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Vonnegut's writing depicts characters that do not support the idea of the American Dream. In fact, these characters are manipulated by the wealthy and are unable to achieve their goals as result

1. Vonnegut thinks the American Dream was unfair because it shifts the blame on poor people.

2. Vonnegut lost faith in America and became disenfranchised.

3. It shows how people in America are not caring for one another and people in America should try to come together and be kind.

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Kurt Vonnegut's use of social commentary in his writing allowed him to express how he feels about the American Dream. “He blended literature with science fiction and humor, and the absurd with pointed social commentary. Vonnegut created his own unique world in each of his novels and filled them with unusual characters, such as the alien race known as tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five” (Biography.com Editors, par. 1). Kurt Vonnegut creatively used science fiction and humor to critique the American Dream concept. A good example of this is Billy’s dreams about the alien planet of Tralfamadore. Vonnegut wrote about different fantasies which included success and being able to succeed is a big part of the American Dream. Vonnegut’s characters like Billy usually dreamed about some successes but their successes were not really tied to the reality of the suffering they were experiencing.

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Quick Facts

"I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours."

Name

Kurt Vonnegut

Birth Date

November 11, 1922

Death Date

April 11, 2007

Education

Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, University of Tennessee, Cornell University, Carnegie Institute of Technology

Place of Birth

Indianapolis, Indiana

Place of Death

New York, New York

Kurt Vonnegut was an American author best known for the novels Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.

Synopsis

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 11, 1922. Vonnegut emerged as a novelist and essayist in the 1960s, and penned the classics Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions before 1980. He is known for his satirical literary style, as well as the science-fiction elements in much of his work. Vonnegut died in New York City on April 11, 2007.

Early Life

Born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, Kurt Vonnegut is considered one of the most influential American novelists of the twentieth century. He blended literature with science fiction and humor, the absurd with pointed social commentary. Vonnegut created his own unique world in each of his novels and filled them with unusual characters, such as the alien race known as the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

After studying at Cornell University from 1940 to 1942, Kurt Vonnegut enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was sent by the Army to what is now Carnegie Mellon University to study engineering in 1943. The next year, he served in Europe and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After this battle, Vonnegut was captured and became a prisoner of war. He was in Dresden, Germany, during the Allied firebombing of the city and saw the complete devastation caused by it. Vonnegut himself escaped harm only because he, along with other POWs, was working in an underground meat locker making vitamin supplements.

Soon after his return from the war, Kurt Vonnegut married his high school girlfriend, Jane Marie Cox. The couple had three children. He worked several jobs before his writing career took off, including newspaper reporter, teacher, and public relations employee for General Electric. The Vonneguts also adopted his sister's three children after her death in 1958.

Writing Debut

Showing Vonnegut's talent for satire, his first novel, Player Piano, took on corporate culture and was published in 1952. More novels followed, including The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), and Cat's Cradle (1963). War remained a recurring element in his work, and one of his best-known works, Slaughterhouse-Five, draws some of its dramatic power from his own experiences. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a young soldier who becomes a prisoner of war and works in an underground meat locker, not unlike Vonnegut, but with a notable exception: Pilgrim begins to experience his life out of sequence and revisits different times repeatedly. He also has encounters with the Tralfamadorians. This exploration of the human condition mixed with the fantastical struck a chord with readers, giving Vonnegut his first best-selling novel.

Further Success

Emerging as a new literary voice, Kurt Vonnegut became known for his unusual writing style-long sentences and little punctuation-as well as his humanist point of view. He continued writing short stories and novels, including Breakfast of Champions (1973), Jailbird (1979) and Deadeye Dick (1982). Vonnegut even made himself the subject of Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (1981).

Despite his success, Kurt Vonnegut wrestled with his own personal demons. Having struggled with depression on and off for years, he attempted to take his own life in 1984. Whatever challenges he faced personally, Vonnegut became a literary icon with a devoted following. He counted writers such as Joseph Heller, another WWII veteran, as his friends.

Later Years

His last novel was Timequake (1997), which became a best seller despite receiving mixed reviews. Kurt Vonnegut chose to spend his later years working on nonfiction. His last book was A Man Without a Country, a collection of biographical essays. In it, he expressed his views on politics and art, and shed more light on his own life.

Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, at the age of 84, as a result of head injuries sustained in a fall at his home in New York a few weeks earlier. He was survived by his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz, their adopted daughter, Lily, and six children from his first marriage.

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"I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours." Name Kurt Vonnegut Birth Date November 11, 1922 Death Date April 11, 2007 Education Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, University of Tennessee, Cornell University, Carnegie Institute of Technology Place of Birth Indianapolis, Indiana Place of Death New York, New York Kurt Vonnegut was an American author best known for the novels Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.

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Kurt Vonnegut Was Not A Happy Man. So It Goes. 

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Kurt Vonnegut Was Not A Happy Man. So It Goes. 

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Kurt Vonnegut was a disenchanted American and he had lost faith in America because he believed that people in society did not seem to care for each other. “Kurt was a disenchanted American. He believed in America. He believed in its ideals. And what he wrote in his books was kind of a disenchantment. He wanted babies to enter a world where they could be treated well, and he wanted to emphasize that people should be kind to one another” (National Public Radio par. 13). Vonnegut believed that people in America are not looking out for each others interest. He wanted children to be born into a world where people are kind. He became disenchanted with the current state of American society because the American Dream was being interpreted as being about selfishness and the pursuit of materialistic goals.

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To listen to this broadcast, click here:

This is WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Laura Sullivan.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVAL RECORDING)

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up at the Malamute saloon. The kid that handles the music box was hitting a ragtime tune. In front of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, and watching his luck was his light of love, the lady that's known as Lou.

That's the voice of Kurt Vonnegut reciting a poem he learned almost 70 years earlier as a child in Indianapolis. Author Charles Shields made the recording while researching a biography of Vonnegut. It was March 14, 2007. And later that day, Vonnegut tripped and fell down the steps of his New York brownstone. He hit his head and lapsed instantly into a coma, and he died. Charles Shields spent hours talking to Vonnegut in that last year of his life, and he had extensive access to the man's letters and papers, and he's compiled it all into a new biography, "And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life." Charles Shields joins me now from member station WVTF in Charlottesville, Virginia. Welcome to the show, Charles.

Thank you for having me.

You write that one of the first things that you noticed when you sat down to speak to him was how bitter he still was at his relationship with his parents and his brother. What was it that he was holding on to all of these years?

Well, my theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression of Kurt Vonnegut at 84 was that he was a very pained and haunted man. And I was, as you say, surprised when I first started talking to him that he began complaining about his parents. For all the world, I thought I was talking to a much younger person who still had a real beef with the way he had been raised. But you know, I think that's probably part of Kurt's appeal to young people is that when they open one of his novels, they get the sense that an older person is leveling with them, that someone appreciates the dilemmas that they are feeling.

"Slaughterhouse Five," of course, was his greatest work. And - well, I guess that's debatable, but it's his most famous work - and he really struggled to write it. I mean, it took him 20 years. He started and stopped and started again. And it seems like the biggest problem he had was this idea that he wasn't - he didn't actually see the bombing of Dresden, that he was just in the basement - he saw the before and the after.

You're absolutely right. The problem that he was facing was he had no act two. He had an act one, and he had an act three. Kurt realized he had an important story to tell, a moment in civilization, and he was there for it - almost like the sacking of Troy, but he missed the sacking of Troy. It was as if he had, you know, arrived, slept through it and then left again. What he did finally, the solution he hit upon was not to be constrained by time or chronology. If he was going to tell his story for "Slaughterhouse Five," he couldn't tell it in a linear way. He needed Billy Pilgrim, his main character, to ricochet around through the universe doing different things and being at different places at different times.

One of the things in the book that is so fascinating to me is that while Vonnegut was considered this icon of the counterculture movement, I mean, it almost seems like he was faking it.

Well, you know, he did work for General Electric in public relations, and he had a pretty good idea about how to pitch an idea and how to create an image. I don't mean to persuade anybody that Kurt was a cynic - just the opposite. He read the signs of what was happening in the country and he realized that he was going to have to be a lot hipper than a nearly 50-year-old dad in a rumpled cardigan to be a good match with what he was writing about. So he, just as, you know, Samuel Clemens was doing Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut began to do Kurt Vonnegut, and it was a big hit.

