Even from the experience of the modern century, which has already witnessed the killing of over one hundred million people in wars and death camps, political philosophers cannot conceive of a system of rule organized and sustained through violence. "No government based exclusively on the means of violence has ever existed," writes Hannah Arendt. It is a startling observation and one carrying the authority of Arendt's rich historical knowledge deepened by philosophical generosity. The assertion gives one pause because the grimness of the historical record seems to challenge Arendt's trust in human governance. To each event that did question her belief, Arendt responded with renewed conviction in the faculty of intelligent action to resolve the contradictions inherent in what she saw as the self-destructive force in the violence of our time.

Arendt's confidence that violence will do itself in is a minority report. The events of the recent past have proved overwhelming to the novelists of this period. (p. 58)

The fiction of Kurt Vonnegut exemplifies this feeling of impotence to handle cataclysmic conditions. Writing out of the same disturbing context from which Arendt speaks, and addressing himself to the identical propensity toward violence in modern life which she examines, Vonnegut arrives at the opposite conviction. His art shows a government in which violence is the essence. He presents institutionalized terror as a culmination of the very historical process which Arendt offered as evidence against the possibility of such a malevolent system. What Arendt, the political theorist finds unthinkable, Vonnegut, the political fictionist, perceives as inevitable. His argument has had extensive appeal. The stories and novels of this "total pessimist," as Vonnegut refers to himself, have put the politics of the recent past on a level of wacky despair altogether congenial to the contemporary imagination. At first there would seem to be an enormous discrepancy between the flippancy of Vonnegut's tone and the grave meaning his fiction bears, but that discordance has struck just the right inversion for his material to touch our abiding hebephrenia.

Violence for Kurt Vonnegut rises from no single source. It serves as an implement of the human spirit and of the physical universe. Nor is violence depicted as an isolated event. It constitutes a cycle of disasters, human and phenomenal, proceeding toward a tremendous conflagration similar to what the Stoics called the ekpyrosis in which everything becomes altered by fire. The Stoics describe an extended period during which only fire exists, but that fire will bring about a new world order. Vonnegut too describes a great fire of destruction and anticipates a protracted period of smoldering decomposition. Vonnegut's world is the Stoics' world minus the final restoration, but the attitude of Stoical detachment remains the same…. By 1970 Vonnegut's work comprised six novels, two volumes of stories, and a play, which collectively picture the world running down like a time bomb toward explosion—in short, "a doomsday device." (pp. 58-9)

[Considering] the wreckage strewing the mindscape of Vonnegut's novels, we can conclude that his total work is a sustained response to violence. There is a tonal shift from satiric rebellion in the early books to tender resignation in the later, but the violent center holds firm. No modern observer could ignore the turbulence of a century which belongs to the darkest of all centuries since the dawn of humankind. For Vonnegut, however, destruction is not simply history but a tragic feeling for life determining the aim and nature of art. To begin with, his reply takes the form of depicting daily American life as fantasy. He wants us to see how outrageous the ordinary has become. At the same time, he wants us to cut through the fantasy. Stripped of its zaniness, his world divulges the typology of hell. (pp. 73-4)

In every Vonnegut novel bondage, mutilation, and economic abuse define his infernal habitation. Hell for Homer and Virgil lay underground…. Dante's hell also is subterranean…. Milton kept his hell beneath the surface and, like Dante, his region of sorrow is a supreme example of God's justice. Blake brought hell into the human mind where the chains of egocentricity imprison the passion for freedom. Vonnegut goes one step further. He plucks hell from below the ground and from behind the brow to make actual the horrors of poetic imaging. The archetypal state is for him our immanent condition.

The ancient mythology of the underrealm which served as a Medieval theology becomes a modern sociology of terror. The implications of this shift are observable throughout Vonnegut's fiction. His concretization of hell marks the disappearance of justice. The principle of punishment suiting the sin cannot explain a world where penalty outweighs the sin. Sin itself vanishes as a concept because the act implies a choice which the human mind does not have. Moreover, there is no perceivable divine law to break. God has stepped back from the human situation and remains aloof—a fan of collisions. "People," Vonnegut says in an interview, "are too good for this world." Loving humanity more than God does, the novelist cannot bring himself to have villains in his stories. He creates only dupes and victims. Their damnation is no longer a result of conduct but a obligation. Life is a sentence. The expiation that once rained down on the depths now heaps on the individual body and the body politic. By displacing the other world into this one, Vonnegut makes violence the constituent element of daily life.

