[Infowarrior] - RIP, Kurt Vonnegut

[Richard Forno]

Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84
By DINITIA SMITH

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels
like ³Slaughterhouse-Five,² ³Cat¹s Cradle² and ³God Bless You, Mr.
Rosewater² caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a
generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in
Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall
several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.

Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels
that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary
idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ¹70s. Dog-eared paperback
copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in
dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of
human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to
make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer,
wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. ³Mark Twain,² Mr. Vonnegut
wrote in his 1991 book, ³Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical
Collage,² ³finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those
around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.²

Not all Mr. Vonnegut¹s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular
writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the
banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the
environment.

His novels ‹ 14 in all ‹ were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy
images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians
and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic
infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as
well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and
Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago
³filled with bittersweet lies,² a narrator says).

The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut¹s life was the firebombing of Dresden,
Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a
young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many
of them burned to death or asphyxiated. ³The firebombing of Dresden,² Mr.
Vonnegut wrote, ³was a work of art.² It was, he added, ³a tower of smoke and
flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their
lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of
Germany.²

His experience in Dresden was the basis of ³Slaughterhouse-Five,² which was
published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and
cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz,
³so perfectly caught America¹s transformative mood that its story and
structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.²

To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent
meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his
1965 novel, ³God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,² summed up his philosophy:

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