Where Have You Gone, Kurt Vonnegut?

I was happy to read this weekend in the Times Book Review that a collection of previously unpublished writings by Kurt Vonnegut has just come out. I can’t get enough Vonnegut — he’s got an inimitable way of satirizing the absurdity of real life by creating his own absurd world of fiction. He and Orwell are the ones I think of when I listen to the news in the morning and get struck by truth-is-stranger-than-fiction quality of some of the stories. I jotted down a few such stories that I heard on Morning Edition last week, all in the same day:

1. “Adventure capitalists” have secured a 50-year lease of one of Baghdad’s public parks, and plan to construct a Disney-like theme park, replete with a water park wherein cartoon images are displayed in the mist created by the fountains. This is in a city that has less than 6 hours of electricity per day, and where car bombs and random violence have become as commonplace as jaywalkers in New York City. To their credit, the plucky financiers pull no punches about their motives: they readily admit that they only care about building up the community infrastructure to the extent that it makes them richer.

2. Army hospitals are struggling to stop overdoses by injured veterans of the Iraq war. Reportedly, vets are being drugged into a near-comatose state for much of their day, with a cocktail of up to 11 different medications. This is happening in what the Army calls “Warrior Transition Units.” One poor warrior at Fort Knox was left in his room for two days or more — unconscious — and was found dead when someone finally decided to check on him.

3. Endurance specialist David Blaine broke a world record by holding his breath underwater for more than 17 minutes on the Oprah Winfrey Show. “When he broke the record, with a half minute to spare, he said he accomplished a life-long dream.”

4. Many Americans are finding themselves “upside down” in car debt, i.e., their car is worth less than the amount they owe on their auto loan. They have no choice but to continue making the payments, or pay thousands of dollars to just get out from underneath the onerous obligation.

Any of the above would fit into a tragicomic novel about the ruthless inanity of modern life. That they are true stories is no matter; Vonnegut wove truth into his fantastic tales, and it gave them a weighted, more believable narrative. Just pick any random page of Slaughterhouse Five for an example. When I did the same I flipped to page 45 of my yellowed, brittle-paged copy and found Billy Pilgrim, in the waiting room of a hospital, reading The Execution of Private Slovik, by William Bradford Huie. It’s an account of Private Eddie D. Slovik, the only American solider to be executed for cowardice since the Civil War.

Vonnegut quotes directly from it: “Billy read the opinion of  a staff judge advocate who reviewed Slovik’s case, which ended like this: He has directly challenged the authority of the government, and future discipline depends upon a resolute reply to the challenge. If the death penalty is ever to be imposed for desertion, it should be imposed in this case, not as a punitive measure nor as retribution, but to maintain that discipline upon which an army can succeed against the enemy. There was no recommendation for clemency in the case and none here is recommended. So it goes.” So it goes, indeed.

Comments

[Emily]

In my openion, Kurt Vonnegut is a satirical writer