Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, like so many other writers before him, has taken up the role of humanities critic. He is a satirist. His works cause us to laugh out loud at the stupidity of human behavior, and then recoil in self-defense. Like all satirists, Vonnegut mercilessly takes aim at the unholy truths on mankind. It is, however, his weapon and his approach that makes him stand out from all the rest. His characters are insane. So insane that they epitomize the very extreme of human traits. It is with their insanity that he points out the insanity of human behavior that we have come to label as, well, sane. In his novels, Kurt Vonnegut uses socially irrational characters to make rational social statements. In his novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut parades a circus of instability around one central, sane, character. The narrator, John, is researching a book about what certain Americans were doing on the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. One of these individuals is Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the father of the atom bomb. In researching him, John contacts an array of characters including the Doctor’s disoriented children, the dictator of a Caribbean island nation, and the founder of an admittedly false religion. The underlying t . . .
They were hideously ugly and were thought to have no intelligence. Eliot would listen to the people, offer advice, and give them money when they needed it. Hoenikker did the bulk of his research, John asked a former coworker of Hoenikker if she had known him, to which she replied: “I don’t think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they’re talking about secrets they’ve been told or haven’t been told. In this novel, Vonnegut once again makes a general social statement. On drunken binges, he will join volunteer fire departments, and trade his top dollar suits with the clothes of random street people. Instead of regarding the poor and unfortunate as inferior, he regards them as equals. Finally, he moved away from his home and his wife and set up an office for his foundation. Some may call this pathetic dependence. They’re talking about intimate things, family things, love things. The religion’s purpose is not to offer the truth of life, but to use lies to comfort humanity from the burden of existence. “Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy. ” (Cat’s Cradle, before chapter 1) With Bokonon and his religion, Vonnegut makes a statement about all religions: They are nothing but lies whose purpose is to comfort human beings while they try to make sense of everything. Though it tackles human idiocy in other forms as well as with mad scientists, the New York Times calls it: “an irreverent and often highly entertaining fantasy concerning the playful irresponsibility of nuclear scientists.
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