Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
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Kurt Vonnegut was a master of language.
I’ve learned many a word from him, although many people who claim to be readers have never heard of him. There are several gems in Vonnegut’s arsenal; I’m only going to attack my personal favourites.
My first encounter was when my friend Andrea gave me a copy of Breakfast of Champions. I was like so many of those “readers” who had never heard his name.
Oddly, my first Vonnegut encounter would be a book where he brings back to life all the characters he created.
He quoted in the preface, “What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my books.”
I was clearly smitten by the beginning of Chapter Two. I love the lines:
“Dwayne Hoover had oodles of charm/I can have oodles of charm/A lot of people have oodles of charm.”
Vonnegut had a wonderful way of spinning yarns while stating his point of view on the human condition. One of Vonnegut’s characters is the author, Kilgore Trout. Here is a passage from Trout’s book Now It Can Be Told:
“Dear sir, poor sir. You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next-and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine.
“Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”
A lot of Vonnegut’s material stems from his experience in Dresden, Germany. As a prisoner of war, he lived through the firebombing of Dresden on February 13 and 14, 1945. The most famous of these novels is Slaughterhouse-Five.
With fictional characters he told of real events that unfolded before his eyes. In the case of Edgar Derby, “The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking a teapot. And he’s given a regular trial, and then he’s shot to death by a firing squad.”
In Cat’s Cradle Vonnegut invents the religion Bokononism.
“The Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon.”
The theme of the book is capturing the day the world ends, but as we all know life goes on despite all of the odds.
So it goes.
In Cat’s Cradle, Dr. Felix Hoenikker invented something called ice-nine. It is a crystal that turns water into ice with a melting point of 130°F; thus drying the water on Earth.
It is the narrator Jonah’s karass that brings him to the remote tropics of San Lorenzo to save humanity. And so on.
To leave on one of his favorite jokes:
“Everyday for years and years a customs agent would carefully search through this guy’s wheelbarrow. Finally when he about to retire the customs agent asked the man, ‘We’ve become friends. I’ve searched your wheelbarrow for years. What are you smuggling?’
‘My friend, I’m smuggling wheelbarrows.’
So it goes.