1. University of Tirana
Faculty of Foreign Languages
Branch: English
Subject: American Literature
Lecturer: Maks Daiu
Kurt Vonnegut
7/2/2011 Worked by: SADIONA ABAZAJ

2. Introduction
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. An
American writer with an excessively unique and persuasive style of writing. Kurt Vonnegut, an
American cultural hero celebrated for his wry, loonily imaginative commentary on war,
apocalypse, technology, materialism and other afflictions. His less-than typical literature mainly
deals with the matter of his own experiences, as he explains them in fancy and peculiar manners
He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents, Kurt
Vonnegut, Sr., and Edith Lieber.Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in
Indianapolis in May 1940 and matriculated to Cornell University that fall. Though majoring in
Chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun.
While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the Army. The Army transferred him to the Carnegie
Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee to study Mechanical Engineering.
Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later
work. As a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was
captured during the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944, after the 106th was cut off from
the rest of Courtney Hodges' First Army. "The other American divisions on our flanks managed
to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks..."
Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke some
German. After telling the German guards "...just what I was going to do to them when the
Russians came..." he was beaten and had his position as leader taken away.
Vonnegut was one of a group of American prisoners of war to survive the attack in an
underground slaughterhouse meat locker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility.
The Germans called the building Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five) which the Allied
POWs adopted as the name for their prison. Vonnegut said the aftermath of the attack was "utter
destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." This experience was the inspiration for his famous
novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a central theme in at least six of his other books.
Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously
negligible wound," later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a
case of "frostbite".
After the war, Vonnegut attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in
anthropology and also worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago. The University of Chicago
accepted his novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, citing its anthropological content, and awarded him
the M.A. degree in 1971.
In the mid 1950s, Vonnegut worked very briefly for Sports Illustrated magazine, On the verge of
abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers'
Workshop. While he was there, Cat's Cradle became a best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-
Five, now considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century, appearing on the 100
best lists of Time magazine and the Modern Library.

3. Major Works
Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano (1952), did not attract popular or critical attention, but it
established many of the traits which continue to typify the author's style. The novel is futuristic
and explores the relationship between changing technology and the lives of ordinary humans. His
second work garnered greater critical reception. The Sirens of Titan (1959) is a science fiction
parody in which all of human history is revealed to have been manipulated by aliens to provide a
space traveler with a replacement part for his ship. This novel, as well as the critically acclaimed
Cat's Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), exhibits Vonnegut's unique
combination of black humor, wit, and pessimism. Cat's Cradle is an apocalyptic satire on
philosophy, religion, and technological progress while God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater concerns
the idealistic attempts of an alcoholic philanthropist, Eliot Rosewater, to befriend the poor and
helpless. Rosewater finds, however, that his monetary wealth cannot begin to alleviate the
world's misery. Like Rosewater, Vonnegut's protagonists are idealistic, ordinary people who
strive in vain to understand and bring about change in a world beyond their control or
comprehension. Vonnegut tempers his pessimistic, sometimes caustic commentary with
compassion for his characters, suggesting that humanity's ability to love may partially
compensate for destructive tendencies. Two of Vonnegut's novels have dealt directly with World
War II. In Mother Night, a spy novel, an American agent who posed as a Nazi propagandist
during World War II undergoes a personality crisis when tried for crimes he committed to insure
his covert identity. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut's best-known work, the author confronts
his personal experience as a prisoner of war who survived the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden, a
city of little military or strategic value. The absurdity of this event is filtered through the numbed
consciousness of Billy Pilgrim, a young soldier who escapes the insanity of war through
schizophrenic travels into time and space; these journeys assume realistic stature when compared
to his irrational wartime experiences. Considered a classic of postmodern literature,
Slaughterhouse-Five is written in a fragmented, non-chronological style to emphasize the
confusion and absurdity of wartime life. Vonnegut's subsequent novels have achieved popular
success but have not always elicited critical praise. In 1971 he wrote his best-known play, Happy
Birthday, Wanda Jane, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s wrote several screenplays for
television. Vonnegut's most recent works include Hocus Pocus (1990) and Timequake (1997). In
both of these novels Vonnegut presents his ideas in new and unusual literary forms. Hocus Pocus
purports to be the autobiographical manuscript of Eugene Debs Hartke, a teacher and the last
American out of Vietnam, who was fired for being too pessimistic and later charged with
engineering the escape of African-American inmates from a prison. Hartke writes observations
about his life on pieces of paper and Vonnegut masquerades as the editor. In Timequake
Vonnegut merges parts of a problematic and incomplete novel with commentary about his life
and views. The result is part memoir and part political novel. "In a nutshell," observes Thomas
Disch, "everyone on Earth has to relive the 1990s on automatic pilot, observing but not
participating in their lives." The book is a "stew" in which Vonnegut combined "the best
pickings from a novel that wasn't working and interspersed them with a running commentary on
his own life and the state of the universe. The mix is thick and rich: a political novel that's not a
novel, a memoir that is not inclined to reveal the most private details of the writer's life," Valerie

