Kurt Vonnegut: ‘So it goes’

November 11, 2022, marked the centenary of the birth of Kurt Vonnegut, considered one of the greatest writers of the golden age of science fiction. Together with Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, H. G. Wells and Edgard Rice Burroughs – to name only the greatest and best known – he shaped our dreams and our nightmares, with stories and situations that have entered our collective imagination and generated further stories, on the small and big screens.

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis on November 11, 1922. His family belonged to the cultured, rich and sophisticated middle class of German-American immigrants, which experienced a meltdown during the Great Depression. After his studies at Shortridge High School, where he discovered a passion for journalism, when the time came to choose university studies, pressure from his brother and father pushed him to choose a course in biochemistry and German at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York State.^[1]

Two tragedies – not the only ones in his life – awaited him: the death by suicide of his mother, unable to bear the shame  of the social collapse, and the experience of war. In January 1943 Kurt decided to abandon his studies and serve  as a volunteer infantryman. His military experience was brief and tragic. He enlisted in March 1943. Between enlisting and leaving for Europe, he experienced the tragedy of the death of his mother, who committed suicide on Mother’s Day, without any note of explanation or farewell. This event strongly marked Kurt, who made the absurdity of life a recurrent feature of his writing.

Vonnegut landed on the continent, at Le Havre, on December 6, 1944. He was captured by the Germans after the Battle of the Bulge, and taken as a prisoner to Dresden on January 12, a few weeks before the bombing of the city by American and British air forces, which razed it to the ground. The bombing of Dresden, which took place on the last day of Carnival of that year, is considered one of the bloodiest and most violent wartime events involving civilians in World War II: 135,000 civilians died. Kurt survived the bombing, locked in an underground bunker. A few weeks the conflict ended, and in June of that year the young man was repatriated to the United States. From that experience was born, twenty years later, Slaughterhouse-Five, his most famous novel.

Back in America, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox. Initially he wanted to resume his studies and enrolled in the anthropology course at the University of Chicago. However, in 1947 he started working as a public relations officer at General Electric, a large company where his brother Bernard already worked as a research scientist. His experience with this company was also short-lived. In the fall of 1951 Kurt and his wife decided to leave Schenectady to live in West Barnstable, in the Cape Cod area, south of Boston, to devote themselves full time to writing. Kurt’s most painful experience occurred in September 1958, when first his brother-in-law, James Adams, died in a train accident and then his sister Alice died of cancer just two days later at the age of 41. The couple left behind four children, who were cared for by Kurt and Jane.

The 1960s were the decisive years in Vonnegut’s career. After difficult beginnings, his first novels were published (Player Piano [1952], The Sirens of Titan [1959], Mother Night [1961]) they did not sell very well and he was forced to accept editorial compromises in order to have his books reprinted, but the turning point came with the release of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, in 1969.

In 1970 Vonnegut moved to New York and in 1971 he separated from Jane, divorcing her in the spring of 1979. The same year he remarried Jill Krementz, with whom he had a daughter, Lily and from whom he later divorced in 1991.

The years spent in New York were full of satisfaction for Kurt. Nominated vice-president of the Pen Literary Association in 1972 and then member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992, he continued to publish novels and short stories. His last novel, Timequake, was published in 1997.

Vonnegut died in New York 10 years later, on April 11, 2007, at the age of 85, after having  had 14 novels published over 45 years,^[2] along with countless short stories and several collections of articles and lectures.

Entering the literary world of this writer is not easy, because his very wide interests can lend themselves to multiple levels of reading, both for the profusion and exuberance of his creations, and for the dense set of internal references to the literary world that he has created over the years. Themes, characters, places, situations are taken up and interwoven.^[3] For reasons of space, we will consider here only four novels.

