That’s right, we’re doing Vonnegut this week. Because I really like Kurt Vonnegut, and because my New Year’s resolution was to stop half-assing things, I went big for this one.
For those of you who don’t know, Indianapolis was the birthplace of the great Kurt Vonnegut. It was also the birthplace of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., whom we’ll be discussing today. To begin my journey, I wanted to meet Mr. Vonnegut in person. Considering he’s dead, that was a pretty tall (remember this pun) order. But as I said, we don’t half-ass things here at The Lit Wiz, so I had to figure it out.
This mural is located at 339 Massachusetts Ave in Indianapolis, for those of you who would like to make your acquaintance. Originally I thought the size of this mural was on par with Vonnegut himself, or maybe slightly larger. Boy was I wrong. This replication of the famous author is 38 feet tall (!) and was painted by artist Pamela Bliss. What a freakin’ feat. Be prepared for both shock and awe.
While I managed to garner a quick introduction with the man, there wasn’t a way for me to actually talk to Kurt Vonnegut about his time on the planet. I can drive fifteen hours straight to Indianapolis, but it turns out I can’t quite bring people back from the dead. Yet. The next best option was to take a tour at the famed Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.
I HIGHLY recommend the museum to anyone who is a fan of Kurt Vonnegut. Even if you’re not a fan, the admission price is only $12. While it’s probably best to book an appointment for your tour to ensure you’re not kept waiting, my mom and I walked in and were given a tour immediately. It takes about forty minutes (longer if you relentlessly badger your tour guide with questions, not that I did that) and covers all of the three story building. Plus, it ends at the gift shop which is always a place I like to find myself.
Before I continue with the museum, I’d like to apologize to my tour guide. If he ever reads this, he gave a phenomenal tour and I will remember it always and forever. Except the part where he told me his name. Terribly sorry, go Butler!
The tour starts in their replication of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing studio. I believe the set up is as close to his real office as they could manage, but the typewriter itself is one of his actual typewriters. The tour guide said the quote written on the back of the desk was really something Vonnegut had on his own desk, but don’t quote me on that. Quote my nameless tour guide, please. He also said Vonnegut, a very tall man (as we’ve established), preferred to sit hunched over because he believed the pain in his back made him a better writer. Or something like that. It’s like how Maya Angelou would wake up at 5:30 every morning to write, or how Stephen King likes to listen to really loud rock music while he practices the craft. Frankly, I think it’s all a bit silly. Maybe my next post will be about all the wild routines writers have.
From there, the tour guide talked about banned books and their connection to Vonnegut since Slaughterhouse-Five has been banned many times over. They have several shelves of books which have been banned somewhere at some point for some amount of time. It’s all pretty neat. One rad thing my guide told me about the library was that in 2011 after hearing about a Missouri school district that had banned Slaughterhouse-Five, they sent seventy-five copies of the novel to that school district! How cool is that? The story is on their website which I will link below. I’m also going to put another picture I took at the museum right here, and I’m not going to give you any context for it. If you want to know how it’s connected to Kurt Vonnegut, you better click on the link and find out!
The museum had a lot of cool direct connections to Vonnegut including his purple heart medal and an unopened letter his father sent him while he was overseas during WWII. The unopened letter passed from father to son, and then from father to son again is quite poetic, even if I am dying to know why Vonnegut never opened it. I think it speaks to him as a person, though. Sometimes he does, and sometimes he does not, and that is Kurt Vonnegut. They also had several of his personal typewriters as well as several of his rejection letters put on display. If anyone reading this is a writer, let this be a comfort to you. The instruments of Vonnegut’s success were put on display in the same place as letters that rejected his writing. Just because someone says you’ve missed the mark doesn’t mean you’ll keep missing it forever.
I don’t have much else to say about the museum itself other than it seems like Vonnegut is in good hands. Also, they make you take the stairs on the way up and the elevator on the way down. What’s up with that?
After learning what I could about Vonnegut from his birthplace, I drove the 15 hours back to Florida and sat down to reread Slaughterhouse-Five. Now that you guys are caught up, we can get to the purpose of this post. There will be no more pictures from here on out, but do stay a while if you please.
I first read Slaughterhouse-Five because it was recommended to me by a friend, and I thought it was just okay. I’d read books with similar themes, like All Quiet on the Western Front (which made me SOB) and Catch-22, and I didn’t feel anywhere near as much of an impact with Vonnegut’s novel. I decided to give him another shot, so I read Mother Night. His satirical style struck my fancy, but I still felt like I must be missing something. It turns out, I was missing the point.
Sometime earlier this year I stumbled across a New Yorker article from 2019 written by Salman Rushdie titled, “What Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five‘ Tells Us Now”. Naturally, I was intrigued. Reading this article is what changed my perception of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, starting with this quote about the novel: “There is much comedy in it, as there was in everything Kurt Vonnegut wrote, but it does not see war as farcical. It sees war as a tragedy so great that perhaps only the mask of comedy allows one to look it in the eye.”