4. Sayers comments. Vonnegut has stated that he is retiring, and that Timequake will mark the end
of his fiction-writing career.
Style
Throughout his writings, Vonnegut uses various methods of portraying his many ideas. These
include the use of similes, metaphors, the jumping from one subject to another, and irony.
Similes-Metaphors; Vonnegut uses similes and metaphors for many purposes. One such
purpose is to evoke emotion in his readers. He explains, "It was like an execution. Billy was
numb as his father carried him from the shower room to the pool. His eyes were closed. When he
opened his eyes he was on the bottom of the pool, and there was beautiful music everywhere. He
lost consciousness, but the music went on.” This quote allows one to really understand what was
going on, but also empathized with Billy. When one imagines an execution, feelings of remorse
and sadness are provoked. Once this emotion is established, we feel the extent of this action on
the boy. Another purpose of the use of similes is to demonstrate the experience for a clear
depiction, as clear as if the reader was there while it happened. For example, when Vonnegut
described the appearance of the Americans as they walked together to these different boxcars. He
describes, “They were moving like water, downhill all the time, and they flowed at last to a main
highway on a valley’s floor. Through the valley flowed a Mississippi of humiliated Americans.”
This quote allows the reader to envision this, comparing it to a river.
Irony; Throughout his writings, Vonnegut using the literary element of irony to portray his ideas
and to evoke something on readers. The main reason he uses irony is to poke fun at life in
general, and to question the motives behind many things. One way he used irony in the novel
was to describe the shooting of an American soldier for stealing a teapot after the Bombing of
Dresden. Vonnegut writes "The irony is so great. A whole city gets burned down, and thousands
and thousands of people are killed. And then this one American foot soldier is arrested in the
ruins for taking a teapot." He goes on to explain that this man was shot by a firing squad as a
result. This was ironic because as a result of the bombing of Dresden almost everything is
destroyed, people died by the thousands, and Dresden is basically leveled. And to think that in
the midst of all this a man is shot and killed simply for stealing a teapot. It just doesn't make
sense, which is what he was trying to make his audience understand. Without saying it is ironic,
he displays the irony of the reaction a woman gave when told of the gruesome details of the
death of man after the bombing of Dresden had occurred. He says, "When I got back to the
office, the woman writer asked me, just for her own information, what the squashed guy look
like when he was squashed....I told her...'Didn't it bother you?' she said. She was eating a Three
Musketeers Bar." This quote shows how ironic it was that this woman did not really care what
the wife had said about the husband's death or anything, but wanted to know what he looked like
when he died. It just doesn't make sense, which makes this very ironic. This specific time in
which Vonnegut used irony to portray his ideas is connected to his use of humor as well.
Little>Big; Kurt Vonnegut is always focused in on the smaller aspects of an event. Or just little

5. things in life. Big events such as a death get blown off by the infamous words "so it goes". When
speaking of Lot's wife Vonnegut writes, "But she did look back, and I love her for that, because
it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. Vonnegut uses the small events
to point out things such as the irony in situations. He also blows off the big events in such a way
that it creates this sense of dark edgy humor amongst him and the reader.
Humor: The way Kurt Vonnegut uses humor is like throwing a curve ball at someone who's
never played baseball before; you really don’t know where it’s going or what it is going to do.
Kurt's type of humor is a really distinctive type of humor just because he doesn’t make an
obvious joke anybody would. He talks about violent events and the detail he puts in to his
writing is what is considered humorous. Kurt uses his "Black humor" in chapter one of Slaughter
House Five when he talks about the guy who got killed because his ring got caught in the
elevator. What's humorous about this is that this man just died a horrible, gruesome death but
Kurt only seems to pay detail to a woman who is eating a three musketeer's bar and asking him
for details on what happened to this man.
Most readers interested in the fantastic in literature are familiar with Kurt Vonnegut, particularly
for his uses of science fiction. Many of his early short stories were wholly in the science fiction
mode, and while its degree has varied, science fiction has never lost its place in his novels.
Vonnegut has typically used science fiction to characterize the world and the nature of existence
as he experiences them. His chaotic fictional universe abounds in wonder, coincidence,
randomness and irrationality. Science fiction helps lend form to the presentation of this world
view without imposing a falsifying causality upon it. In his vision, the fantastic offers perception
into the quotidian, rather than escape from it. Science fiction is also technically useful, he has
said, in providing a distance perspective, "moving the camera out into space," as it were. And
unusually for this form, Vonnegut's science fiction is frequently comic, not just in the "black
humor" mode with which he has been tagged so often, but in being simply funny.
Themes
Vonnegut was deeply interested in the Destructive Powers Technology. You can really see it
in: Slaughterhouse-Five, where his fear of technology begins with a pointless fire bomb or in
Player Piano, in which a dystopian world comes to depend entirely on technology at the expense
of every other profession, especially art. Even in Cat's Cradle, in which Ice-9 destroys the world.
Other themes include Art: Breakfast of Champions contains a variety of statements about art, in
particular a character's justification of his painting The Temptation of St Anthony, which
consists of a single line on a canvas. Player Piano is about the balance of art in a technological
world.
As far as Existentialism is concerned we can easily find it in Breakfast of Champions where is
the most commonly cited. Even Slaughterhouse-Five could certainly be considered existential, in
particular its statement about the Tralfamadorians "why me" is not a valid question, because it
had to be somebody, and it was you...