Vonnegut a science fiction writer? The debut with ‘Player Piano’

The first question that arises, faced with Vonnegut’s output, is whether he is principally a science fiction writer. Kurt says: “Years ago I worked for General Electric in Schenectady, and surrounded as I was by machines and ideas for machines, I had no choice but to write a novel about people and machines, and in which machines often got the better of people, as they often do in the real world. […] It was then that literary critics informed me that I was a science fiction writer. I didn’t really know that. I thought I had written a novel about life, about the things I had to see and hear in Schenectady, a city that was more than real, a disturbing presence in our already frightening everyday life. […] Apparently, to get into this category, one has only to acknowledge the existence of technology. We persist in thinking that no writer can be respectable and at the same time understand how a refrigerator works.”^[4]

Vonnegut is the first to refuse to be considered a genre writer. Family interests and biographical coincidences seem to be at the origin of the first novel, Player Piano and the short stories of the first phase of his writing. The writer rather explores  the expressive freedom that the characteristics of the science fiction genre allow him. His writing is marked  by a very strong ethical intent. More than science fiction and space travel, he has been interested in human beings since his debut.

The novel Player Piano begins with a description of Ilium,^[5] reflecting Thomas More’s Utopia or Plato’s Republic: “Ilium, New York, is divided into three parts. In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants, and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all of the people live.”^[6] The machines took the place of the people, “Paul unlocked the box containing the tape recording that controlled them all. The tape was a small loop that fed continuously between magnetic pickups. On it were recorded the movements of a master machinist, turning a shaft for a fractional horsepower motor. Paul counted back: eleven, twelve, thirteen years ago, he’d been in on the making of the tape, the master from which this one had been made […]. And here, now, this little loop in the box before Paul, here was Rudy as Rudy had been to his machine that afternoon—Rudy, the turner-on of power, the setter of speeds, the controller of the cutting tool. This was the essence of Rudy as far as his machine was concerned, as far as the economy was concerned, as far as the war effort had been concerned. The tape was the essence distilled from the small, polite man with the big hands and black fingernails.”^[7] The underlying issue is the value of the person, his or her dignity.^[8]

Vonnegut makes the protagonist, Paul Proteus, say in a moment of repentance during a conversation with his wife, Anita: “In order to obtain what we have obtained, Anita, we have, in essence, deprived these people of what for them was the most important thing on Earth: the feeling of being useful and necessary, the foundation of their dignity.”^[9]

Proteus is a senior executive in the industrial complex responsible for producing the goods necessary for everyday life. His father played an even more prominent role in the previous generation, and Paul, as a “son of art,” is destined to follow in his footsteps. Everything seems to be going well, except that Paul is restless and is attracted to the most popular part of the city of Ilium, where all those who have been expelled from the world of work live, having been replaced by machines.

The opening episode already contains the parable of Paul, who goes to repair a part indicated as defective by the spies in his office: “‘There’s nothing to be done,’ he said. The number three lathe assembly in Shed 58 had worked well in its day, but by now it was showing wear and tear and becoming something not integrated into that streamlined, perfect environment where there was no place for erratic behavior. ‘Basically, either way, it wasn’t built for the job it’s doing now. I expect the buzzer to sound any moment now and that will be the end of it’.”^[10] The piece whose hours are numbered is Paul himself.

