Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Laid out before Billy, the events of his life and the history of the world become morally contemporary. Vonnegut has a forbearing, thoughtful sense of history, and he is working here-as in all his books taken together-on a vast, loosely linked metaphorical mosaic that portrays the condition of man. For him-as the book's subtitle suggests-the horrors of World War II and the Children's Crusade should be seen as perpetually fresh. Yet, Vonnegut suggests, most men are protectively, intentionally, numb to them. If the numbness is necessary to endure life, it also encourages...
Backward Film. Vonnegut's view of man is not new. Indeed he sometimes sounds eerily like the 16th century mystic Sebastian Franck. Appalled by the cruelties men worked upon one another in the name of religion during the Reformation, Franck wrote: "Whoever looks at mankind seriously may break his heart with weeping." Then he added: "We are all laughingstocks, fables and carnival farces before God." Formal belief in God seems to have no part in Vonnegut's philosophy, though in Slaughterhouse-Five he does suggest that the story of the Crucifixion would be more appealing if Jesus...
...Vonnegut's eloquent concern transforms something as pedestrian as a war movie, seen back to front, into a vision, which in its weird way is as effective as any short passage ever written against war: "American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. . . .The bombers opened their bomb-bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted...
...Kurt Vonnegut was mourning the follies of the world with laughter long before the term "black humorist" had been coined. In a series of fictional fables he confronted a remarkable range of topics: space, religion, creeping technology, how to love the unlovable, and even doomsday, which, as he gently observes, "could easily be next Wednesday." His first book, Player Piano (1952). told how a crew of smoothly programmed engineers take over America. Another, Cat's Cradle, began with a reporter trying to fix the whereabouts of important Americans at the time the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and ended...
Such themes are now fashionable. Just lately, in fact, Vonnegut has become as "in" as a good writer can decently and quietly be. Yet he has been writing, largely unnoticed, for much of the past 20 years. Some of Vonnegut's early books, today reissued and selling briskly, were first published only in paperback, and often went unreviewed by journals that today are noting Vonnegut's popularity, and have begun to celebrate the success of Slaughterhouse-Five (20,000 advance sales, Literary Guild alternate, optioned to the movies...