Vonne-good

By Sarah Tereniak
Collegian Staff
February 28, 2007

“Oh, God – the lives people try to lead. Oh, God – what a world they try to lead them in!”

So says Kurt Vonnegut in Mother Night, a novel about an American spy posing as a Nazi radio propagandist during World War II. Although the spy, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., does not support the Nazi regime, only a few people in the entire world, including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, actually know this vital piece of information. Years after the war, the world is still disgusted with Campbell, and many want him dead. Vonnegut, in his introduction as Campbell’s editor to Campbell’s “memoirs” (which Campbell writes in an Israeli prison, awaiting his trial for war crimes) says, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

I like Vonnegut because he’s straightforward. I don’t have to guess about his main ideas or work my way through a bunch of hefty symbolism; he tells me exactly what he thinks, and I can agree or disagree as I see fit. Vonnegut’s prose is often deemed “simplistic” by some critics and is conversational and light in tone, even when he’s dealing with a heavy topic. I love the eloquence of an Austen or Brontë novel as much as the next English major, but I love Vonnegut because he’s not going for eloquence. He’s going for the message and the message alone.

Of heavy topics, there are many. As readers, we can’t always relate to Vonnegut’s settings or plots (World War II, outer space, the Galapagos Islands), but it’s almost too easy to connect with his themes and social commentaries. The human race has been dehumanized by technology; common decency is becoming more and more difficult to find. Who could argue with that, in a world dominated by nuclear weapons and terrorism?

Vonnegut is one of us. We can see the man behind the words as we read his novels. Sometimes I have to work so hard to understand a novel that I completely forget about the author himself or herself, but Vonnegut is different. He invests so much of himself into what he writes that I consistently see his face and hear his voice as I read. Vonnegut was there during the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden during World War II, a horrific incident that resulted in between 25,000 and 35,000 casualties; he was one of only seven Americans to survive. Witnessing this crime against humanity led Vonnegut to write his most popular novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. In his later works, such as his latest piece, the essay-style A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut is almost uncomfortably candid about his personal life. Some authors shield themselves with their novels; Vonnegut puts himself out on the table.

My favorite thing about Vonnegut is that he includes himself in the depiction of men as bumbling, confused beings, as his later works detail; he doesn’t isolate himself from this view of humanity. As Vonnegut says in his novel Cat’s Cradle, “Each of us has to be what he or she is.” We would do well to see things the same way.

tereniaks1@lasalle.edu