For those whose jobs have been replaced by machines there are only two possible alternatives: the army or the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps. The possibility of access to higher studies and the more affluent part of society is determined by IQ tests that leave no room for error.^[11] Paul’s encounter  in the bar where he has gone to buy a bottle of whiskey, in the poor part of Ilium  with the father of a young man is heartbreaking: “‘Let’s drink to our children,’ the man with the thick lenses suddenly said. For a man who had used such a vibrant tone, his voice was surprisingly high-pitched. This time many glasses were raised. After the toast, the man turned to Paul with the most cordial of smiles and said, ‘My boy just turned eighteen, Doctor.’ ‘Good thing.’ ‘He’s got his whole life ahead of him. A wonderful age, eighteen.’ He paused, as if his remark demanded an answer. ‘I wish I was still eighteen,’ Paul said weakly. ‘He’s a fine boy, Doctor. He’s not what you’d call a genius. Like his old man… he’s got his heart in the right place and would like to do the best with what he’s got.’ That expectation-laden pause again. ‘That’s all that can be done,’ Paul said. ‘Well, since we have a clever man like you here, perhaps I could persuade you to give me some advice for the boy. He’s just finished the National General Classification Tests. He nearly killed himself studying, but it didn’t do any good. He didn’t do well enough for college. There were only twenty-seven places, and six hundred applicants’.” At a later date Paul would meet that father again, “‘How’s your son?’ said Paul. ‘Son, Doctor? Oh, oh, of course, my son. You said you were going to talk to Matheson about him, didn’t you? What did the good Matheson say?’ ‘I haven’t seen him yet. I meant to, but the opportunity hasn’t presented itself.’ The man nodded. ‘Matheson, Matheson… Beneath that icy exterior beats a heart of ice. Well, it’s just as well. There’s no need to talk to him now. My boy’s all set.’ ‘Oh, really? I’m glad to hear that.’ ‘Yes, he hanged himself this morning in the kitchen’.”^[12]

People are discontented, and they hatch creeping forms of rebellion.^[13] When Paul meets his youthful companion Finnerty, who has abandoned an even higher social position because of his distrust of the present situation, the desire to leave everything becomes compelling. It is only because of the ambition of his wife Anita, who sees her own personal fulfillment in her husband’s success, that he agrees to attend a gala dinner and the annual gathering of executives on an island for a week of games and team challenges for corporate team building. On the island, something unexpected happens. His attempt to quit his job fades; at the same time, Paul gets caught up in a game of manipulation by his bosses to get him to join the Ghost Shirts, to the point where, after a few weeks, he finds himself in the dock in a court of law, accused of being the leader and mastermind of a rebellion against the machines. This erupts in the streets during this interval, saving him from conviction. But after the rebellion, the human instinct to repair prevails, and the workers resume repairing the machines they have just finished destroying. This is, for the protagonist, the fulfillment of a fate, of becoming someone equal to his father, but different from him, equal, and at the same time opposite.

The science that can lead to the Apocalypse: the novel ‘Cat’s Cradle’

Another important social and philosophical theme for Vonnegut is the relationship between science and faith. The novel Cat’s Cradle came out in 1963, in a period of very strong international tensions. A few months earlier, in October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis between the United States and the USSR had pushed the world to the brink of World War III, the first one involving the threat of nuclear weapons. The possibility that the world could end in an immense tragedy is far from unrealistic, and the question of the responsibilities of science and scientists are felt by Vonnegut as inescapable. The novel’s protagonist is Jonah, the biblical name of the prophet who unwillingly announces God’s message. He is a writer who is gathering material for a book he wants to title: “The Day the World Ended.” The idea is to describe what some people were doing on the afternoon of August 6, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

In Cat’s Cradle, is scientist Felix Hoenikker (the exemplar of every scientist dedicated to pure research who helped create atomic weapons) innocent or guilty? Much to John/Jonah’s surprise and dismay, he discovers that shortly before his death Hoenikker invented a chemical compound – ice molecule nine – capable of freezing all the water in the world in a matter of minutes, both the salt water of the seas and the fresh water of lakes and rivers, and thus destroying life on Earth. What became of that invention, the most powerful weapon created by human hands? The molecules were handed over to his three children, Frank, Angela and Newt. Jonah embarks on a journey to a phantom island in the Caribbean (the Republic of St. Lawrence), to join Frank.

