[Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.] is a Cosmic Fool, a clown who laughs at the world's failings and sorrows (and tries to tease, cajole and seduce us into laughing at them, too), rather than be overwhelmed by them (though sometimes it is touch and go). His satirical commentaries on business, war, politics, machine technology, organized religion, and organizations in general expose the foibles and inhumanities of a society of which he is always highly critical. Yet his satire and cosmic pessimism are paradoxically countered by his humor, gentleness and kindness, as well as his comic energy and individual optimism. (p. 3)

Faced with a world defined by Emersonian or Jungian polarities (what he calls in Cat's Cradle "Dynamic Tension," or Bokonon's "sense of a priceless equilibrium between good and evil" [one could add to his list nature and history, freedom and determinism, love and indifference, individuality and conformity, reality and illusion, and literature and life], Vonnegut consciously chooses a stance of naivety and wonder—the "child-like"—as well as sentiment and self-pity—the "childish." In many ways, he is sensitive and profound; in others, he remains a blurb-writer, still doing public relations work, but now for himself.

Vonnegut establishes throughout his writings a point of view intended to be outside our own moment in time and space…. This point of view—usually "a visitor from another planet"—is concerned fundamentally with problems of value: self-awareness, self-realization, self-fulfillment; the nature and destiny of man. On a primary level, Vonnegut's search for the sacred in human experience involves the attempt, as the narrator says in Slaughterhouse-Five, "to reinvent himself and his universe in his novel." Or, as Billy Pilgrim hears Eliot Rosewater say to a psychiatrist: "I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living." These "new lies" (or Bokononist foma) and the reinvented selves are the moral centers of Vonnegut's fiction. (p. 4)

[What] makes a worthwhile life in a meaningless, arbitrary, contingent universe? Each of Vonnegut's works embodies in its characters a response to this predicament…. (pp. 4-5)

Vonnegut's other major themes, the nature of truth, the paradoxical contrast between illusion and reality, and the nature of man, all come together in his sense of the need for the creation of a reinvented universe (a "secondary universe" in fantasy terms), a perspective from which we may examine our primary universes and perhaps change them. His tactics include irony, paradox, and satirical humor, sometimes coupled with a didactic and sentimental tone, to delineate his own created universes. At one level, Vonnegut is a failed Romanticist who sees "no hope" in a world which does not care either for or about man…. (p. 5)

[Player Piano] is a satire of modern society, relationships, religion, and politics…. Some critics have argued that it is Vonnegut's finest novel, and even that it is the best work of modern science fiction. Others have argued that it is his poorest, and not science fiction at all. One of the reasons for this wide variance in opinion is Vonnegut's characterization: the characters who people this novel (and indeed all his novels) seem to many critics flat and stereotypic, to lack depth in their feeling and thinking, to fail to meet a prime criterion for fiction: making us care deeply about them. But this misses the point, for Vonnegut's characters are closer relatives to the figures in G. B. Trudeau's "Doonesbury" than they are to most of the characters in modern American fiction. They embody and reflect the ideas and values which come under close scrutiny in Vonnegut's work; they do not come into any "full life" of their own. (p. 9)

Vonnegut's satire … focuses on one of his consistent themes: the failure of love to provide a secure center for human relationships in the modern world. Paul makes a "dark muffled womb" of his bed every night, and his "barren" wife Anita (who would fit in rather easily with the Stepford wives) has social rather than sexual orgasms. Their ritual love-refrain ("I love you, Paul." "I love you, Anita.") is repeated in one form or another eleven times in the novel, and along with Paul's "Hi ho," is the first of the refrains which become consistent thematic punctuations in Vonnegut's work. Yet Paul, in a pathetic yet poignant scene typical of Vonnegut (and reminiscent of Isaac Mc-Caslin's thoughts about his own wife in Faulkner's The Bear), thinks that Anita "was what fate had given him to love, and he did his best to love her." This problem with love, and its failure as a redeeming force in life, is reflected in much of Vonnegut's work, and becomes the center of [Slapstick]…. (p. 11)

[Player Piano's] cast of characters is varied and impressive, and although they tend to be brittle, fallible, fragile, and weak, "losers" more than "winners," they inspire both irony and pity, Vonnegut's as well as the reader's. (pp. 11-12)