6. Religion; Vonnegut was descended from a family of German freethinkers, who were skeptical of
"conventional religious beliefs."His great-grandfather Clemens Vonnegut had authored a
freethought book titled Instruction in Morals, as well as an address for his own funeral in which
he denied the existence of God, an afterlife, and Christian doctrines about sin and salvation. Kurt
Vonnegut reproduced his great-grandfather's funeral address in his book Palm Sunday, and
identified these freethought views as his "ancestral religion," declaring it a mystery as to how it
was passed on to him.
Vonnegut described himself variously as a skeptic, freethinker, humanist, Unitarian,
Universalist, agnostic, and atheist. He disbelieved in the supernatural, considered religious
doctrine to be "so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash," and believed people were
motivated by loneliness to join religions.
Vonnegut wrote: "I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently
without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead."Vonnegut considered
humanism to be a modern-day form of free thought, and advocated it in various writings,
speeches and interviews.
Critical Reception
Vonnegut's first decade of work did not attract much critical attention: most early discussion of
his writing centered on how to classify it. Citing his futuristic settings and the paramount role of
technology in his work, some critics insist that Vonnegut is a science fiction writer. Others argue
that despite these elements, Vonnegut is ultimately writing about the universal human condition
and that he only employs science fiction devices to create distance and irony, just as he employs
satire to the same effect. In recent years Vonnegut has come under fire from commentators who
claim that he has failed to develop stylistically and that his characters are little more than
mouthpieces for his opinions. Such critics claim that Vonnegut's work after Slaughterhouse-Five
has offered more or less the same style, theme, and message. Tom Shone, for instance, writes
that "all the same subjects are there, novel after novel" and that "Vonnegut's highly distinctive
style has eclipsed Vonnegut the author." Others remain enamored of Vonnegut's distinct style,
praising him for continually presenting his message in a deceptively skillful manner. John Irving
remarks, "Vonnegut's subject has always been doomsday, and nobody writes about it better. That
he is also so terribly funny in how he describes our own worst nightmare is, of course, another
element that confuses his dumber critics."
Vonnegut introduces the terms karass and granfalloon in Cat's Cradle, a satiric novel whose
observation of social structures was so keen it fulfilled Vonnegut's anthropology dissertation
requirement long after the author had abandoned his studies at the University of Chicago.
Instead of going off to study "primitive" cultures, Vonnegut brings his curiosity and talent to
bear on the society in which he lives --America in the latter half of the 20th century-- and
exposes its flaws, foibles, and frailties with a wit and insight which is inevitably compared to
his hero's, Mark Twain.

7. Criticized by his own father for never having created a villain, Vonnegut's characters are
motivated by either lonesomeness, boredom ("What are people for?"), or biological and
environmental factors beyond their control. But an at least partial corrective for all three
conditions exists--artificial extended families analogous to the tribal cultures of his
anthropology studies and the real-life extended family of Vonnegut's idyllic Indiana boyhood.
The theme gains prominence with each subsequent book most overtly explained in the flawed
Slapstick and most eloquently summarized in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: "We're here to
help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."
Vonnegut's ideas are so humane, his words so compassionate, his advice so sensible, that
his readers feel a strong connection to the man, and, by extension, to one another. Perhaps his
greatest contribution has been the unwitting creation of a global family of admirers who share
and recognize in one another the desire to exhibit that most uncommon of human traits--
common decency.
Although he was disdained by some critics who thought his work was too popular and
accessible, his fiction inspired volumes of scholarly comment as well as websites maintained
by young fans who have helped keep all 14 of his novels in print over a 50-year career. Five of
his novels have made the leap into films.
Conclusion
"There was never a kinder and, at the same time, wittier writer to be with personally," author
Tom Wolfe, a friend and admirer of Vonnegut's, told The Times. "He was just a gem in that
respect. And as a writer, I guess he's the closest thing we had to a Voltaire. He could be
extremely funny, but there was a vein of iron always underneath it, which made him quite
remarkable."He was never funny just to be funny,"An obscure science fiction writer for two
decades before earning mainstream acclaim in 1969 with "Slaughterhouse-Five," Vonnegut
was an American original, often compared to Mark Twain for a vision that combined social
criticism, wildly black humor and a call to basic human decency. He was, novelist Jay
MacInerny once said, "a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion." He is
"together with John Hawkes and Gunter Grass ... the most stubbornly imaginative" of writers,
novelist John Irving once wrote of Vonnegut. "He is not anybody else, or even a version of
anybody else, and he is a writer with a cause."
The end

8. Bibliography
-Los Angeles Time-An article by Elaine Woo/criticism
-Mighty Students- : Kurt Vonnegut Writing Style
-OPPAPERS.COM- Style Analysis of Kurt Vonnegut
-Wikipedia sources
-www.vonnegut.com/artist
-www.avclub.com
-www.about.com