[Almost] all the commentators on Vonnegut betray a certain uneasiness in talking about him as a satirist; he does not quite fit the mold. (p. 101)

Vonnegut's basic world view is Post-existential. He [rejects] all ethical absolutes. Vonnegut stresses the futility of man's search for meaning in a world where everything is "a nightmare of meaninglessness without end," where we are all the victims of a series of accidents, "trapped in the amber of this moment…. Because this moment simply is." In Cat's Cradle he shows how man's "nostalgia for unity," to use Camus' phrase, forces him to interpret mere chance as purposeful, leads him to create the meaning he wants to find and makes him believe in his own insubstantial structure, his own cat's cradle. Each of Vonnegut's novels shows us that there is no relation between human actions and the events that take place in human lives. All success—and, one supposes, failure—is the result of luck…. Man, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, finds that among the things he cannot change are past, present and future. His actions serve no purpose he can hope to comprehend. Vonnegut also has his own version of [Jean-Paul] Sartre's theory of human identity. He talks about the desire of Being-For-Itself to become Being-In-Itself as the Universal Will to Become and claims that the moral of Mother Night is "We are what we pretend to be."

If Vonnegut denies the possibility of absolute values, then how can he be a satirist [since satire implies the existence of absolute values]? The answer is that he is not. He has the look of the satirist, but has no answer to give us. (pp. 102-03)

[He] employs the methods of satire as an attack upon satire itself, or rather upon the idea of a world in which the definite answers satire implies are possible. Vonnegut deliberately uses the expectations that satire arouses to tempt the reader into easy moral answers he subsequently undermines either by later attacking the acquired moral answer or by setting it in a Post-existential philosophic framework where no value is absolute….

Vonnegut frustrates the reader's expectations in order to bring about in him an experience of the absurd. He allows the reader the temporary illusion that he has the answer and then disillusions him. This is not just a question, as perhaps it is in the case of such other pessimistic satirists as Swift or [Samuel] Johnson, of not believing man likely to adopt the alternative to the vices under attack. Vonnegut does not merely disbelieve that man will become benevolent,… but attacks the very idea of the workability of benevolence.

In his earlier novels, Vonnegut works chiefly against the expectations aroused by satire but more recently, particularly in his sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, he has been making increasing use of those techniques of action, language, and characterization that work against the expectations of realism. (p. 103)

Vonnegut uses the form of the fable against the objectives of the fable. By suggesting, through obvious patterning of characters and contrasts between our own world and those of other planets, that he is arguing to a conclusion, he arouses our expectation for revelation. The pattern will work out; the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle will make the picture clear; the fable will reveal its moral. But Vonnegut's fables do not have morals, at least none which can stand as solutions to the Post-existential dilemma, just as his apparently satirical methods do not operate from any consistent ethical scheme. Again he is deliberately working to disillusion the reader…. [He] parodies himself; his novels gradually unmake themselves….

[The central figure of Player Piano, Paul Proteus] feels "love—particularly for the little people, the common people, God bless them. All his life they had been hidden from him by the walls of his ivory tower…. This was real, this side of the river, and Paul loved these common people, and wanted to help, and let them know they were loved and understood, and he wanted them to love him too"….

If we accept, as most critics have, that this novel is a satire directed against technology, then the values expressed by Paul here are those Vonnegut expects us to accept also. But … a careful reader would surely have to be suspicious of the tone of this passage. Vonnegut is too conscious of language to use such phrases as "the common people," "the little people," "ivory tower" "this was real," without recognizing them as clichés. He is giving us an easy answer—charity, fellow feeling, remorse—to the problems of mechanization and inhumanity, and is indicating that the answer is simplistic by his use of clichés.