The dysfunctional dynamics of the members of the Hoenikker family – of the father Felix and his three children – as if they were an “original” biblical family, lead to the final apocalypse, a depopulated and frozen world, in which the only animals that manage to survive are the ants because of their ability to collaborate.^[14]

The novel begins thus: “Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John. Jonah or John… if I had been a Sam, I would still have been a Jonah – not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be in certain places at certain times. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there. Listen: When I was a younger man – two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago… When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called The Day the World Ended. The book was to be factual. The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.”^[15]

The long quote expresses an evolution in Vonnegut’s writing style from Player Piano, which was classic in its composition. In between there were two other novels, The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night. The style became tenser, more nervous. It is the mind-tongue that struggle to find the words to express the experience and, when it finds them, throws them out like stones, like congealed spittle, in search of a solution or resolution. Even the graphic form on the page, with  many lines starting over, da capo, in the body of the novel even more insistently, almost as if to create stains or islands of ink on the white page, expresses the effort to communicate what is seen from the precipice at the end of the world. In the book’s ending, the apocalyptic and eschatological point of view from which the novel is written, in the form of a memorial diary of the events that led to the destruction, is revealed. When all is over, a family of “Robinsons” remains, and the island is an ark with few human beings, and the writing can only be hallucinatory, stunted, even stuttering, and the characters little less than circus attractions.

The provocation of the figure of Jesus: the novel ‘God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater’

From a religious point of view, Vonnegut came from a German family of freethinkers. For some time he joined a Unitarian community and in his later years declared his atheism, but not in a controversial or destructive way. He also succeeded Asimov as president of the American Humanist  Association. The figure of Jesus fascinated him,^[16] and the novel that seems to be most inspired by the exploration of evangelical themes and sensibilities is God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It begins thus: “A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a tale about bees.”^[17]

The novel’s other leading character is Eliot Rosewater – the young heir to a colossal fortune kept in the family foundation, protected by legalities, who suddenly and unexpectedly decides to start handing out small sums of money to anyone who asks. The guilt of having killed some innocent people during the recently ended war consumes and distresses him. Any poor, derelict, indebted man or woman in Rosewater County, where the family fortune began, can show up at his door or call  a telephone number, to which Eliot personally responds with the words “Rosewater Foundation, how may we be of service to you?”^[18]

Eliot’s evangelical choice, like a new Jesus, to give money to anyone^[19] throws his family and the lawyers who represent them into bewilderment: “‘You must be crazy,’ said the New Egypt fireman. “I don’t want to be like me,” Eliot replied. “I want to be like you. You’re the salt of the earth, by God. You’re the good of America, you, in those clothes. You are the soul of the infantry of the United States. Finally, Eliot trades everything in his wardrobe except his tails, his tuxedo, and a gray flannel suit.” In an excited speech, Eliot’s father asks Sylvia, his daughter-in-law, “‘Tell me one good thing about those people Eliot helps.’ ‘I can’t.’ ‘I thought so.’ ‘It’s a secret,’ she said, forced to answer, wishing the discussion would end there. Without realizing that he was becoming ruthless, the senator insisted, ‘You are among friends, now: what if you confided this great secret to us?’ ‘The secret is that they are human beings,’ said Sylvia.”^[20]

A young lawyer, who sees that the particular situation has created the possibility of earning a large sum of money to advance the cause of another branch of the Rosewater family, begins to gather evidence for a charge of dementia or insanity. The various discussions between the father (Senator Rosewater) and the son (benefactor Eliot Rosewater) become more and more intense, and eventually something in Eliot’s mind snaps. When he announces that he will be leaving the county for a while, the poor people and the many benefactors sense that they will never see him again and do everything they can to keep him from leaving. They won’t succeed, and the reader will find Eliot in an asylum as he learns to give the right answers to win his case in court. Rosewater’s roommate is Kilgore Trout. This man, Vonnegut’s alter ego, appears for the first time in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and he would become a recurring character in the following novels, a figure through whom the writer enjoyed giving voice to his own more non-conformist side, duplicating his presence in the pages of his novels, talking with Kilgore as if in a game of theatrical masks. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater there is also an allusion to the tragic bombing of Dresden,^[21] which will constitute the plot of the following novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.

The novel ends with the image, also evangelical, of a group of 57 infants being adopted, taking on the new status of Eliot Rosewater’s children. It is the necessary ploy to break the impasse of a ruling that could hand control of the family estate to other Rosewaters. For nothing to change, the trick is for everyone to become the son’s children.

