One character, Mary O'Hare, opines that "wars were partly encouraged by books and movies", starring "Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men". Vonnegut made a number of comparisons between Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima in Slaughterhouse-Five and wrote in Palm Sunday (1991): "I learned how vile that religion of mine could be when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima".

Nuclear war, or at least deployed nuclear arms, is mentioned in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. In Player Piano, the computer EPICAC is given control of the nuclear arsenal and is charged with deciding whether to use high-explosive or nuclear arms. In Cat's Cradle, John's original purpose in setting pen to paper was to write an account of what prominent Americans had been doing as Hiroshima was bombed.

Religion

Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. ... I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake."

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, 1999

Vonnegut was an atheist, a humanist and a freethinker, serving as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association. In an interview for Playboy, he stated that his forebears who came to the United States did not believe in God, and he learned his atheism from his parents. Vonnegut did not, however, disdain those who seek the comfort of religion, hailing church associations as a type of extended family. He occasionally attended a Unitarian church, but with little consistency. In his autobiographical work Palm Sunday, Vonnegut says that he is a "Christ-worshipping agnostic". During a speech to the Unitarian Universalist Association, he called himself a "Christ-loving atheist". However, he was keen to stress that he was not a Christian.

Vonnegut was an admirer of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, particularly the Beatitudes, and incorporated it into his own doctrines. He also referred to it in many of his works. In his 1991 book Fates Worse than Death, Vonnegut suggests that during the Reagan administration, "anything that sounded like the Sermon on the Mount was socialistic or communistic, and therefore anti-American". In Palm Sunday, he wrote that "the Sermon on the Mount suggests a mercifulness that can never waver or fade". However, Vonnegut had a deep dislike for certain aspects of Christianity, often reminding his readers of the bloody history of the Crusades and other religion-inspired violence. He despised the televangelists of the late 20th century, feeling that their thinking was narrow-minded.

Religion features frequently in Vonnegut's work, both in his novels and elsewhere. He laced a number of his speeches with religion-focused rhetoric and was prone to using such expressions as "God forbid" and "thank God". He once wrote his own version of the Requiem Mass, which he then had translated into Latin and set to music. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Vonnegut goes to heaven after he is euthanized by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Once in heaven, he interviews 21 deceased celebrities, including Isaac Asimov, William Shakespeare, and Kilgore Trout—the last a fictional character from several of his novels. Vonnegut's works are filled with characters founding new faiths, and religion often serves as a major plot device, for example, in Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle. In The Sirens of Titan, Rumfoord proclaims The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Slaughterhouse-Five sees Billy Pilgrim, lacking religion himself, nevertheless become a chaplain's assistant in the military and display a large crucifix on his bedroom wall. In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut invented the religion of Bokononism.

Politics

Vonnegut's thoughts on politics were shaped in large part by Robert Redfield, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, co-founder of the Committee on Social Thought, and one of Vonnegut's professors during his time at the university. In a commencement address, Vonnegut remarked that "Dr. Redfield's theory of the Folk Society ... has been the starting point for my politics, such as they are". Vonnegut did not particularly sympathize with liberalism or conservatism and mused on the specious simplicity of American politics, saying facetiously: "If you want to take my guns away from me, and you're all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other ... you're a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you're a conservative. What could be simpler?" Regarding political parties, Vonnegut said: "The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead."

Vonnegut disregarded more mainstream American political ideologies in favor of socialism, which he thought could provide a valuable substitute for what he saw as social Darwinism and a spirit of "survival of the fittest" in American society, believing that "socialism would be a good for the common man". Vonnegut would often return to a 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'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free." Vonnegut expressed disappointment that communism and socialism seemed to be unsavory topics to the average American and believed that they offered beneficial substitutes to contemporary social and economic systems.

