Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007
Posted by Non-Shannon
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the age of 84. Fittingly, 84 is also the age at which Vonnegut’s alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, died in the novel Timequake. Though it seems his plan to commit honorable suicide through years of smoking unfiltered Pall Malls didn’t pan out, complications from a fall finally took his life.
An August 2006 Rolling Stone article reported:
He has stalled finishing his highly anticipated novel If God Were Alive Today - or so he claims. “I’ve given up on it … It won’t happen. … The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people’s discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, ‘Please, I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?’ That’s what I feel right now. I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now?”
My personal obsession with his books began with an essay I wrote about Slaughterhouse-Five in high school–you know, the usual “I just learned the word catharsis!”-type fiasco. I think I chose the book off of a list after just reading the back cover in the library. The teacher loved my essay, probably less for its execution than for the obvious enthusiasm I had developed for the text. In college, my 4-year undergraduate boyfriend and I took turns reading almost all of Vonnegut’s works, which we checked out from the Loyola Library and pretended were ours, garnering astronomical late fees. But ah, I think it was worth it.
In Palm Sunday, ol’ KV actually graded his own works, stating that the grades “do not place me in literary history” but were meant to compare “myself with myself”:
Player Piano: B
The Sirens of Titan: A
Mother Night: A
Cat’s Cradle: A+
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
Slaughterhouse-Five: A+
Welcome to the Monkey House: B-
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
Breakfast of Champions: C
Slapstick: D
Jailbird: A
Palm Sunday: C
My personal favorite is probably Galapagos (which came later), but that’s neither here nor there. I think what I’ve really always found compelling about Vonnegut is his unfailing ability to be both bitterly jaded and hilarious at the same time. He seemed to echo my mostly unconscious (back in high school) conviction that although life is basically a carnival of the grotesque, you may as well have a few laughs with the bearded lady. Y’know what I mean?
And so it goes.
April 16th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Hey Non-Shannon,
Oddly enough, I didn’t read any Vonnegut in high school, or actually, well, ever…but got really into his works about a year ago when our mom gave me a set of books on tape that was Vonnegut reading excerpts from his own works. It was really phenomenal to listen to it the way he thought it, though it caused serious problems for me at work, because I would listen on the way to work and then get to work and write emails the way Vonnegut writes books. People wouldn’t understand anything I was telling them. But back to the point, if you haven’t listened to the books on tape, you should. It is such a journey into his consciousness and would be a really fitting homage to him!
It starts with an excerpt from Slaughterhouse 5, has an excerpt from Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to the Monkey House, and I think Cat’s Cradle.
-Not Non-Shannon, but not Shannon either