Death of a magician – Kurt Vonnegut a writer for all times

One of the greatest American novelists of all times, a devoted humanist who inspired many across generations with his writing, a bearer of a life story almost as extraordinary as a plot line of one of his thought-provoking works, died on April 11, 2007, in Manhattan, New York. So it goes. Sounds like an excerpt from a Kurt Vonnegut novel? No, this time it is a real-life situation if an avid Vonnegut reader can ever conceive of one.
Vonnegut was a man of many hats. The self-described “fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker” was born on November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis. An editor at the first daily school newspaper in the U.S., he then moved to the East to study biochemistry at Cornell. He then studied briefly at the Carnegie Institute of Technology before enlisting in the U.S. Army. The defining moment of his life, and to a great extent of his literary work, came when he witnessed the Allied destruction of Dresden on February 13-15, 1945 from an underground cellar called Slaughterhouse Five where he had been held as a Prisoner of War. Despite the seemingly immense influence of this event on him, Vonnegut wrote in his Fates Worse Than Death: “The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am.” He has also claimed to be the only person who profited from the bombing by making several dollars for each one of those who lost their lives in the flames.
After the War, Vonnegut married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, and together they moved to Chicago where he took a job as a reporter for the City News Bureau. He enrolled in a master’s course in anthropology at the University of Chicago but his thesis was unanimously rejected by faculty. He was finally awarded the degree in 1971, submitting his novel Cat’s Cradle as a master thesis. In his novel Bagombo Snuff Box, in his characteristic ironic autobiographic style, Vonnegut writes of the University’s rejection of his thesis on the need to account for the similarities between Cubist painting and late-19th Century Native American uprisings on the grounds of being “unprofessional.” The unmistakable self-irony and inimitable sarcasm, delivering thinly-veiled criticism of flaws of contemporary society such as excessive individualism, the obsession with success and the attainment of wealth, aggression and lack of compassion for others, have been continuously deployed by Vonnegut. Commenting on another moment of his life, he quoted his lack of success in the Saab auto dealership he started on Cape Cod, Mass. at one point, as the reason why he was not given a Nobel Prize after becoming a globally renowned author.
Together with his patent sarcasm and sharp irony, Kurt Vonnegut used an unmistakable mixture of styles and literary devices to convey his messages. At the very first, his early work was dismissed as abstract Science Fiction and critics to this day have blamed the author for lacking coherent plot sequences, time and spatial setting in his novels. His writing is also characterized with short sentences and paragraphs, often telegraphic style, and ample use of punctuation. One critic, in a review of Vonnegut’s 1973 Breakfast of Champions, even suggested that the author is kidding the reader with his use of na෥ style and language and childish discussions of the gravest problems of modern-day civilization.
The atypical literary style of Vonnegut is coupled with his willingness to take an assertive stance on a wide array of issues and his ability in exposing and criticizing many of the flaws of present-day social and political life. The writer could not but cause controversy, and in some circles – outright condemnation, when, in a 2005 interview for The Australian, he stated that he regards modern terrorists as “very brave people” who are “dying for their own self-respect.” Vonnegut has also been a staunch critic of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq, writing a regular column in the liberal journal In These Times in the years before his death. In a response to accusations that he might be destroying the morale of U.S. troops in Iraq with his comments he wrote: “Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.” Coming from a man who has witnessed first-hand the horrors of war, indeed as noted once by Gore Vidal – one of the three living American writers who are also World War II veterans (the others being Vidal, himself, and Norman Maylor) – these words should be taken as more than liberal anti-war verbiage.
While avoiding narrow associations with political, cultural or intellectual fads or ideas, Vonnegut has been a life-long proponent of the cause of humanism and an Honorary President of the American Humanist Association. Once asked about his definition of a Humanist, the author quipped that “being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.” The lack of decency in human relations and the propensity of the human race to continuously inflict damage on itself and the environment it inhabits has been a lasting theme in Vonnegut’s writing and thinking. Nonetheless, he has managed to explore human cruelty and self-inflicted suffering without losing his wit and without resorting to remorseful over-dramatization of the human predicament. On the issue of death, Vonnegut, who miraculously survived the Dresden firebombing and made an unsuccessful suicide attempt in 1984, simply had to say: “When you’re dead, you’re dead.” So it goes.