The Vonnegut Effect

Conclusion Vonnegut in Fiction

175 conclusion Vonnegut in Fiction kurt vonnegut’s place in literary history has been assured since 1969, when not only did Slaughterhouse-Five become a best-seller but also his college underground reputation of the previous decade blossomed into a full-fledged canonical presence. Similar reputations had been built by Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)—neither making much impression at first publication but both becoming paperback bibles of the emerging cultural and sociopolitical transformation known as the American 1960s. It was to this countercultural readership that paperback editions of Cat’s Cradle and The Sirens of Titan appealed. When Vonnegut happened to come along with a new novel in 1969 that summed up many of his previous themes and techniques , he and the times were in precisely the right place for maximum cultural impact. Like Heller’s and Kesey’s novels, Slaughterhouse-Five could talk about classic midcentury events (World War II, the power of the institution ) in a peculiarly contemporary way—compared to them, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) shows its age, even though Vonnegut , Heller, and Mailer were born within nine months of one another. But Vonnegut had an advantage over Heller and Kesey as well. Unlike them, he had a string of previously published works ready to be reissued, every one of them seeming to speak to current times, even though the first, Player Piano, dated from 1952. Just as the 1960s came to a close, America had found a prolific author to represent this exciting era. That Kurt Vonnegut was old enough to be most of his readers’ father was not a distraction but rather a benefit. The new times were challenging and somewhat intimidating, to participants in the counterculture as well as to observers. Here was someone from the older generation who could be trusted by both sides, who could put apparently destabilizing recent events in a more reassuring context. He had seen the Great Depression and World War II, after all, and been a bemused the vonnegut effect 176 commentator on the establishment of middle-class postwar life. He championed the social changes of this new era, but he could also see them in perspective. One of his favorite lines in interviews and essays was that he had learned all of his presumed radicalism in high school civics classes taught with the full approval of the board of education in Indianapolis, Indiana, in the heart of the country during the 1930s. Slaughterhouse-Five and Vonnegut’s five earlier novels thus joined Catch22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in articulating the sensibility of countercultural revolt. The messages of all three are firmly antiwar, antiinstitution , and antiestablishment, and their manner of expressing these themes is appealingly vernacular. Heller’s parody of military language and corporate talk is hilarious; Kesey’s use of Chief Broom as his narrator, caught psychologically within the action yet striving to rise above it, is compelling in its manner of direct address; and Vonnegut, telling readers that “All this happened, more or less,” shares the trust of readers already pledged to the honesties of Kesey and Heller. This tone of personal speech, honest and frank and unstylized, stands in contrast to the manneristic prose of John Updike, the moral probity of Saul Bellow and James Baldwin, and the psychological slant to the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. For a sense of personal voice there were the rhythms and tonal shadings in the works of Bernard Malamud and Grace Paley. But each of these spoke in the vernacular of a time and place no less regional than Walker Percy’s South or Edward Abbey’s West. Only in Heller, Kesey, and Vonnegut did one find the voice of a new generation, controlled for artistic effect by authors as much as half a generation older but coming into their own with this new sensibility. With the success of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut was embraced by a second identifiable readership: that of the newly emergent innovative fiction . Some of it, most notably by Thomas Pynchon, would make the bestseller list, but as a rule this style of work was most effective among an academic readership. Vonnegut, of course, would outsell even Pynchon, making him the leading example of this new type of writer who either discarded or radically transformed the conventions of traditional fiction. Close behind him, at least in terms of accessibility...