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This past spring American author Kurt Vonnegut died, but the date of his passing, April 11, was quickly eclipsed by the terrible events of April 16.
No, Vonnegut did not die young; in fact he was blessed with a good 84 years. However, I believe his departure deserves a few comments. After reading a number of pieces on his life, I should say that this will not be the most elegant of eulogies, but just a few words on the meaning of his works to me.
I first read "Slaughter-House Five" as a junior in high school and, although I enjoyed it, I was more impressed with Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," which I read shortly after. However, continuing to read more of Vonnegut's works brought to me a true appreciation of his literary skill and the growing impact his words were having on my own thinking.
His works were not always the subtlest, but often the straightforward manner in which he wrote cast a deceptive simplicity onto the messages he was pointing to.
For the uninitiated, Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indiana in 1922. He served in World War II, and as a prisoner of war, was moved to the Dresden, Germany. Near the end of the war, the allied forces firebombed the city, killing as many of 130,000 of its inhabitants. Vonnegut, along with several other Americans, survived the firebombing in the meat locker where they were being held. Slaughterhouse Five was its name.
What an odd twist of fate that let this man survive to tell his tale and become to many a twentieth century Mark Twain, as much in literary satire as in their shared disdain for the increasing use of war as an acceptable method of solving our problems.
His humanist voice, spoken over and over again in every novel he wrote, conveyed to many in a wholly unique way the virtues of pacifism and social justice. His continued ability to find inspiration in the words of those before him, from fellow Hoosier and American Socialist, Eugene Debs, to Jesus of Nazareth and his Sermon on the Mount, was his greatest strength. Vonnegut once remarked that had it not been for the Sermon on the Mount, he would just as well have been a rattlesnake as a human being.
In one of the most beautiful passages in modern literature, Vonnegut created a scene in Slaughter-House Five in which the bombing of a city takes place in reverse:
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