More Thoughts about Favorite Writers: Reading Kurt Vonnegut

When I was in college in the 1970s, I read most of the Kurt Vonnegut books available then: Player Piano, Sirens of Titian, Cats Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, Welcome to the Monkey House, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Breakfast of Champions,—all except Mother Night. I was a fan.

Slapstick, the 1970s novel that followed Breakfast of Champions, I read my senior year in college. For a brief time, it made me hopeful that I was going to graduate into a world where writers, with their creative sensibilities and ideas, actually went into politics and made a difference.

That was a fantasy, of course.

Sure, John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage is still referenced, talked about. And Donald Trump once brought out a book called The Art of the Deal, though it turned out to be completely ghost-written by Tony Schwartz. Many politicians who run for major office—most of them—usually come out with autobiographies or memoirs, but these are usually books written to expand and add gravitas to their campaigns.

As far as I can see, until the recent success of J.D. Vance in Ohio and Wes Moore in Maryland, writers making career shifts to politics have never succeeded. Vance, a Republican, and Moore, a Democrat, may be part of big cultural shifts going on today. But back in the day (by that I mean the 1970s), writers failed in American politics, while bad or mediocre actors made the career jump into politics successfully. Most people my age will remember that during the era of the 1970s and ‘80s, Gore Vidal was the successful author/failed presidential candidate, and Ronald Reagan was the B actor/two-term successful president.

Vonnegut never ran for public office that I know of. But as a writer of considerable invention (at least I thought so), he had a great deal to say about the human condition. His first novel, Player Piano, is a technically sound novel about a future projected from the 1950s, with its distant, omniscient narrator reminiscent of Isaac Asimov. But after that, Vonnegut began to experiment, especially with his narrative voice, developing a new tone and attitude to his subject material. This experiment eventually emerged as the involved narrator of Slaughterhouse Five who offers commentary on the events being narrated in the form of authorial sighs of “So it goes” to punctuate scenes of human suffering or, by the time he was writing Slapstick, an added “Hi ho.” Instead of just listing or reporting on human suffering, he was commenting on it, even putting little verbal asterisks by it.

In an essay on style, Vonnegut once talked about writing to “sound like someone from Indianapolis,” his hometown. To this day, whenever anyone talks about voice or style, I think of Vonnegut and the years it took him to develop his through successive books, starting in 1952 and leading up to the late 1960s. His omniscient but sympathizing, god-like but still sad narrator reaches a surprising culmination when Vonnegut as narrator appears to Kilgore Trout at the end of Breakfast of Champions. “I am your creator,” he announces. “Ask me anything!” and then sets Trout free (Trout was supposed to have been based on Phillip K. Dick).

Trout is, of course, reduced to incoherence in the scene. But talk about an intrusive narrator.

I have no evidence about Vonnegut’s intentions or his aesthetics. But I will say that, at least for me as a reader, his frequently intruding narrative voice makes the human suffering he depicts seem less normal. That’s what it did to my roommates and me. In the ‘70s, we had reading and sharing books we’d read, and I remember more than one late night sitting on the curb in front of our cottage on campus talking about Vonnegut’s plots and the problem of suffering, especially if all of us believed in a loving, all powerful God. Vonnegut’s plot machinations and narrator asides, in addition to adding a touch of the whimsical, raised our suspicions, sophomores that we were, about the problem of evil. Why is there so much suffering? Why did we spend our time ignoring it? What’s going on, God? God? Are you there?

These were questions raised by kids at a private, religious college. And we knew other kids at our college who wouldn’t read him.

Slapstick continues Vonnegut’s program with the move to try to address loneliness. Slapstick may have been Vonnegut’s first attempt to engage with the loss of his sister to suicide years before. It concerns a twin brother and sister who as children, when they play together, swirl into being a single genius. Eventually, their caretakers separate them to put an end to the genius disruption.

Later, the brother goes into politics and runs his political campaign on the slogan “Lonesome No More.” He pledges to give all Americans an extra middle name which will serve to include them in an extended family of everyone else who shares that same middle name.