But, you know, the irony, when you really study Kurt's novels and when you look at the things that he said and also my interviews with him, Kurt was not really so much a radical as a reactionary. What Kurt wanted was an earlier America. He wanted an America that he remembered before World War II, an America of aunts and uncles and swimming holes and things like that. That was the world he wanted to return to. I think a seminal moment that shows the contrast between what people thought of Kurt and what he was actually like was this: Jefferson Airplane asked him if he'd like to brainstorm with them for their next album. So he went to the meeting with Jefferson Airplane wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and wingtip shoes.

I'm speaking with Charles Shields. His new book is "And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life." It seems like that there is this disconnect that runs throughout the book about the way Kurt Vonnegut sees himself and the way the people around him saw him.

Yes. I think one of his nephews said that Kurt seemed a whole lot hipper than he really was.

I mean, here he is being read by hippies and counterculture types and, you know, he's still being read. I don't mean to say that his work is time-specific, either, but it's true. In the biography, I show a man who was a little bit surly to his kids, who was obsessed with doing his writing, who wanted to make it big and was perceived by his public as somebody who was the ideal avuncular, jocular kind of person, you know, somebody who tells it like it is and somebody who will level with you. Well, Kurt was actually rather flinty, rather irascible. He had something of a temper. But as I also point out in the book, he was a damaged person.

How do you reconcile these two people? I mean, the man who wrote "God damn it, babies, you've got to be kind" and this other guy who had difficult relationships, sometimes was not so great to even his agents and publishers and was a little bit irascible?

Kurt was a disenchanted American. He believed in America. He believed in its ideals. And what he wrote in his books was a kind of an outpouring of his disenchantment. He wanted babies to enter a world where they could be treated well, and he wanted to emphasize that people should be kind to one another. So these were his priorities as a human being. But as you know, so often happens in life, he had a sort of a creative professional side and a personal side. One fed into the other. As one reviewer said recently, you know, Vonnegut couldn't have been the kind of writer that he was unless he was this kind of person. And so I don't see it as a complete break. I see his pain as, you know, pouring into his works in a kind of a wry, droll, unhappy way.

Charles J. Shields is the author of "And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life." Charles, thanks so much.

OK. Thank you very much.

Source Citation

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Kurt Vonnegut Was Not A Happy Man. 'So It Goes.'

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To listen to this broadcast, click here: This is WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Laura Sullivan. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVAL RECORDING) A bunch of the boys were whooping it up at the Malamute saloon. The kid that handles the music box was hitting a ragtime tune.

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His family was unemployed and Vonnegut was young at the time of the Great Depression so it was hard for him and his family to obtain employment and stay successful. “Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis in a well-to-do family, although his father, an architect, was unemployed during much of the Great Depression” (EB Editors par. 2). Vonnegut’s family's trouble of obtaining employment during the Great Depression encouraged him to question the idea that the American Dream allows people to succeed. His family was trying their best in a rough part of American history and that did not work out for them.

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Enter the Access ID and Passcode provided by your school to access Britannica School.

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Vonnegut’s Cat’s cradle Expresses Alienation, 1963

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Vonnegut’s Cat’s cradle Expresses Alienation, 1963

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This article "Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle Expresses Alienation" describes events which influenced Vonnegut's view point of the American dream. His parents were originally successful. Vonnegut’s dad was an architect and his mother was a heiress. Later Vonnegut’s family started to hurt financially because of the stock market crash that took place in 1929. Vonnegut was taken as a prisoner of the war in Dresden during World War 2. The stock market crash caused his family to lose a lot of money and that made him view the American economy as an unfair system where the American Dream of upward mobility is an illusion. Vonnegut's experiences as a veteran in the war contributed to his depression and other mental health issues. These events contributed to his thoughts on the American Dream and how he thought it does not help everybody. Vonnegut's experiences as a veteran of the war led him to become an anti-war activist and likely also contributed to his view that there were injustices in America that prevented people from achieving the goals of the American Dream.

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