The Shah provides for us a point of view and perspective from outside the limited world and experience of the novel's cultural framework (and our own, Vonnegut suggests). (p. 13)

What the Shah never sees is Paul's personal world, and this lack of interaction or confrontation is one of the novel's weaknesses. For Paul is finally insubstantial, a "wraith" who is "little more than his station in life…." [He] remains a figurative as well as literal prisoner at the novel's end. Like Malachi Constant in The Sirens of Titan, Paul is a manipulated messiah figure who inadvertently satirizes not only the Protestant work-ethic, but also the forms of old religions and the failures of new religions (like the Ghost Shirt Society) to replace them. (p. 14)

The central question of the novel concerns the nature and destiny of man…. Paul, on trial for sabotage (the greatest sin against a technocracy, states that "The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings … not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems." Yet it is not always clear in the novel just what "doing a good job of being human beings" means. Indeed, Vonnegut struggles with this question throughout his work. (pp. 14-15)

Of all the characters in [The Sirens of Titan], it is Rumfoord who is the most intriguing. On one hand, he is described by the narrator in terms which would do justice to a Hemingway "code character": he has "un-neurotic courage," "style"…, and "gallantry." Yet he loves fraud, endlessly manipulating the other characters…. (p. 19)

The image of man in this novel is thus close to what e. e. cummings has called 'mostpeople." People are described as "whores for money, alcoholics, cynics, and scummy idiots who dream of greener pastures without being willing to work for them." Yet, in Rumfoord's eyes, man remains laughingly optimistic, expecting the species to last for millions of years. It is this laughter, along with memory, which is one of the few measures of man's freedom. (p. 20)

In many ways the characters in The Sirens of Titan have their parallels with the characters in Player Piano. There are: the central character who somewhat simple-mindedly struggles to make sense of his world, and in the process becomes more aware and more human, though still manipulated and used (Malachi and Paul); the observer from "outer space" who sees the action more clearly and honestly than those who are involved in it (Salo and the Shah); the perceptive participant who tries to create a new religion to solve man's problems (Rumfoord and Lasher); and the plastic-hostess female figure who only at brief moments shows any humanity (Bee and Anita).

Both novels focus on the question of the meaning of life. (p. 22)

Love and kindness may be illusion and not reality, as are the Sirens of Titan (Malachi learns on Titan that they are not real women, but only statues made by Salo of Titanic peat); yet that may be all there is. As Woody Allen says to the psychiatrist who tells him to hospitalize his brother who thinks he is a chicken: "I can't; I need the eggs." The same is true, he says, of human relationships: we don't give them up, because we need the eggs. Perhaps the moral of The Sirens of Titan finally is: abandon expectations, live fully in the present moment, and love whoever is around to be loved. (pp. 22-3)

[At several levels Mother Night] is about pretending, duplicity, illusion, and multiple roles…. Campbell is in several ironic ways as much Nazi as pseudo-Nazi. He says that like Mata Hari—to whom he dedicated his book—he "whored in the interest of espionage"; but Wirtanen points out that historians would consider him really a Nazi, and asks what would have happened if Germany had won the war. Campbell's response is that he probably would have become a "Nazi Edgar Guest." Vonnegut extends the moral in his editor's note by quoting from a chapter Campbell later rejected, in which he dedicated the novel to "one familiar person, male or female, widely known to have done evil while saying to himself, 'a very good me, the real me, a me made in Heaven, is hidden deep inside,'" and rededicates the novel to himself, as a "man who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times." Clearly, the moral is meant to apply to the reader as well as to Campbell. (pp. 24-5)

Mother Night might be subtitled "A Portrait of the Artist as Liar." It is a novel of escapes from reality, in which (like Player Piano) history overcomes art, love, and politics. Campbell, as playwright-artist, hides from reality in a world of the imagination, and sees the world—rather than himself—as diseased. (p. 26)

