There is a mystical, perhaps unnerving appeal in the way Vonnegut artistically maintains the clement aloofness that strangely accounts for much of his contemporaneity; but behind it all, behind the fantasy and the anti-establishmentarianism, is a deceptive fondness for the uncomplicated that enchants some readers, repels others, and seems downright anti-intellectual or, worse, silly to his least sympathetic critics. Which of the three reactions is most valid is a matter of taste or tastelessness (depending on how you look at it); but how Vonnegut, a distinctly bourgeois writer who has more in common with Sinclair Lewis than with Hermann Hesse, came to achieve his present reputation and whether his artistry will sustain it is another matter. (p. 1)

Vonnegut's emphasis on the need for self-respect and his belief in the necessity of pacifism point to traits of character that are, one may argue, very much midwestern. Vonnegut's work can be read almost as if it is designed to illustrate attitudes that John T. Flanagan … sees as particularly midwestern: "individualism, self-reliance, a practical materialism, skepticism of custom and tradition unless rooted in common sense, political intransigence, and isolationism explained and heretofore justified by the geographical barriers and almost antagonistic apathy of the Old World."

Even Vonnegut's obsession with science-fiction techniques can be understood in terms of his regional background. "Vonnegut's fondness for vistors from other worlds is the drollest expression yet of the midwestern feeling that the Midwest is the Earth and that all other people are different," Alfred Kazin writes. "All that has changed since the West was the country of innocence is Vonnegut's feeling that innocence is dangerous." Vonnegut shares this feeling with Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and other midwestern writers; but given Vonnegut's sense of imminent apocalypse, the feeling is expressed with much more urgency and is more to the point than ever.

Vonnegut returns to the midwest again and again for characters and settings. The novelist Dan Wakefield (Going All Way), who also hails from Vonnegut country, points out that in each of Vonnegut's books there is at least one character from Indianapolis and compares this to Alfred Hitchcock's practice of making a walk-on appearance in each of his movies. Vonnegut can even be seen as a literary embodiment of the midwesterner in the updated tradition of the vernacular storyteller…. (pp. 3-4)

This is an appealing approach and it may be a good reason for the success Vonnegut has had with a contemporary reading audience that uneasily accepts alienation as a fact of life. Even though the stability, the security, and the optimism associated with middle-class, midwestern attitudes are no longer to be found in Indianapolis or anywhere else, Vonnegut remains something of a homesick writer. In all of his attacks on pornography, pollution, war, and whatever other evils he chooses to name, there is an inescapable longing for an earlier, simpler time, for the midwest of his boyhood…. (p. 4)

[Vonnegut is] a transitional figure in a time when the anti-egalitarian values of such earlier figures as T. S. Eliot, who believed that culture is the property of the tiny remnant that can appreciate highly abstruse and allusive symbolic forms of art, are being left behind. Pop, which has been seen as a vice of the populace, is now regarded as a fantastic and fantastically valuable storehouse of dreams, longings, and ancient myths retooled. What Vonnegut as a pop novelist does, in part, is what he himself attributes to Hunter S. Thompson: "He makes exciting, moving collages of carefully selected junk. They must be experienced. They can't be paraphrased."…

In just about every conceivable way Vonnegut's novels are what only can be termed "naïve" literature because he makes so much use of expected associations and conventions for the purpose of rapid communication with its readers. And what sets other writers apart from popular audiences is the very thing that Vonnegut seems to lack—sophistication. His manner suggests to his readers that he is not looking down on them, that he may even be right there, where they are and where it's at. (p. 10)

Vonnegut's revelations are often accomplished through the use of fables, another of the naïve forms he likes to work in. His stories always have morals, and they work to expose sins and folly.

Vonnegut uses another, perhaps more complex, association or convention—the structural discontinuity that appeals to the imagination of an audience accustomed to the montage of television. This is part of Vonnegut's fragmented idiom, which in itself suggests contemporary experience. The way Vonnegut times the talk of his characters, along with his short chapters, his sharp images, and his quick scenes—all of this makes reading his fiction a formal approximation of the experience of watching television.

But Vonnegut's popularity should not be interpreted only as a consequence of the modish appeal of his fiction or because his books make use of so many of the devices employed by the electronic media. Vonnegut's willingness to speak directly to his audience must have something to do with it…. (p. 11)

In a sense, all of Vonnegut's novels are Welcome books, full of attitudes and instructions on handling those attitudes that are useful if one is to avoid falling off the planet, or if one wishes to keep the planet here, wherever it is.

It is a mistake, however, to conceive of Vonnegut's significance entirely in terms of his popular success. Not only does he deal with concerns that are important to all of us, but he develops many ideas in startlingly refreshing ways. One surprising consideration is that Vonnegut a thoroughly middle-class writer who is, in some of his work at least, an apologist for the very kind of life he seems to be attacking. Vonnegut writes from a vantage point that is consistently middle class, and in his novels there is the suggestion, repeated many times, that the most unhappy people are those who do not have the blessings of middle-class life—a point that Vonnegut often expresses with considerable sentimentality. (p. 12)

Vonnegut's sentimentality is, of course, behind most of his social pronouncements and his remedy for the American experience, an experience he interprets as generally an unhappy one. One reason he sees for the unhappiness is that Americans suffer from living without a culture. In his view, American society is a lonesome one. He senses a longing for community, a longing that is frustrated by the shifting from house to house and from town to town that the economic system requires of so many Americans…. Vonnegut would also prefer that people live in "primitive" communities, folk societies, which he seems to think of in terms of small towns or of neighborhoods within cities (again the middle-class, midwestern vision of tree-shaded streets and old, comfortable homes).