Some of you reading this are probably thinking, “Well, duh”. It’s not that I thought Vonnegut was using the idea of war for comedy, nor that he was poking fun at war itself, but I didn’t entirely understand where his anti-war message was coming from. Catch-22, which is also mentioned in the article, is so over the top that you immediately understand the message. You couldn’t understand the message better if Joseph Heller stood by and screamed it at you himself. All Quiet on the Western Front (which I know is about WWI, but war is war, no?) is tragic from beginning to end. It’s easy to see the anti-war message there. But Vonnegut has a subtle irony, a combination of tragedy and comedy that may not be immediately recognizable to some. Actually, his books are misread and misquoted quite often by people who think he’s 100% serious in everything he writes.
My crime in misunderstanding the novel wasn’t because I took him too seriously, it was because I fell into the trap of wondering if he was a fatalist. Some of you just scoffed, I know it. I’m not stupid for considering he might be a fatalist, but it would be stupid to know what I know now and still think him capable of being so. I do not think that, so take your scoff back. My tour guide at the museum told me Kurt Vonnegut was a humanist. After a cumulative read of his works, this is rather obvious, but based off of a single book, it may not be. Upon rereading Slaughterhouse-Five, though, I could clearly see it in his writing.
I think one of the most popular arguments in favor of fatalist tendencies in the novel is the phrase “so it goes”. Vonnegut says it after every character that dies. It can seem blasé to some, like that’s just how life is, like war is as inevitable as that glacier and so is death because it happens all the time anyway. That’s the exact opposite of his message, though, and here’s the secret that lets us know: Vonnegut doesn’t only say “so it goes” after a character dies, he says it when anything dies. He says it about characters, he says it about the people of Dresden, he says it about the CITY of Dresden, he says it about animals in the slaughterhouse, he says it about a dog that dies, etc. He takes the time to place the saying after every single death.
Vonnegut doesn’t do this to normalize their deaths or death itself, but as a way to show his care for each one. As Rushdie says in his article, “Nobody… who cared so profoundly about the dead, could be described as a fatalist, or a quietist, or resigned.” That was when I realized how deeply Kurt Vonnegut cared for everyone in his stories, everyone who died in Dresden, and everything that ever has been and ever will be lost by war. So yes, he’s a humanist, and if you read his works through this lens you will see just how deeply Vonnegut cared for humans and the world around us.
Now, there’s also that whole sci-fi thing. I could not stand the fact that I didn’t know if the Tralfamadorians were real or not. Was Billy Pilgrim actually abducted by plunger-shaped space invaders, or were his mad tales a symptom of PTSD? Rushdie comments on this in the article, and he does it far more eloquently than I ever could. I will link it below as one of my recommendations for the order you should read Kurt Vonnegut in. The best advice I can give to you is this: if you learn to relax and enjoy Vonnegut, you’ll pick up more than you ever could by agonizing over the details. It’s all about the 30-hour round trip journeys, guys.
So, here are my recommendations:
- Armageddon in Retrospect
This is a nonfiction novel containing a speech by Vonnegut as well as some nonfiction stories from his time in the war and some fictionalized versions of those events. The introduction is given by his son, Mark Vonnegut, and gives the reader insight into Kurt Vonnegut as a person. This is where I learned about Vonnegut’s time in the war and became more familiar with his writing style. It is the epitome of Rushdie’s description about using comedy to look tragedy in the eye. I think it’s a great introduction to Vonnegut’s style, and it’s relatively short. - Slaughterhouse-Five
It’s a great novel, even if you don’t quite get it the first time. The best way I can sum up this novel is with a quote from the book itself, “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.” - “What Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five‘ Tells Us Today,” by Salman Rushdie
This one isn’t by Kurt Vonnegut, I know, but it gives so much insight into the meaning of Vonnegut’s work that I think anyone who really wants to understand him should read it. Fans of Vonnegut will enjoy the piece too as it discusses the long-term reach of his work. It’s a good piece of writing. I’ll even link it for you right here: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-kurt-vonneguts-slaughterhouse-five-tells-us-now - Slaughterhouse-Five
My current library copy is only 215 pages. It’s plenty short enough for you to read it again. - The Sirens of Titans
These next two slots (numbers five and six) are interchangeable, but I think you should read these two novels before moving onto the others. If you want to know more about the Tralfamadorians, read The Sirens of Titan first. It deals with war, trauma, PTSD, aliens, and time travel. It’s very similar to Slaughterhouse-Five, but the sci-fi aspect has a much bigger role in the story. - Mother Night
As I said, I believe these last two slots are interchangeable. If you want to read more about war, espionage, and the psychological themes that are at play in Slaughterhouse-Five, read Mother Night next. The main character, Howard Campbell, is mentioned in Slaughterhouse-Five. He is a writer who is conscripted during WWII to deliver pro-Nazi propaganda to the Europeans that contains coded messages for the allied troops. There’s not a lot that can be said about this book without spoiling it, but it’s a great read. This is my favorite Vonnegut novel I’ve read so far.
Which brings me to this: no, I’ve not read every Vonnegut novel. I will one day, but I still think my recommendations for diving into Vonnegut hold up. Once you’ve read these books, anything else you read by him will be like talking to an old friend. Personally, I recommend starting with Breakfast of Champions after this list, if only because it’s one of his most famous works. There’s also Slapstick, Jailbird, Cat’s Cradle… You get the picture.
The Lit Wiz
An edit: My tour guide does, in fact, have a name. It’s Sam. We are now friends.