We are best cheered by untruths, so the bigger the whopper, the better—says Vonnegut. In his masterpiece, Cat's Cradle, the founder of a new religion insisted at every step that his own doctrines were lies. Solace, apparently, came immediately.

In the preface to [Welcome to the Monkey House] he announces that one of the themes of his novels is "No pain." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., probably our finest Black Humorist, is offering us comfort.

He is the little Dutch boy stopping the hole in the dike: while he conscientiously aids us, he reminds us that we live in the shadow of deep waters. Or, to use the idea that appears frequently in his work as a main character, a minor figure, part of the background, or the tail of a metaphor, he is the volunteer fireman, unselfishly and innocently rushing to put out the random blazes of civilization. His comforts frighten us with their inadequacy, and we laugh in self-defense.

Vonnegut's special enemies are science, morality, free enterprise, socialism, fascism, Communism, all government—any force in our lives which regards human beings as ciphers. His villains are simple egotists, indifferent to other people, his protagonists men who adapt events to their own discontent with the system, rolling with the times to create change, which is rarely, in Vonnegut's world, an improvement. His third group of characters, his saints, his volunteer firemen, are content to aid others in their own small world, unaware of the larger actions that swirl around them. Failing to participate in events, they nevertheless become the focus of all activity, their relevance being the undeniable fact that they exist.

Vonnegut is a pessimist. But he is also an idealist; his irony is not cynicism. His writing has a disarming directness, and his few statements about style reinforce this simplicity, yet the apparent slickness of his short, tight paragraphs—almost a paradigm of the popular magazine—fails to conceal the size of his concepts. And what appears at first to be gratuitous satire is always integral to the tale. (p. 123)

The style may bring to mind another Black Humorist, Terry Southern…. Both authors use the cliché for effect, but where the sardonic Mr. Southern uses the commonplace to reinforce our own complacency, Vonnegut uses it to throw new light on those thoughts which we hoped were not ordinary. A cliché is dead language, as when an author deliberately inserts one into the unresisting mouth of a character, he is registering contempt for that character, labeling him dead….

Roughly half of Vonnegut's published short stories are included in this collection. It is a good selection, although an unimpressive review of the big Random House dictionary has unaccountably crept in….

The reader should not expect full-fledged apocalypse from these pleasant tales, only brush fires of varying intensity that a good fireman can handle. (p. 124)