Nevertheless, it is easy to miss these early clues, and the novel does for a long time seem to be a satire. Vonnegut's targets are standard ones: daytime soap operas designed to keep everyone satisfied with the status quo; the big business aspects of college football now no longer related to academic life at all; ambitious wives who feign affection. Each of these targets is attacked through the usual satirical method of slightly exaggerating a situation already present to a lesser extent in our society. Each of these targets also is an aspect of the apparently chief target of Vonnegut's novel, the mechanization of human lives. The great example of its opposite, human feeling and eccentricity, is Ed Finnerty, and Vonnegut sees to it that our sympathies lie with Finnerty and his friend Lasher throughout the novel. Who can resist the temptation to support man and human feeling against machines?

So far the novel is conventional. The methods are basically realistic, except for the use of a future world. Even the visitor from another country, the Shah of Bratpuhr, functions … as a naive observer, not as he would in later Vonnegut novels as a creature with more knowledge from a totally different world. (p. 104)

But Player Piano does not end conventionally. The values established by the satirical methods at the beginning of the novel are finally completely undercut. This is not to deny, of course, that Vonnegut prefers human warmth to mechanization; but he does not, in his novel, appear to see it as a viable situation. Those representatives of human feeling against mechanization, Finnerty and Lasher, treat Paul as an object. "'You don't matter,' said Finnerty. 'You belong to History now'"…. They are prepared to kill him if it is necessary. (p. 106)

In Player Piano the easy answers of [Vonnegut's] initial satirical attacks are not refuted by placing them in a Post-existential framework and there are only the earliest hints of absurd techniques. But nevertheless Vonnegut does use here the basic method of all his novels; he tempts the reader into easy answers through satirical methods and later disillusions him.

The subject of man as machine is fare more imaginatively treated in Vonnegut's second novel, his first attempt at science fiction, The Sirens of Titan. In this novel Vonnegut takes the old sophomoric debate about first cause—if God created the world, then who created God—and gives it some new turns. He is concerned with the absurdity of man's "appetite for the absolute," with his inescapable tendency to attribute meaning to his existence on earth. (pp. 106-07)

Religious belief, says Vonnegut, is based on no evidence at all. Rumfoord believes he knows the meaning of certain earthlings' lives, since they are part of his plan to establish the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent on earth by leading an attack from Mars. Malachi Constant, later Unk, is used by Rumfoord. What Rumfoord desn't know is that he is part of a more complicated plan, the ultimate aim of which is to transport a replacement part for a space ship stranded on Titan. So the meaning of human life is reduced to an absurdity. (p. 107)

If human life has a pattern, a scheme, it is not a merciful one…. If the plan of the universe is not merciful, suggests Vonnegut, it might just as well not have one. Our religious fantasies of all truth being revealed to us in another world might well turn out to be the truth revealed to us through the other worlds of Vonnegut's novel. At all events there is no possible way of our finding the truth. Each man is doomed to his own subjective version of it….

All events come about through luck, though like Malachi Constant we choose to believe that "somebody up there" likes us. (p. 108)

The Sirens of Titan invites us to read it as a satire just as Player Piano does. The many early targets of the book—posted bulletins about someone's health that reveal nothing; man's need to feel superior to his fellows by remembering his own achievements—suggest a satire operating from some base of consistent values. A favorite target is one that epitomizes the theme of the book: man's belief in image without substance….

The major satirical method is a traditional one, to be found in [Swift's] Gulliver's Travels, for example; Vonnegut ridicules the target by making the abstract concrete. Thus the support religion has historically given to big business in the U.S.A. becomes in the novel the literal making of money by using initials from the first sentence of the Bible; the handicaps of life become actual weights carried around by some people to make the race of life fair. (p. 109)

There are some positive images of human experience in this novel…. Beatrice, Malachi, and their son, Chrono, together on Titan towards the end of the novel, can be seen as an illustration of the truth that Constant believes he has found; that one of the purposes of human life is to love "whoever is around to be loved." In this novel Vonnegut, … does appear to see human emotion as a value, even if a relative one…. [But] Vonnegut's picture of Constant is of an old, lonely man accepting a comforting myth as the truth. Vonnegut, then, as in Player Piano, tempts the reader into accepting easy answers and then invalidates them. He also sets the assumed values in a Post-existential framework which makes them all relative….

