Vonnegut Forever! Hi Ho!

The Great Wampeter of our karass is gone. Our saint, our hero, has left us to better understand the lies of Bokonon. Busy, busy, busy. No more foma. No more granfalloons. Kurt Vonnegut is dead, dead, dead. So it goes. Perhaps he has become unstuck in time, and is now visiting his childhood, or rolling on the floor with some of his favorite dogs.

How can you really say goodbye to someone like Kurt Vonnegut? If you've read his work (see above for examples), you know what all the fuss is about. If you haven't read it, well, it's not going to be easy to describe. Some people say that Vonnegut was the Mark Twain of the 20th century because, like Twain, he used humor and wit to shed light on some of the less savory parts of our national (and sometimes international) culture. This is how you end up with books like Slaughterhouse Five where the horrors of WWII Dresden are interwoven with a story of time travel, aliens, and a porn star. You would think this combination would never work, but the results are incredible. Vonnegut always comes back to the point that some things are so terrible you can only find the absurdity in them.

I credit, or perhaps blame, Vonnegut's work for helping to shape my world view. He was a secular humanist, a liberal, and a peace activist, and all of these ideas were very much present in his novels. As a teenager I inhaled his books with great enthusiasm because they talked about real issues in a way that was completely fresh and unusual. Who would have thought that great literature could be so funny, surprising, and completely engrossing? Billy Pilgrim, Bokonon, Daffodil 11, and Kilgore Trout make for some odd teachers, but their lessons are certainly unforgettable. Therefore, God bless you Mr. Vonnegut, wherever you are. I hope that everything there is beautiful and nothing hurts. So it goes.