Technology

In A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut quipped "I have been called a Luddite. I welcome it. Do you know what a Luddite is? A person who hates newfangled contraptions." The negative effects of the progress of technology is a constant theme throughout Vonnegut's works, from Player Piano to his final essay collection A Man Without a Country. Political theorist Patrick Deneen has identified this skepticism of technological progress as a theme of Vonnegut novels and stories, including Player Piano, "Harrison Bergeron", and "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow". Scholars who position Vonnegut as a critic of liberalism reference his pessimism toward technological progress. Vonnegut described Player Piano some years after its publication as "a novel about people and machines, and machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will." Loss of jobs due to machine innovation, and thus loss of meaning or purpose in life, is a key plot point in the novel. The "newfangled contraptions" Vonnegut hated included the television, which he critiqued often throughout his non-fiction and fiction. In Timequake, for example, Vonnegut tells the story of "Booboolings", human analogs who develop morally through their imaginative formation. However, one evil sister on the planet of the Booboolings learns to build televisions from lunatics. He writes:

When the bad sister was a young woman, she and the nuts worked up designs for television cameras and transmitters and receivers. Then she got money from her very rich mom to manufacture these satanic devices, which made imaginations redundant. They were instantly popular because the shows were so attractive and no thinking was involved ... Generations of Booboolings grew up without imaginations ... Without imaginations, though, they couldn't do what their ancestors had done, which was read interesting, heartwarming stories in the faces of one another. So ... Booboolings became among the most merciless creatures in the local family of galaxies.

Against imagination-killing devices like televisions, and against electronic substitutes for embodied community, Vonnegut argued that "Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something."

Writing

Influences

Vonnegut's writing was inspired by an eclectic mix of sources. When he was younger, Vonnegut stated that he read works of pulp fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and action-adventure. He also read the classics, such as the plays of Aristophanes—like Vonnegut's works, humorous critiques of contemporary society. Vonnegut's life and work also share similarities with that of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn writer Mark Twain. Both shared pessimistic outlooks on humanity and a skeptical take on religion and, as Vonnegut put it, were both "associated with the enemy in a major war", as Twain briefly enlisted in the South's cause during the American Civil War, and Vonnegut's German name and ancestry connected him with the United States' enemy in both world wars. He also cited Ambrose Bierce as an influence, calling "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" the greatest American short story and deeming any who disagreed or had not read the story "twerps".

Vonnegut called George Orwell his favorite writer and admitted that he tried to emulate Orwell. "I like his concern for the poor, I like his socialism, I like his simplicity", Vonnegut said. Vonnegut also said that Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley heavily influenced his debut novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel also included ideas from mathematician Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Vonnegut commented that Robert Louis Stevenson's stories were emblems of thoughtfully put together works that he tried to mimic in his own compositions. Vonnegut also hailed playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw as "a hero of [his]" and an "enormous influence". Within his own family, Vonnegut stated that his mother, Edith, had the greatest influence on him. "[My] mother thought she might make a new fortune by writing for the slick magazines. She took short-story courses at night. She studied writers the way gamblers study horses."

Early on in his career, Vonnegut decided to model his style after Henry David Thoreau, who wrote as if from the perspective of a child, allowing Thoreau's works to be more widely comprehensible. Using a youthful narrative voice allowed Vonnegut to deliver concepts in a modest and straightforward way. Other influences on Vonnegut include The War of the Worlds author H. G. Wells and satirist Jonathan Swift. Vonnegut credited American journalist and critic H. L. Mencken for inspiring him to become a journalist.

Style and technique

The book Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and his longtime friend and former student Suzanne McConnell, published posthumously by Rosetta Books and Seven Stories Press in 2019, delves into the style, humor, and methodologies Vonnegut employed, including his belief that one should "Write like a human being. Write like a writer."

I've heard the Vonnegut voice described as "manic depressive", and there's certainly something to this. It has an incredible amount of energy married to a very deep and dark sense of despair. It's frequently over-the-top, and scathingly satirical, but it never strays too far from pathos—from an immense sympathy for society's vulnerable, oppressed and powerless. But, then, it also contains a huge allotment of warmth. Most of the time, reading Kurt Vonnegut feels more like being spoken to by a very close friend. There's an inclusiveness to his writing that draws you in, and his narrative voice is seldom absent from the story for any length of time. Usually, it's right there in the foreground—direct, involving and extremely idiosyncratic.

Gavin Extence, The Huffington Post, 2013

In his book Popular Contemporary Writers, Michael D. Sharp describes Vonnegut's linguistic style as straightforward, his sentences concise, his language simple, his paragraphs brief, and his ordinary tone conversational. Vonnegut uses this style to convey normally complex subject matter in a way that is intelligible to a large audience. He credited his time as a journalist for his ability and pointed to his work with the Chicago City News Bureau, which required him to convey stories in telephone conversations. Vonnegut's compositions include distinct references to his own life, notably in Slaughterhouse-Five and Slapstick.