Though Cat's Cradle is in many ways an antidote to Mother Night, countering its view of lies as corrupting and destructive with a vision of lies as nurturing and sustaining, its fundamental focus is literature as game. In this novel Vonnegut is closer to [Vladimir] Nabokov, [Jorge Luis] Borges, [John] Fowles, and [John] Barth than he has been in his earlier works. The reader is more aware of being played with than he is of being instructed or amused, though Vonnegut continues to satirize science, religion, politics, sex, man's understanding, nationalism, and love. (p. 28)

Once again, man in Vonnegut's cosmos is obsessed with the search for meaning and purpose…. And once again, understanding is the booby-prize; man must accept what is, and not separate himself from his experience by constantly trying to analyze its meaning. (p. 31)

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater deals with the confusions of money, power and love in a "Free Enterprise System." (p. 37)

But God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is as much about love and integrity as it is about money and power. The only character with real integrity in the novel besides Kilgore Trout (the others either lack it or are searching for it) is the Hemingway-type caricature of Mr. Natural, Harry Pena…. (p. 40)

Eliot and his father argue periodically throughout the novel about the nature of love…. [The] point to Eliot, and to Kilgore Trout, is that "people can use all the uncritical love they can get." As Trout says, what Eliot wants is "treasuring human beings because they are human beings." This contrast in views on love is similar to that of John and Mona in Cat's Cradle. And what Eliot has learned is similar to what Howard Campbell learns in Mother Night, that people need uncritical love, love without judgment, love which accepts people just the way they are, and just the way they are not. (p. 41)

[Happy Birthday, Wanda Jane] deals fundamentally with death, the acceptance of death as a part of the natural order, and the place of women in the modern world…. However, the central conflict in the play is between those who enjoy killing, and those who don't, a conflict which is never clearly resolved, at least in part because once again Vonnegut has no real villains. The play is also about the need for rituals in society … male chauvinism …, and the human need for dignity and patience…. [His] plays are certainly less successful than the novels, due fundamentally to a lack of depth of motivation in the characters, and no clearly defined points of view….

[Slaughterhouse-Five] focuses particularly on the horror and absurdity of war, man's helplessness in an absurd universe, the fact that life (and death) simply is what it is, and how man can deal with these realities: by inventing "wonderful new lies." It presents these ideas, however, in a style which is continuing to develop, and which is moving significantly closer to the form which might be called the Gestalt Novel, the form of Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick. (p. 45)

Beginning with Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut is not only a character in his novels, but also, in dramatic terms, the producer and director as well. His authorial intrusions provide the framework for the entire novel (as the beginning and end of the actual novel, rather than as introduction and afterword), and also punctuate the work throughout, reminding us that Vonnegut as "author" and Vonnegut as "narrator" are not necessarily the same. (pp. 45-6)

There is no beginning, middle or end to the novel—not in terms of chronological time-scheme nor of plot development. There is also no suspense (we as readers, as well as Billy Pilgrim, learn quite early how and when he will "die"), and none of the cause and effect relationships of realistic fiction; the book simply reinforces the Tralfamadorian and Bokononist views that what is, is. In fact, the Tralfamadorians frequently tell Billy that men are "machines" and "bugs in amber," and that Earthlings are the universe's "great explainers," who keep needing to create artificial answers to the question "why?" rather than accept the irrelevance of the question. The disjointed time-scheme and short chapter form also create a clump of images, if not symbols, which come together in the mind of the reader as a montage which does often "produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep." It is this technique of "Gestalt fiction" which Vonnegut extends in Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick as a vehicle for his naive vision. (pp. 49-50)

When Billy asks the Tralfamadorians that question which must be asked in all Vonnegut novels, "Why me?," they reply: … "Because this moment simply is…." [Billy discovers] that this view totally eliminates guilt, and frees man to use his memory selectively. By concentrating only "on the happy moments" of life one is able to adopt the epitaph which Vonnegut says will serve for himself as well as Billy Pilgrim: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt" (or, as he phrased it in Monkey House: "No Pain")…. What this foma (or "wonderful new lie") provides is a perspective beyond anxiety and alienation, a perspective which accepts the meaninglessness of the world (and says "so what?"), and then goes on to create a world in which man is paradoxically free because he has been released from the burden of irresponsible responsibility. It is a world in which what a man does is simply what he does; a world governed by a naive vision out of which, as Kilgore Trout says, one can open the window and make love to the world.