Consideration of such economic and social pronouncements might have no place in a study of Vonnegut's achievement as a writer if it were not for his often stated opinion (which he wryly says is in agreement with that of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini) that a writer should serve society and that his own motives, at least, are political. "Writers are a means of introducing new ideas into society," Vonnegut emphasizes, "and also a means of responding symbolically to life." His notion of what a writer should do is in conflict, however, with his assumption (perhaps another middle-class suspicion) that writers of fiction are simply not important and most certainly are not listened to by the government. (pp. 13-14)

The purpose of writing and of all the arts is to provide … myths of "frauds," as Vonnegut terms them, which make man seem wonderful and important even if we all know that in the long run he is not…. So, even though each of Vonnegut's novels shows that man in general is contemptible, Vonnegut always has a hero who denies that contemptibility through his ability to come up with or live through a myth that is usually redemptive, somehow.

There is, however, another way Vonnegut views the usefulness of the arts. In his address to the American Physical Society in 1969, he said that in teaching writing, he has come up with what he calls the "canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts." His explanation is "that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive…. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there." His application of this theory is evident in all of his novels, each of which is a cry of danger, from Player Piano with its warning about computerization, to Breakfast of Champions with its warning about the consequences of failing to understand the chemical causes of schizophrenia. (pp. 14-15)

Time travel, visits by creatures from other planets, flying saucers, glimpses into a nightmare future—these and other science-fiction motifs are employed by Vonnegut to make the reader more aware of the absurdity of man's place in the universe. Vonnegut uses science fiction as a means of transmitting his vision, a vision that, because of its cosmically ironic implications, demands the intergalactic scope that science fiction affords. Given Vonnegut's attitudes toward his characters, if there were no such form as science fiction, he would be forced to invent it….

[Science fiction] also serves as a mitigating element in Vonnegut's fiction as well as a means of carrying off many of the jokes that run through and structure his novels….

[Vonnegut] uses science fiction not only as a way of carrying his ideas but as a way of making those ideas more palatable. If it were not for the science-fiction elements, Vonnegut would often be very unfunny indeed. (p. 86)

But, as even his first novel demonstrates, Vonnegut refuses to be limited by either the form of science fiction or its conventions. He shows from the start in Player Piano that he differs from most science-fiction writers in his characterization. Even though Vonnegut tends toward cartoonlike characters in his novels, purposely avoiding full development on principle, he nonetheless begins with a character, Paul Proteus, rather than an idea. Science may provide the conflict, but the resolution comes through character.

Most of Vonnegut's fiction concerns itself with technological problems but only insofar as those problems relate to and explicate character, with the point usually being that no matter what technology surrounds them, men and women remain essentially the same. Player Piano despite its EPICAC XIV computer and its checker-playing machine, comes down in the end to an ironic story about a disappointed middle-class revolutionist…. (p. 94)

The Trout novels retold in Breakfast of Champions are remarkably similar to Vonnegut's own in their resolutions and in their tendency to avoid any actual technical explanation of the strange futuristic technologies they rely upon. A good example is the story of Delmore Skag, who, as a way of protesting against the wastefulness and absurdity of large families, invents a means of reproducing replicas of himself by shaving living cells from the palm of his right hand and culturing them in chicken soup. He then invites his neighbors, all of whom have large families, to mass baptisms—sometimes as many as a hundred of his "babies" at once. But instead of passing a law outlawing families of more than one or two children, the government enacts legislation prohibiting the possession of chicken soup by an unmarried person. And the cosmically ironic joke is on Delmore Skag, a joke that goes along with one of Vonnegut's main themes—the destruction of the planet through the insane response human beings seem to make to any idea. (p. 97)

In one novel, Cat's Cradle, however, Vonnegut plays things straighter, especially with the substance that engenders the final catastrophe—ice-nine. Vonnegut generally makes no attempt to explain or make plausible the scientific wonders that occur in his futuristic worlds, and there admittedly is not much "science" in his fiction. But with ice-nine, at any rate, Vonnegut provides a technical lecture that makes Cat's Cradle read at times more like hard-core science fiction than any of Vonnegut's other novels…. The result is a suggestion of authentic science that makes the apocalyptic ending of the novel horrifying, despite Vonnegut's comic implications. (p. 98)

What Vonnegut is doing as he moves half mystically, half laughingly, in and out of science fiction is to try to come up with a definition of himself and others that will "stand in the terrifying light of twentieth-century knowledge." When he is writing simply as a science-fiction writer in the stories he published in Galaxy ("Unready to Wear" and "The Big Trip Up Yonder") or in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction ("Harrison Bergeron"), he does not move very far toward that definition. But when he combines the special effects of science fiction with extended cosmic irony in his novels, he transforms one of the most important forms of pop culture into his own distinctive form of astral jokebook. (p. 100)

James Lundquist, in his Kurt Vonnegut (copyright © 1977 by Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc.), Frederick Ungar, 1977.