Vonnegut believed that ideas, and the convincing communication of those ideas to the reader, were vital to literary art. He did not always sugarcoat his points: much of Player Piano leads to the moment when Paul, on trial and hooked to a lie detector, is asked to tell a falsehood. Paul states: "every new piece of scientific knowledge is a good thing for humanity". Robert T. Tally Jr., in his volume on Vonnegut's novels, wrote: "rather than tearing down and destroying the icons of twentieth-century, middle-class American life, Vonnegut gently reveals their basic flimsiness". Vonnegut did not simply propose utopian solutions to the ills of American society but showed how such schemes would not allow ordinary people to live lives free from want and anxiety. The large, artificial U.S. families in Slapstick soon serve as an excuse for tribalism. People give no help to those not part of their group; the extended family's place in the social hierarchy becomes vital.

In the introduction to their essay "Kurt Vonnegut and Humor", Tally and Peter C. Kunze suggest that Vonnegut was not a "black humorist", but a "frustrated idealist" who used "comic parables" to teach the reader absurd, bitter or hopeless truths, with his grim witticisms serving to make the reader laugh rather than cry. "Vonnegut makes sense through humor, which is, in the author's view, as valid a means of mapping this crazy world as any other strategies." Vonnegut resented being called a black humorist, feeling that, as with many literary labels, it allows readers to disregard aspects of a writer's work that do not fit the label.

Vonnegut's works have been labeled science fiction, satire and postmodern. He resisted such labels, but his works do contain common tropes in those genres. In his books, Vonnegut imagines alien societies and civilizations, as is common in science fiction. Vonnegut emphasizes or exaggerates absurdities and idiosyncrasies. Furthermore, Vonnegut makes fun of problems, as satire does. However, literary theorist Robert Scholes noted in Fabulation and Metafiction that Vonnegut "reject[s] the traditional satirist's faith in the efficacy of satire as a reforming instrument. [He has] a more subtle faith in the humanizing value of laughter."

Postmodernism entails a response to the theory that science will reveal truths. Postmodernists contend that truth is subjective, rather than objective. Truth includes bias toward individual beliefs and outlooks on the world. Postmodernist writers use unreliable, first-person narration, and narrative fragmentation. One critic has argued that Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, features a metafictional, Janus-headed outlook and seeks to represent historical events while doubting the ability to represent history. Doubt is evident in the opening lines of the novel: "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true." The bombastic opening—"All this happened"—"reads like a declaration of complete mimesis," which is radically called into question in the rest of the quote and "[t]his creates an integrated perspective that seeks out extratextual themes [like war and trauma] while thematizing the novel's textuality and inherent constructedness at one and the same time." Although Vonnegut does use fragmentation and metafiction in some of his works, he more distinctly focuses on the peril of individuals who find subjective truths, mistake them for objective truths, and proceed to impose these truths on other people.

Themes

Economy

Vonnegut was a vocal critic of American society, and this was reflected in his writings. Several key social themes recur in Vonnegut's works, such as wealth, the lack of it, and its unequal distribution among a society. In The Sirens of Titan, the novel's protagonist, Malachi Constant, is exiled to Saturn's moon Titan as a result of his vast wealth, which has made him arrogant and wayward. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, readers may find it difficult to determine whether the rich or the poor are in worse circumstances, as the lives of both groups' members are ruled by their wealth or their poverty. Further, in Hocus Pocus, the protagonist is named Eugene Debs Hartke, a homage to the famed socialist Eugene V. Debs and Vonnegut's socialist views.

In Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, Thomas F. Marvin states: "Vonnegut points out that, left unchecked, capitalism will erode the democratic foundations of the United States." Marvin suggests that Vonnegut's works demonstrate what happens when a "hereditary aristocracy" develops, where wealth is inherited along familial lines: the ability of poor Americans to overcome their situations is greatly or completely diminished. Vonnegut also often laments social Darwinism and a "survival of the fittest" view of society. He points out that social Darwinism leads to a society that condemns its poor for their own misfortune and fails to help them out of their poverty because "they deserve their fate".

Ethics in science

Science and the ethical obligations of scientists are also a common theme in Vonnegut's works. His first published story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect", like many of his early stories, centered on a scientist concerned about the uses of his own invention. Player Piano and Cat's Cradle explore the effects on humans of scientific advances. In 1969, Vonnegut gave a speech to the American Association of Physics Teachers called "The Virtuous Physicist". Asked afterwards what a virtuous scientist was, Vonnegut replied, "one who declines to work on weapons."