Talk about basing a political campaign slogan on nostalgia.

When I read this at 22, I thought it was a great solution to a problem I feared facing. As a college student, I had found and was about to leave my new extended family of fellow college students, people I could talk with about the problems of suffering, and this experience left me open to the persuasion that the “Lonesome No More” campaign might be realistic. It could work to help many people feel belonging where marriage and many churches had failed them—sort of a church without dogmas or a club without dues, bylaws, or books to read. Today it might work better than most of the dating apps I’ve heard about.

I was in my early 20s. What did I know?

Perhaps writers are not always good at solving the world’s problems, but many of them are good at detailing the problems. And unlike most authors in the modernist tradition—writers like Katheryn Ann Porter, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Carson McCullers, where there is no authorial commentary on what are sometimes horrific narrative events—Vonnegut, the sad, sentimental figure, offers his occasional commentary in the form of a hick up like “Ho Hum” or, as noted above, “So it goes.”

This is a real contrast to the other writers of the 20th century who employed disappearing narrators. For example, Flannery O’Connor stories come through an omniscient narrator who keeps her distance, except for narrative descriptions that reveal a certain comic tone toward her characters. I wonder what it is we learn from this approach.

Vonnegut never claimed to be a person of faith, yet I’ve always seen him as concerned with suffering in the world, often drawing attention to it. I was reading his books right along with those by C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton. I can detect some of Vonnegut’s influence on John Irving’s The World According to Garp. I am also suspicious that Brian Doyle and George Saunders liked and were influenced by his work. I’ve often wished for a church headed by a pastor who had read and liked “Harrison Bergeron” or Slaughterhouse Five.

Vonnegut is a real contrast to most of the talk of the day, both in church and in society, largely born in the human potential movement, about remaining optimistic. And certainly, when we talk about the problem of suffering, we should acknowledge that we are talking about something that comes in swarms. People talk about the banality of evil, the normalization of it, the fact that it is simply part of our lives and we see it on the news and nothing is ever done about it. I often feel overwhelmed as an individual, not ever able to fight it on my own terms.

Vonnegut survived the American bombing of Dresden in World War II, an American crime that still isn’t talked about much. Since then, we’ve seen new horrors. The twenty-first century was just over eight months old when terrorists flew planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon. I often remember that in the days that followed, even journalists used the word evil as the one appropriate way to identify what had happened. I have an image of those firefighters, those first responders called to the scene, and how they must have come up to the burning buildings, sized them up, understood the cost, and ran into the building to save some people anyway.

Those doomed people have seemed to me a picture of our response against evil. We’ve lived through Hiroshima, Nagasaki, then suffering in Vietnam, in Laos, Cambodia. More recently, Syria and Ukraine have appeared on our maps. And the Gaza strip. It does feel repetitious and out of our control.

I have nothing specific to offer on this subject, no thesis to advance. I think that I’ve decided as a reader to try to understand that when authors depict human suffering, they are not endorsing it or suggesting we look down on it or dismiss and ignore it. I think that we should also be aware of political policies and vote for candidates who are not going to be cruel in their work.

Vonnegut is especially good at capturing the loneliness of the collapsing economic conditions and the loneliness of the American middle class in the late 20th century. His books were written in the shadow of Vietnam. For a lonely college student like me, he offered a voice that said that something was not right, and maybe we should be more kind. Maybe we should stop looking at our differences and start recognizing the humanity we have in common.

And we should consider: All attempts to make pain and suffering standout should be rewarded with our attention. We’ve made heroes of those first responders to 9/11, but we should not trivialize them or sentimentalize them in any way. The search for the right terms seems valuable, and I’ve let it start, for me, with “So it goes,” if that doesn’t sound too accepting or banal.

“Hi ho.”

Shameless self-promotion: Friends, I’ve just had some poems published:

three poems appear in Two Hawks Quarterly. For your interest, here’s the link,

one poem in Amethyst, the link here.