His conception of character follows from this predicament. We learn in Slaughterhouse-Five that one of the effects of war "is that people are discouraged from being characters."… In all his work we learn that living in a hell-hole precludes the possibility of inner wholeness. Any sense of participating in one's destiny is fraudulent. The truest awareness, and the one that leads to compassion, is the recognition of the meaninglessness of one's self. In truth, the conventional word character implies a fullness of motivation which does not fit Vonnegut's art. Figure is modest enough to suggest the shadows flouncing through the stories, each a mere spindrift of fate, a representation of this or that devastation. In a novelistic world where figures derive their ethos from cowboy films, where government models policy on football game-plans, and where slogans serve as moral imperatives, it is right that a book's title be taken from a cereal box-top. All identity, artistic and human, is adventitious.

The impoverishment of Vonnegut's figures is further seen by their subservience to plot in an extreme degree. If we think of master of characterization, say, Henry James, for whom the possibilities of inner life are so rich that plot becomes a function of character, then we can estimate how far Vonnegut's involvement with violence has taken his notion of the novel. The Vonnegut plot is merely a succession of disasters, deadends, enigmas which are never surmounted or cleared up, but only brushed away and at that through whim or wisecrack. Anamorphosis is the only discernible principle of structure. Within the breakup and reassemblage of predicaments, the figures are tossed about. The kaleidoscope as aesthetic registers a mind attuned to violence. Vonnegut's frequent pronouncements in the novels about his inability to give shape to the experience he portrays are admissions of his being engrossed by violence.

So massive is the effect of violence on his work that many serious readers cannot get through the reiterations of disaster to his seriousness. Clinging to the old belief that life is many-sided, readers are reluctant to grant Vonnegut's premise, born of violence, which is that most of human life and artistic form has to disappear before he can give us a novel. The last word of the apocalypse is the first word of his story. He preserves a limited (re-cycled) cast of figures. There is always a narrator-witness who is baffled by the terrible state of the world, and there is always a motley crew of maimed victims. For all the affliction, malefactors, if any, are few. Also, all are presented along the stingy lines of satire, capable only of ventriloquized gesture and subject to wayward plots. It is as though we have plots in search of victims. Now this drastic curtailment of human representation and this sustained assault on literary form are in the interests of the anamorphic perception we are left with after violence has worked its will on the world. Vonnegut does not hesitate to choose the wildest situations, the most factitious aspects of contemporary life, because the truth he is after deepens in his making such distorted unrealities seem real. Reality for Vonnegut lies in the mind perceiving the raging disunion. The sum of his work catches the mind dazed by the wandering and re-wandering turmoil it fails to comprehend. Violence locks the mind in its own tortuosities. (pp. 75-6)

From the first, Vonnegut's doomsday device has implied either a malevolent Creator gloating over the rubbish spewed out by His recreational gadget or an indifferent Creator yawning behind the contraption. Starbuck's confession in Jailbird bespeaks the ultimate implication of this ultra-violence for the created. An exploding creation throws humanity back on its own resources to find understanding. Since we are not the source of being, we are not substitutes for meaning. We all then become jailbirds trapped in hopelessness, locked out of transcendence. The material destruction of cities and nations and planets and people expresses for the figures in the stories the inner division that wracks the inmates of spiritual ruin. We as readers read their tales like the stiff-necked unbelievers of Scripture, who must be annihilated to be convinced of our spiritual bondage. The constituent act of consciousness is not a communion of selves but a recognition of one's nullity. We remain apart from one another, opposed to one another and our world…. The squeezing vise which brings each of [Vonnegut's] novels to an end shows the constriction felt in the here and now by the human heart crushed by disunion. Violence emerges in Vonnegut's novels as a dramatic ceremony in which havoc occupies the center of the life rhythm; the individual stories celebrate the psychic disorder that chaos is in the human mind. (p. 76)