[In] Vonnegut's novels people are forced into new roles by others. The fact that people treat others as objects is illustrated by having the characters literally turn into machines—Malachi Constant becomes mechanized as Unk—much in the way Beckett's characters often do. In this way, of course, Vonnegut is working against the expectations of the reader for "human," rounded characters. He, then, undercuts his own method deliberately: Salo, a machine, is more humane than the earthlings. (p. 110)

The Sirens of Titan is the first Vonnegut novel to display an interest in the techniques of self-conscious art—in Vonnegut self-parody—that are so important in the later novels. His concern with the whole subject of the nature of fictional reality is revealed in the dedication: "All persons, places, and events in the book are real," reminding us of [Eugene] Ionesco's comment that fantasy is more real than realism. Throughout the novel Vonnegut draws our attention from what we are reading to the process of reading, by introducing other novels and stories which comment on the themes of his novel. (p. 112)

Superficially, at least, Vonnegut's third novel, Mother Night, is concerned with … the ways men use and destroy each other in the name of purpose. Given Vonnegut's concern with atrocities and his basic method of working against the expectations of the reader, it is not surprising that he should take as his subject the Nazis' treatment of the Jews…. [But in Mother Night an American is] about to be tried by Israel for broadcasting anti-Semitic speeches for Germany in World War II. As Campbell describes his postwar escape to New York and subsequent capture, the moral certainties become less clear. (pp. 112-13)

In Mother Night Vonnegut is primarily interested in two concepts. The first is the impossibility of absolute truth. We can only have absolute answers by blocking our minds to some obvious facts: "The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained…. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths"…. All absolutes lead inevitably to tyranny…. There are no absolute reasons for action as Campbell discovers when he finds himself paralyzed,… because he has "absolutely no reason to move in any direction". (p. 113)

The second concept is Sartre's theory of human identity: "We are what we pretend to be." We cannot pretend to be evil, as Campbell does, and remain good secretly. We can choose our roles, but we are what we choose. Man, Vonnegut shows, has an infinite capacity for living in bad faith. Campbell can sustain a lovenest—a "nation of two"—while he helps destroy thousands. Stalin can love a romantic play about the Holy Grail and yet be Stalin. This play, one of Campbell's, functions as a comment on the novel itself for, in spite of its romantic treatment, its subject is the tyranny of Christianity, which, like the absolutes in Mother Night, has destroyed human lives.

The basic technique of Mother Night is that of Player Piano: to play against our preconceived attitudes and the expectations which the initial satirical attacks have aroused in us…. All absolutes, all preconceived notions, are undercut in this novel. The reader is left, as Campbell is, without any values to cling to….

Cat's Cradle is perhaps Vonnegut's most successful novel. The use of the methods of satire to attack satire is at its sharpest; the techniques of science fiction are turned upon science itself. But the novel works primarily because of the quality of the two central images, ice-nine and cat's cradle, and because of a fundamental irony underlying Vonnegut's conception of the narrator. (p. 114)

[The] using of clichés in new ways, which Vonnegut has occasionally employed before, becomes a major technique in the novel. He takes this cliché, reverses the traditionally benign associations of it, and shows how our inheritance from the past is not necessarily benign at all. Evil, cold like ice, spreads like water and is inevitably passed, like the ice-nine, from one generation to the next. (pp. 114-15)

Throughout the early scenes of the novel there is much ironic juxtaposing of Christianity with inhuman technology. Christmas Eve is the night Angela Hoenikker divides up the ice-nine among the children. We are tempted into believing Vonnegut offers Christian compassion as the answer. Yet Christianity is associated with destruction too…. Perhaps, then, if capitalistic Christianity is no answer, communism is? Vonnegut undercuts that solution also. (p. 115)

There can be no absolute solution, of course, because there is no meaning to human existence. The second important image of the novel is the image of the child's game cat's cradle…. Cat's cradle is a structure without substance or the meaning ascribed to it. Cat's cradle is a concrete example of the religious and philosophic structures man seems driven to build to explain his existence.

