It is a growing awareness of the seriousness of Vonnegut's inquiries which has made people realize that he is not only the science fiction writer he first appeared to be.

His first novel, Player Piano (1952), was, to be sure, a fairly orthodox futuristic satire on the dire effects on human individuality of the fully mechanised society which technology could make possible. A piano player is a man consciously using a machine to produce aesthetically pleasing patterns of his own making. A player-piano is a machine which has been programmed to produce music on its own, thus making the human presence redundant. This undesirable inversion of the relationship between man and machine, suggested by the title, is at the heart of the novel. In this society of the future there is one part for the machines and the managers, and another part ('the Homestead') into which have been herded all the unnecessary people. Paul Proteus (whose initials suggest his relation to the theme of the title, and whose second name suggests a predisposition to change), is a top manager who believes in the system. But he starts to feel a 'nameless, aching need' which indicates a nascent dissatisfaction with the very social structures he has helped to erect. He realises that he is trapped in the system he serves. (pp. 181-82)

[Player Piano presents] a basic dilemma in Vonnegut's work. Both sides want to use the hero; both sides want to impose a particular role on him and make him into a special sort of messenger or conveyor of information; and as Paul discovers, between the two sides, 'there was no middle ground for him'. Paul is a typical American hero in wanting to find a place beyond all plots and systems, some private space, or 'border area'—a house by the side of the road of history and society. He would like not to be used, not to be part of someone else's plan. But the book shows this to be an impossible dream.

The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut's next novel, is also about people being used, this time on the sort of inter-galactic scale permissible in science fiction…. [Rumfoord] is a man who now exists as 'wave phenomena' as a result of having run his space ship into an 'uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum'. He is 'scattered far and wide, not just through space, but through time, too', and with his new-found power to arrange things to suit his patterns, free to handle time and space as he pleases and put people where he wants them, he is a suitably fantastic analogue of Vonnegut himself, who is doing just that in his book. But if Rumfoord is the user, he is also the used. (pp. 182-83)

It is man's status as agent-victim which preoccupies Vonnegut; once one of his characters comes to see this double aspect of human life and action he usually, like Malachi, becomes 'hopelessly engrossed in the intricate tactics of causing less rather than more pain'. (p. 183)

[A] possible attitude to the discovery of [the human] fate is implied in Beatrice Rumfoord's conclusion that '"The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be not to be used for anything by anybody.'" A corollary of this is Malachi's late decision that one purpose of human life "'no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.'" This formulation, albeit very sympathetic, points to a detectable strain of sentimental sententiousness which recurs in Vonnegut's work. (p. 184)

With Mother Night (1961) we are back into the bleakest years of contemporary history. In this book … one may discern a shift in Vonnegut's style. There is less attempt at narrative fulness, and a greater use of short chapters which give the sense of the intermittencies and incompletenesses inevitable in any written version. The impression is of compressed selections suspended in an encompassing silence…. Howard Campbell is a quintessential Vonnegut hero: the agent-victim, the most uncertain and perhaps the most hapless of all Vonnegut's bemused messengers. (p. 185)

Campbell is a special 'agent'; but in Vonnegut's vision we are all agents, and the perception that we can never be sure of the full content and effect of what we communicate to the world, by word or deed, is at the moral centre of this novel. It also carries the implicit warning that our lies may be more influential than our truths, a consideration which writers in particular must ponder. (p. 186)

The book presents, almost in shorthand, a whole spectrum of fiction-making, from the vilest propaganda to the most idealistic art. There is no cynical attempt to identify these two extreme ends of the spectrum, but it is part of Vonnegut's meaning to suggest that the artist cannot rest in confidence as to the harmlessness of his inventions…. In one way it comes down to that suspicion of all communication which seems to go so deep in contemporary American fiction. As no one can be fully aware of the 'information' that goes out through him (just as you cannot control the information that is fed into you), the artist as a professional inventor and sender of messages must be very careful about what he puts out. He may think that, in [Sir Philip] Sidney's terms, he is delivering a golden world from our brazen one. But he might, all unawares, be contributing to the restoration of the ancient reign of Mother Night. (p. 188)

[Vonnegut] has seldom been more comically inventive [than he is in Cat's Cradle,] but then the whole novel is an exploration of the ambiguities of man's disposition to play and invent, and the various forms it may take….

[Each character on the island of San Lorenzo] is following his dream, creating his fiction. And it is from this island that the process which will end the world is unwittingly launched. This may be Vonnegut's mordant way of predicting the possible final outcome of the human instinct to play. When this island of invention contains both [ice-nine], and representatives of the artistic and Utopian dreams which console and dignify the race, one can see that Vonnegut is pushing quite hard for a recognition of the deeply ambiguous creative/destructive aspects of the innate human instinct to play. (p. 189)

The title is explained in the book. Newt recalls that the one game his father played with him on the day the first atom bomb was exploded, was to make a cat's cradle and push it jeeringly into his face. On the island Newt makes a painting of the ancient game of cat's cradle, and adds "'For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grown-ups have been waving tangles of string in their children's faces.'" In Newt's view it is no wonder that children should grow up crazy, because when they look at the cross-crossed string, what do they see? 'No damn cat, and no damn cradle'. A chapter in Mother Night is entitled 'No Dove, No Covenant'. It alludes to the same discovery which any child is likely to make; namely, that the religions or legends taught to him by adults are just fictions. There is no cat there; nor does God make a sign. On the other hand it is an axiom of Bokonism that man has to tell himself that he understands life even when he knows he doesn't. This is the justification for constructing fictions, for the necessity of art. It does, after all, take skill to weave the string, and something more again to imagine the cat. On the other hand one must confront the fact that the string is only string. The matter is summed up in what the narrator calls 'the cruel paradox of Bokonist thought, the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it'. That, certainly, is what Vonnegut contrives to suggest in his own brilliant little fiction.