Breakfast of Champions is a further development in Vonnegut's naive vision, and in the techniques of "Gestalt fiction." (pp. 51-2)

It is [the] seemingly radical separation of art and reality, and of literature and life, which becomes the center of Vonnegut's naive vision. It is an attempt to break down the stereotypes of continuity, order and ordinary meaning which inform mainstream fiction, a fiction in which "people get what is coming to them in the end," a fiction which convinces readers that in this "fair and just" world, they too will be rewarded (and their enemies punished). (p. 53)

The central theme in Breakfast of Champions remains the same as it is in Vonnegut's other work. If human beings are "non-sacred machines" living on a "wrecked planet," if the real "breakfast of champions" is alcohol (which destroys the body) rather than any cereal which nourishes it, and if there is no Creator to cry "Olly-olly-ox-in-free" to us (as Dwayne does so ironically in this novel, and as Howard Campbell wishes it in Mother Night), what shall give us the will to live? How can we say goodbye to all the "Blue Mondays"? (p. 56)

[Commenting on the novel, Vonnegut] says that "the American experience has been an unhappy experience, generally, and part of it, as I say, is living without a culture" …, "all my books are my effort to … make myself like life better than I do."

Yet there is a gap (and in our contemporary culture, perhaps a chasm) between acknowledging a problem and solving it, and with each novel, the gap for Vonnegut seems to become wider. (p. 57)

In Slapstick, Vonnegut again reveals his disenchantment with the lack of supportive culture in America, particularly the disenfranchisement brought about by the breaking down of regionalism….

Vonnegut, still the intrusive author, begins the novel with the sentence: "This is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography…." And the novel does seem to be autobiographical, with Wilbur's relationship with his sister Eliza paralleling Vonnegut's own relationship with his sister Alice; it is also grotesque, situational poetry—"real life," as Vonnegut called it in Breakfast of Champions; and it is filled with a poignant longing for a recapitulation of the past …, the other side of Kilgore Trout's last cry at the end of Breakfast of Champions: "Make me young, make me young, make me young!" (p. 58)

The irony in [the novel] is that Wilbur is unable to have real intimacy, just as he is unable to share love…. [Love] "can often be poisonous" (Vonnegut wants it replaced by "common decency"), and when Wilbur and Eliza attempt a reconciliation the result is an incredibly intense, traumatic, and pathetic orgy which lasts for "five whole nights and days," and which terrifies them both. Eliza, the intuition, has spent her time in the institution singing the same song, over and over again: "Some Day My Prince Will Come;" Wilbur, the intellect, has spent his time justifying their separation. Neither the romanticist nor the rationalist alone is "really very good at life." Yet when Wilbur twice tells Eliza that he loves her, she tells him that she doesn't like it because its "just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don't mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, 'I love you, too?'" (reminiscent of the ironic refrain Paul and Anita repeat in Player Piano)…. Despite Vonnegut's admonition in the preface that this novel is "what life feels like to me," and the epigraph of Romeo's "Call me but love, and I'll be new baptiz'd," intuition bows and defers to intellect, and feeling to thinking, and love fails. (pp. 61-2)

Where will Vonnegut go from here? In Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick, the Gospel from Outer Space (the detached observer) has been replaced by the Gospel from Inner Space (the involved participant). Vonnegut remarked in the preface to Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons that "I keep losing and gaining equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction." Though there are still no Nirvanas, Vonnegut may continue, if he overcomes his own fears (particularly embodied in Howard Campbell's desire for suicide in Mother Night, and Kilgore Trout's cry against growing old in Breakfast of Champions) and maintains his "equilibrium," to develop and refine his techniques of Gestalt fiction. Look also for an extension of his naive vision, for a literature which helps us laugh (as well as cry) at life's ironies, and helps us become our own folk heroes. Look for a book like Unk's letter, as it was described in The Sirens of Titan: "literature in the finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free. It made him his own hero in very trying times." (p. 63)

Clark Mayo, in his Kurt Vonnegut: The Gospel from Outer Space (or, Yes We Have No Nirvanas), (copyright © 1977 by Clark Mayo), The Borgo Press, 1977.