On the 11 of April, 2007, the world lost one of the greatest literary minds ever to grace the planet Earth. Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on November 11, 1922. Having survived World War II as an infantry corporal and Prisoner of War during the firebombing of the German city of Dresden, Vonnegut gained a profound understanding of the meaning of life and the events therein, which translated brilliantly in every piece of his writing.
In works such as “Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade” and “Galapagos,” Vonnegut discusses the randomness of life. Confronting the nature of the human condition head on, he proudly announced that life has no inherent meaning, and is merely a string of seemingly meaningless events. This principle serves as a key theme through much of his work, and is often times coupled with other philosophies that border on the teachings of many existentialists. His novel “Player Piano” discuses the nature of human progress, and the notion that machines are slowly erasing our humanity. This concept is furthered in a short story entitled “Welcome to the Monkey House,” in which extreme metaphors such as forced contraception and government mandated suicide chambers are employed to convey the cold and clinical nature of modern society.
Throughout his life, Vonnegut expressed dreams for America that, for the most part, centered around a strong education system and educated government officials. In an interview filmed in October of 2005, Vonnegut went so far as to threaten to impeach any president who fails to respect his office, a practice that happened all too frequently according to Vonnegut. His flare for the extreme was often controversial, and because of this, some of his work was even banned in public schools. Recently, his novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” was banned by the school board of Republic, Missouri for being inappropriate due to its graphic descriptions of sexual relations and references to pornography. His flare for the extreme and use of sometimes graphic themes in his work helped Vonnegut to gain recognition and shed a light on the messages he shared with readers through satire.
It can be said that Kurt Vonnegut was a cynic and a pessimist, but maybe it would be more appropriate to say that he was a man living in a machine’s world. In a world where people think too much and feel too little, Vonnegut made it possible to look at life both objectively and subjectively at the same time. By claiming that life had no inherent meaning, he allowed the reader to give life their own meaning. For the majority of his life, Vonnegut promoted the idea of realizing when you are truly happy. In his novel “A Man Without a Country,” this is highlighted as Vonnegut tells the reader, “And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”