The distinctive tone of Vonnegut's work is very likeable and sympathetic; it obviously bespeaks a compassionate humane spirit. The economy and laconic wit prevent this from issuing in much overt sentimentality, though the tendency is there. However, at times it does seem as though he is using his fiction to issue short sermons on the state of contemporary America, or the world, and this can at times endanger the poise of his work. I think that some of the weaker aspects of his writing show up in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), despite the wit and moral feeling with which the book is conceived and executed. (pp. 191-92)

[Slaughterhouse-Five] is a moving meditation on the relationship between history and dreaming cast in an appropriately factual/fictional mode….

[Vonnegut] himself enters his own novel from time to time … and it becomes very difficult to hold the various fictional planes in perspective…. But the overall impression is that of a man who has brought the most graphic facts of his life to exist in the same medium with his more important fictions to see what each implies about the other. (p. 195)

[Although] one necessarily reads in sequence the many compressed fragments or messages which make up his novels, one nevertheless gets the impression of arrested moments suspended in time. In reading Billy Pilgrim's adventures we too become unstuck in time. As a result one is left with something approaching the impression of seeing all the marvellous and horrific moments, all at the same time. Vonnegut, the telephoner, has condensed and arranged his telegrams to good effect. He starts his account of the adventures of Pilgrim with the single word—'Listen'. This is to alert us. We are being messaged. (p. 197)

A motto which Billy brings from his life into his fantasy, or vice-versa, reads: 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference'. In itself this is an open-ended programme. But immediately afterwards we read: 'Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future'. Billy becomes completely quiescent, calmly accepting everything that happens as happening exactly as it ought to (including his own death). He abandons the worried ethical, tragical point of view of western man and adopts a serene conscienceless passivity. If anything, he views the world aesthetically: every moment is a marvellous moment, at times he beams at scenes in the war. Yet he does have breakdowns and is prone to fits of irrational weeping.

Here I think is the crucial moral issue in the book. Billy Pilgrim is a professional optometrist. He spends his life on earth prescribing corrective lenses for people suffering from defects of vision. It is entirely in keeping with his calling, then, when he has learned to see time in an entirely new Tralfamadorian way, that he should try to correct the whole erroneous Western view of time, and explain to everyone the meaninglessness of individual death…. The point for us to ponder is how are we to regard his new vision. According to the Tralfamadorians, ordinary human vision is something so narrow and restricted that, to convey to themselves what it must be like they have to imagine a creature with a metal sphere round his head who looks down a long thin pipe seeing only a tiny speck at the end. He cannot turn his head around and he is strapped to a flatcar on rails which goes in one direction. Billy Pilgrim's attempt to free people from that metal sphere, and his own widened and liberated vision, may thus seem entirely desirable. But is the cost in conscience and concern for the individual life equally desirable? (p. 198)

Perhaps the fact of the matter is that conscience simply cannot cope with events like the concentration camps and the Dresden air-raid, and the more general demonstration by the war of the utter valuelessness of human life. Even to try to begin to care adequately would lead to an instant and irrevocable collapse of consciousness. Billy Pilgrim, Everyman, needs his fantasies to offset such facts. (p. 199)

Billy's Tralfamadorian perspective is not unlike that described in Yeats's 'Lapis Lazuli'—'gaiety transfiguring all that dread'—and it has obvious aesthetic appeal and consolation. At the same time, his sense of the futility of trying to change anything, of regarding history as a great lump of intractable amber from which one can only escape into the fourth dimension of dream and fantasy, was the attitude held by Howard Campbell during the rise of Nazi Germany. Vonnegut has, I think, total sympathy with such quietistic impulses. At the same time his whole work suggests that if man doesn't do something about the conditions and quality of human life on Earth, no one and nothing else will. Fantasies of complete determinism, of being held helplessly in the amber of some eternally unexplained plot, justify complete passivity and a supine acceptance of the futility of all action. Given the overall impact of Vonnegut's work I think we are bound to feel that there is at least something equivocal about Billy's habit of fantasy, even if his attitude is the most sympathetic one in the book. At one point Vonnegut announces: 'There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces'. It is certainly hard to celebrate the value of the individual self against the background of war, in which the nightmare of being the victim of uncontrollable forces comes compellingly true. In such conditions it is difficult to be much of a constructive 'agent', and Billy Pilgrim doubtless has to dream to survive.

At the end of the novel, spring has come to the ruins of Dresden, and when Billy is released from prison the trees are in leaf. He finds himself in a street which is deserted except for one wagon. 'The wagon was green and coffinshaped'. That composite image of generation and death summarises all there is actually to see in the external world, as far as Vonnegut is concerned. The rest is fantasy, cat's cradles, lies. In this masterly novel, Vonnegut has put together both his war novel and reminders of the fantasies which made up his previous novels. The facts which defy explanation are brought into the same frame with fictions beyond verification. The point at which fact and fiction intersect is Vonnegut himself, the experiencing dreaming man who wrote the book. He is a lying messenger of course, but he acts on the assumption that the telegrams must continue to be sent. Eliot Rosewater's cry to his psychiatrist, overheard by Billy Pilgrim, applies more particularly to the artist. '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.' Of course, they must also tell the truth, whatever that may be. Kafka's couriers could hardly be more confused. What Vonnegut has done, particularly in Slaughterhouse-Five, is to define with clarity and economy—and compassion—the nature and composition of that confusion. (pp. 200-01)