Vonnegut earns top praise, reignites reading passion

During my sophomore year of high school my English class was assigned a small red book called “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Over the next few weeks, I became more engaged in reading than I had been since elementary school.

Series like, The “Magic Treehouse” and “Percy Jackson” catalyzed my passion for reading in my early childhood, and Kurt Vonnegut’s humorous and understated writing style reignited it half a decade later.

“Slaughterhouse-Five” focuses on a man named Billy Pilgrim, who has become “unstuck in time” This means that Billy jumps around between various experiences throughout his lifetime without any control over it.

Though this is a frightening proposition to most humans, Billy is equipped with a higher understanding of time. It was taught to him by his one-eyed pals from the planet Tralfamadore.

Though the book contains many ridiculous phrases and moments, it remains one of the most important American anti-war books ever written. Much of the book is based upon its author’s own experiences in World War ll.

While Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany he survived the allied force’s bombing of the city in a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of the city.

After the war, Vonnegut studied the shapes of human stories by plotting the good and bad fortunes of the characters over time. What he found was that the predictability of chronological stories vastly differed from how humans experience their lives.

Hand-shaped aliens, major celestial events and writing himself into the stories are a few of the ways that Vonnegut circumvented the typical chronology of the stories he wrote.

Though some readers are put off by Vonnegut’s tendency to “spoil” the endings of his books early on, I find this feature relieving. In my opinion knowing how a story concludes forces the reader to focus on events as they happen, leading to a better understanding of the story and how the various pieces of it fit together to teach us something.

“Cat’s Cradle” is another book that mettles with the reader as early as the first chapter, affectionately titled “The Day the World Ended” giving the reader a gigantic hint about the novel’s conclusion.

The book’s 191 pages are split into 127 chapters, giving the novel a unique pace and plenty of opportunities to read “one more chapter” late at night.

What surprised me most about this book was the beauty of its fictional religion, Bokonoism, which serves as a symbol of how humans choose to believe small, harmless lies in order to distract themselves from the fragility of life.

Many of Vonnegut’s characters are dejected and melancholic, such as Billy Pilgrim, Eliot Rosewater and his alter ego Kilgore Trout.

This is likely because Vonnegut struggled with his mental health throughout his life and had a generally pessimistic view of life.

These characters, as well as many others devised by Vonnegut, represent various aspects of the human condition, no matter how absurd or amusing the circumstances they’re written into are.

Though he passed away in 2007 at the age of 84, Vonnegut’s legacy lives on in the form of his irreverent novels and introspective autobiographical books from his last few years.

On November 19, a documentary about his life will be released titled “Kurt Vonnegut: American Made”. If you’re looking for Vonnegut recommendations, please consult the report card where he graded many of his own novels.