Life

Vonnegut also confronts the idea of free will in a number of his pieces. In Slaughterhouse-Five and Timequake the characters have no choice in what they do; in Breakfast of Champions, characters are very obviously stripped of their free will and even receive it as a gift; and in Cat's Cradle, Bokononism views free will as heretical.

The majority of Vonnegut's characters are estranged from their actual families and seek to build replacement or extended families. For example, the engineers in Player Piano called their manager's spouse "Mom". In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut devises two separate methods for loneliness to be combated: A "karass", which is a group of individuals appointed by God to do his will, and a "granfalloon", defined by Marvin as a "meaningless association of people, such as a fraternal group or a nation". Similarly, in Slapstick, the US government codifies that all Americans are a part of large extended families.

Fear of the losing one's purpose in life is a theme in Vonnegut's works. The Great Depression forced Vonnegut to witness the devastation many people felt when they lost their jobs, and while at General Electric, Vonnegut witnessed machines being built to take the place of human labor. He confronts these things in his works through references to the growing use of automation and its effects on human society. This is most starkly represented in his first novel, Player Piano, where many Americans are left purposeless and unable to find work, as machines replace human workers. Loss of purpose is also depicted in Galápagos, where a florist rages at her spouse for creating a robot able to do her job, and in Timequake, where an architect kills himself when replaced by computer software.

Suicide by fire is another common theme in Vonnegut's works; the author often returns to the theory that "many people are not fond of life". He uses this as an explanation for why humans have so severely damaged their environments and made devices such as nuclear weapons that can make their creators extinct. In Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut features the neutron bomb, which is designed to kill people, but leave buildings and structures untouched. He also uses this theme to demonstrate the recklessness of those who put powerful, apocalypse-inducing devices at the disposal of politicians.

"What is the point of life?" is a question Vonnegut often pondered in his works. When one of Vonnegut's characters, Kilgore Trout, finds the question "What is the purpose of life?" written in a bathroom, his response is: "To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool." Marvin finds Trout's theory curious, given that Vonnegut was an atheist, and thus for him, there is no Creator to report back to, and comments that, "[as] Trout chronicles one meaningless life after another, readers are left to wonder how a compassionate creator could stand by and do nothing while such reports come in". In the epigraph to Bluebeard, Vonnegut quotes his son Mark and gives an answer to what he believes is the meaning of life: "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

Tralfamadore

A fictional planet called Tralfamadore is a recurring motif in Vonnegut's works; a planet by that name is referenced in The Sirens of Titan, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, Hocus Pocus, and Timequake. It is variously depicted as being located outside of the Milky Way galaxy or being fictional within the fiction itself; in Slaughterhouse-Five, it is implied to be imaginary as a result of the protagonist losing his grip on reality. A recurring characteristic of the inhabitants of Tralfamadore is their low esteem of humanity. According to Julia A. Whitehead, Vonnegut used the concept of an imagined planet inhabited by beings more enlightened than humans as an outlet for escapism. By contrast, Lawrence R. Boer rejects the notion that the pessimism and fatalism of the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five reflects the views of the author, and Brian Stableford characterizes the different Tralfamadorian races in that book and The Sirens of Titan as "tiny-minded smartasses".

Awards and nominations

Award	Year	Category	Book	Result	Ref.
International Fantasy Award	1953	-	Player Piano	Nominated	-
Writers Guild of America Award	1960	Television script	"Auf Wiedersehen"	Won	-
Hugo Award	1960	Best Novel	The Sirens of Titan	Nominated
Hugo Award	1964	Best Novel	Cat's Cradle	Nominated
Nebula Award	1970	Best Novel	Slaughterhouse-Five	Nominated
Hugo Award	1970	Best Novel	Slaughterhouse-Five	Nominated
Drama Desk Award	1971	Outstanding New Play	Happy Birthday, Wanda June	Won	-
Seiun Award	1973	Foreign Novel	The Sirens of Titan	Won	-
Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation	1973	Best Dramatic Presentation	Slaughterhouse-Five	Won	-
John W. Campbell Award	1986	Best Science Fiction Novel	Galápagos	Nominated
Audie Award	2009	Short Stories/Collections	Armageddon in Retrospect	Won	-
Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame	2015	-	-	Inducted	-
Prometheus Hall of Fame award of the Libertarian Futurist Society	2019	-	Harrison Bergeron	Inducted	-