The Post-existentialist world view of Cat's Cradle is that of The Sirens of Titan. Vonnegut has invented a religion called Bokononism, which most critics have described as Existentialism and take as Vonnegut's own philosophy. Certainly Bokononism recognizes that life has no purpose…. It is equally true that "Man got to tell himself he understand" … Bokonon recognizes that even his own cosmogony is a "pack of foma," all lies. Here, surely, is the point…. The narrator … calls himself a Bokononist, just as he used to call himself a Christian, and thus is in the ironic position of believing in lies as his truth. Of course, Vonnegut claims, so are we all. (p. 116)

The action is full of [such] absurd coincidences as Jonah's chance meeting with Marvin Breed just after leaving his brother Asa, and the discovery of a pedestal on which his own name is engraved. There is little causal relation between the scenes; each is a short anecdote, often complete in itself. In many of these anecdotes action is exaggerated to the point of absurdity,…. (p. 117)

[Slaughterhouse-Five] comes to terms with the question that has in one way or another been central to all his novels: What is the significance of human suffering? Is it possible for human beings to be other than cruel to one another in an Existentialist world…. For Vonnegut the firebombing of Dresden … is the ultimate symbol of purposeless human cruelty…. How, asks Vonnegut, can the knowledge of such suffering, the memory of it, be made bearable? Can anything make sense of it? (p. 122)

Vonnegut dramatizes for the reader that whatever scheme one may devise to handle the idea of death, nothing can minimize the fact of it. "So it goes" comes at us with increasing momentum….

One of the effects of the "so it goes" on the reader is the effect produced by the disjunction of tone and subject. We expect death to be treated with more apparent concern. (p. 123)

Vonnegut constantly moves the reader between real life and fiction, mentioning the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Harry Truman…. [There] are numerous references also to characters from his own earlier novels…. In this way he reminds us of the fictional nature of all experience. (p. 124)

More or less everything, he announces at the beginning of the novel, is true, not just metaphorically true, but actually true. Billy Pilgrim's attempt to come to terms with the horrors of Dresden is Vonnegut's own attempt. Billy Pilgrim creates an imaginary world, Tralfamadore; Vonnegut creates an imaginary world, Slaughterhouse-Five. In fiction, of course, as on Tralfamadore, all time is eternal, the past can be recaptured, the dead returned to life. Art is apparently a way of dealing with death, but the novelist of number is not Zeus and must ultimately fail. (pp. 124-25)

[For] all its Post-existential world view, [Breakfast of Champions] appears to argue that there are ways of living with the absurd dilemma: "It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done"…. [We] may be able to improve the human situation. (p. 125)

[This] is a world of interdependent people; we have the power to be each other's saviour rather than his slavemaster, but we are unaware of that fact, Vonnegut seems to be arguing.

The solution, apparently, is to set each other free. What is valuable … is the core of awareness in each one of us, an awareness which appears to be identical with Sartre's concept of Being-for-itself…. It is not enough to adopt the Kilgore Trout view, perhaps intended to represent Vonnegut's in his earlier novels, that everyone is a machine except oneself. (p. 126)

It seems to me, though, that Vonnegut, here as in all the other novels, undercuts this proposed solution which may remain an ideal but is seen in the novel as unworkable. Vonnegut decides to give Trout and all his other characters their freedom…. But Trout becomes once again Vonnegut's father, the man upon whom the character was modelled, and what he wants is not freedom but further control from his creator; "Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice: 'Make me young, make me young, make me young!'"….

Has Vonnegut become an optimist? Hardly. Even if one does not read the ending of Breakfast of Champions as ironic, recognition of each other's value is not a solution to the Post-existential dilemma; it is at best … a way of making bearable the absurdity of the human condition. Vonnegut is ultimately a pessimist. (pp. 126-27)

Jean E. Kennard, "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: The Sirens of Satire." in her Number and Nightmare: Forms of Fantasy in Contemporary Fiction (© 1975 by Jean E. Kennard), Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut, 1975, pp. 101-28.