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Vonnegut’s style becomes more composed and classical. The tension that characterizes Cat’s Cradle is internalized. It is no longer the linguistic epidermis that quivers, but that of the plot, made up of the words that constitute the novel, that is put to the test. The weight is shifted on to what is told or re-told regarding the figure of Jesus, Eliot Rosewater’s alter ego.

Never War Again: The Novel ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’

Any introduction to Vonnegut cannot fail to mention Slaughterhouse-Five, the work that guaranteed his success, allowing the relaunch of his previous works. Slaughterhouse-Five is the novel with which the writer outlines the drama of his own experience of war, its absurdity and insane violence. “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his.”^[22] So begins the novel, whose protagonist is Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s alter ego, inspired by one of his fellow soldiers, Edward “Joe” Crone from Rochester, New York, who died in Europe.^[23]

The events of Billy’s life are largely Vonnegut’s autobiographical material: his brief wartime experience, his capture and his chance survival during the violent bombing of Dresden in the cold room of Number Five, a slaughterhouse building, from which the novel’s title derives. The first chapter, in fact, is the first-person narration, by the author, of how he arrived at the writing of the novel and what steps it involved.

The first chapter is also in some ways discharging a debt of honor to a woman, the wife of the comrade-in-arms who survived the conflict, with whom Vonnegut took a trip to Dresden in 1967, funded by a Guggenheim Foundation grant. She is Mary O’Hare, wife of Bernard V. O’Hare. “Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. ‘You were just babies then!’ she said. ‘What?’ I said. ‘You were just babies in the war, like the ones upstairs!’ I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood. ‘But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.’ This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation. ‘I-I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Well, I know,’ she said. ‘You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.’ So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies. So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise. ‘Mary,’ I said, ‘I don’t think this book is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. ‘I tell you what,’ I said, ‘I’ll call it The Children’s Crusade.’ She was my friend after that.”^[24]

This conversation took place in 1964. The lengthy quote is necessary to understand the ethical tension that animates Slaughterhouse-Five and also the great difficulties Vonnegut faced in talking about the war. “‘Would you be willing to talk about the war now if I asked you to?’ said Valencia. […] ‘It would be like talking about a dream,’ Billy said. ‘Usually other people’s dreams aren’t very interesting’.”^[25] The science fiction genre gave the writer the freedom he was looking for. Hence the choice to create a character who travels through time. Billy jumps from one point to another in his existence, experiencing it as an eternal present. “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. Tralfamadorians can look at different moments just as we look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. They can see how all moments are permanent, and look at any moment that interests them. It is only our delusion as earthlings to believe that one moment is followed by another, like knots on a rope, and that when one moment has passed it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is, ‘So it goes’.” ^[26]

From the second chapter on, Vonnegut switches to the third person and introduces the main character, Billy Pilgrim: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has traveled through time. Billy went to bed a senile widower and woke up on his wedding day. He walked through one door in 1955 and out another in 1941. He came back through that door and found himself in 1963. He has seen his own birth and death many times, he says, and he relives from time to time all the events that have happened in between.”^[27] It is through this key that the story unravels, by successive, sometimes very short paragraphs, with the effect of a handful of confetti thrown into the air, flashes of time that flank each other in harmony for a moment and then fall to the ground. Billy thus survives the war, marries, has a happy and successful life. He is kidnapped and taken to Tralfamadore. Then it is again time for sorrow: Billy survives a frightful plane crash, and at the same time his wife dies. Billy reaches old age, cared for by his daughter. And everything comes together in a  clash  of passages, to the point that the reader cannot help but wonder what the center is, but perhaps there is no center.

That this novel represents a moment of important synthesis for Vonnegut can also be understood from the fact that the writer calls together the principal characters of the previous novels, and so in the hospital where Billy is, the meeting takes place between him, born in Ilium,^[28] and Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater^[29] and Professor Rumfoord.^[30] Only letting weapons rust can prevent a new slaughter, the one seen by the writer in Dresden.

In the last chapter, Vonnegut resumes speaking in the first person and writes: “Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the house where I live all year round, was shot. He died last night. So it goes. Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day the government of my country tells me the number of dead bodies produced by military science in Vietnam. So it goes. My father died many years ago now – of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.”^[31]

Conclusion

Vonnegut’s oeuvre is broad and articulate. The four novels we have examined give us an idea of the power, style and creativity of this author, who is profoundly linked to the crucial issues of his time. It is striking to note the burning topicality of his pages, especially those denouncing the folly of war and the danger of the weapons produced by the most advanced scientific research, which can endanger the life of the planet as we know it.

To call Vonnegut a science fiction writer is limiting and reductive. Much stronger, in fact, was his impulse to take up a position than to entertain. Painful family events and the collective events he witnessed are the driving force behind the most intense pages of his work, which progressively grew in an inexhaustible effort to denounce, warn, synthesize and re-elaborate tensions. If Vonnegut’s work could be condensed into one word, appropriate and true would be the one the writer ascribes to a minor character of his first novel, the Shah of Bratpuhr, who, on his voyage of discovery of the United States, dominated by machines, blesses men and women with the word: “Live!”

DOI: La Civiltà Cattolica, En. Ed. Vol. 7, no.1 art. 13, 0123: 10.32009/22072446.0123.13

^[1].    Vonnegut’s writing would go on to feed on the interests and passions that were experienced in his family. His brother and father’s love of science and technology on the one hand, and his mother’s ambition to become a famous writer on the other, combined in young Kurt’s life and writing.

^[2].    Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat’s Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick (1976), Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1984), Galapagos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), Hocus Pocus (1990), Timequake (1997).

^[3].    Just to mention the most explicit and recurring elements, we mention: the town of Ilium, the character of Eliot Rosewater, the planet of Tralfamadore, the science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout.

^[4].    K. Vonnegut, Divina idiozia. Come guardare al mondo contemporaneo, Rome, edizioni e/o, 2002, 15.

^[5].    Latin name for ancient Troy, a fictional town that is paired with the real Ithaca, home of Cornell University, where Vonnegut lived and studied for a time. This town will also return in the novel Cat’s Cradle.

^[6].    K. Vonnegut, Player Piano.

^[7].    Ibid.

^[8].    Significantly, the epigraph of the book  quotes  these verses of Matthew’s Gospel: “Look at the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you that not even Solomon, in all his glory, was ever clothed like one of them” (Matt 6:28-29).

^[9].    K. Vonnegut, Player Piano.

^[10].   Ibid.

^[11].   See ibid.

^[12].   Ibid.

^[13].   Vonnegut has been accused of being a Luddite, but he always defended himself, saying that in this first novel he just wanted to describe what he saw and was before his eyes.

^[14].   Cf. K. Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle.

^[15].   Ibid.

^[16].   “In the arduous search for subversive literature among the shelves of our junior high schools […] the two most subversive texts always remain in place, completely unsuspected. One is the story of Robin Hood. […]. And yet another, as disrespectful to constituted authority as the story of Robin Hood […], is the life of Jesus Christ, as it is described in the New Testament” (K. Vonnegut, Timequake).

^[17].   K. Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

^[18].   Ibid.

^[19].   Cf. ibid.

^[20].   Ibid.

^[21].   See ibid.

^[22].   K. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.

^[23].   Cf. C. J. Shields, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2011, 66f; 393f.

^[24].   K. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.

^[25].   Ibid., 116.

^[26].   Ibid., 33. Interestingly, this view of time, far from being merely a literary device, is steeped in the theories of relativity to which Vonnegut’s scientific training gave him access.

^[27].   Ibid., 30.

^[28].   Ilium is the setting for Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano.

^[29].   In  God Bless You, Mr Rosewater.

^[30].   In  The Sirens of Titan.

^[31].   K. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.