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The use of humor in literature
Vonnegut use of satire in slaughterhouse 5
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Vonnegut’s humor and satirical elements have become ubiquitous in his work. His sense of humor developed at an early age: “he first learned to be funny at the family dinner table. As the youngest child in the family, the only way he could get anyone to listen to him… was telling jokes” (Farrell 5). He would also tune into popular radio comedians and perform slapstick comedy with his older sister, Alice (Farrell 5). Vonnegut’s lifelong pessimism fueled his darker humor. It “had its roots in his parents’ despairing response to being blindsided by the Depression (Allen). The death of his mother in 1944 and his experience in World War II also lead to the development of his darker humor. Critics “claim that his real strength is very much tied to …show more content…
It allows the harsh truth to go down with a little bit of sugar. Vonnegut strategically deploys humor throughout Slaughterhouse-Five to magnify a theme. Before Billy is transported to Dresden, the Englishman says, “I envy you lads… You lads are leaving this afternoon for Dresden--a beautiful city...You needn’t worry about bombs, by the way, Dresden is an open city. It is undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance” (Vonnegut, SF 186). The use of this irony underscores the brutality of the Dresden bombing. Dresden was a city of no military importance that got obliterated. Vonnegut’s humor is also portrayed in his use of science fiction elements. He is actually very familiar with math and science. Between the late 1940s to 1951, Vonnegut worked at General Electric as a machinist, cutting rotor blades for jet engines (Farrell 8). In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kilgore Trout, an unpopular science fiction writer paralleling Vonnegut, writes absurd novels as a comic relief. One such story is entitled The Gospel from Outer Space; it follows an extraterrestrial studying Christianity. He concludes that Christians are a cruel bunch because of their slipshod storytelling in the New Testament (Vonnegut, SF 138). Similarly comedic are the Tralfamadorians themselves: “they were two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber’s friends. Their suction cups were on the
Vonnegut deals a lot with fantasy in his book, Cat's Cradle. From the beginning, he talks about the religion that he follows: Bokonism. This is not a real religion, however he has rules, songs, scriptures, and opinions of a person that practices this fantasy religion. Within his description of this religion however is black humor as well. I think that by him making up this whole religion and an entire island of people who follow it, is in a way mocking today's religion and the way that people are dedicated to their beliefs.
Most literary scholars accredit Kurt Vonnegut’s literary voice as a style of dark comedy or humor to tell the stories in his writing that are typically horrific and macabre. According to Smith (2014), “In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut embellishes the scope of black humor by incorporating irony and by using vocabulary that creates a mock-serious tone, often leading to absurdity”. Arguably Vonnegut’s most famous novel and where most scholars agree Vonnegut’s literary voice is most prominent is in Slaughterhouse-five. An example of Vonnegut’s dark humor is a scene in which American prisoners
"In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.' The reviewer concludes that 'Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.' "The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital to the late sixties: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions.New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees larger reasons for the book's success: 'Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact which may be the fairest example of American cultural change. . . . Shunned as distastefully low-brow . . . and insufficiently commercial to suit the exploitative tastes of high-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazine and pulp paperback circulation. Then in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age. '"Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut 'avoids framing his story in linear narration, choosing a circular structure.
Vonnegut uses satire that is both dark and humorous to pursue this point. A good example is found in the prelude of the book where he writes, "Nothing in this book is true. 'Live by the foma [Harmless untruths] that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.'"
Vonnegut's writing style throughout the novel is very flip, light, and sarcastic. The narrator's observations and the events occurring during the novel reflect a dark view of humanity which can only be mocked by humor. At the beginning of the novel the narrator is researching for a book he is writing. The book was to be about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the lives of the people who created the bomb. The narrator travels through the plot of the story, with characters flying in and out, in almost a daze. He is involved in events which are helplessly beyond his control, but which are inevitably leading to a destination at the end.
One can only imagine the intense emotional scarring that one would suffer after exiting an underground shelter with a dozen other men to find a city destroyed and its people dead, corpses laying all around. These feelings are what prompted Kurt Vonnegut to write Slaughterhouse-Five as he did. The main character of this novel mirrors the author in many ways, but the striking similarity is their inability to deal with the events of Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945. Section Two- Critical Commentaries Kurt Vonnegut's work is nothing new to critics, but Slaughterhouse-Five is considered to be his best work.
Meeter, Glenn. "Vonnegut's Formal and Moral Otherworldliness: Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five," in Jerome Klinkowitz & John Somer (eds.), The Vonnegut Statement. USA: Delacourte Press/ Seymour Lawrence, 1973, 204-220.
...ities from WWII in his experiences at Dresden. Vonnegut’s writing is unique because “the narrator offers a very different kind of war story—one which combines fact and fiction” (Jarvis 98). With the combination of fact and fiction, Vonnegut successfully connected events from WWII to the political references and societal conflicts during the Vietnam War.
Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war science fiction novel entitled, Slaughter House Five otherwise known as “The Children’s Crusade” or “A Duty Dance with Death,” is a classic example of Vonnegut’s eccentric and moving writing capabilities.Originally published in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five pays tribute to Vonnegut’s experiences in World War Two, as an advanced scout in the 106th infantry division, a prisoner of war and witness to the firebombing of Dresden on February 13th, 1945 in which 135,000 people were killed, making it the greatest man-caused massacre of all times.This novel illustrates the cruelties and violence of war along with the potential for compassion in human nature and all that it encompasses.
Kurt Vonnegut uses a combination of dark humor and irony in Slaughterhouse-Five. As a result, the novel enables the reader to realize the horrors of war while simultaneously laughing at some of the absurd situations it can generate. Mostly, Vonnegut wants the reader to recognize the fact that one has to accept things as they happen because no one can change the inevitable.
One of the most prevalent themes in Vonnegut’s works is religion. In the early pages of Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut submits his contention that "a useful religion can be founded on lies (Vonnegut, Cats Cradle 16)," meaning that, fundamentally, religion is about people, not about faith or God. Reminiscent of Karl Marx’s description of religion as the "opiate of the masses," he describes all religions as mere collections of "harmless untruths" that help people cope with their lives. The Book of Bokonon in Cat's Cradle represents this portrait of religion at both its dreariest and its most uplifting, Bokononism is contradictory, paradoxical, and founded on lies; its followers are aware of this...
Black Humor in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle The phrase Black Humor has the broad meaning of poking "fun at subjects considered deadly serious or even taboo by some"2. This definition is simple, and yet embodies an important idea that is often lost in more complex definitions: the idea that Black Humor can actually be "fun", and provoke laughter. This is not, of course, the only important aspect of the term, and I shall explore some of the other important defining features of Black Humor before moving on to discuss its use in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle3. Many critics have attempted definitions of Black Humor, none of them entirely successfully. The most significant recurring features of these definitions are that Black Humor works with: absurdity, ironic detachment4; opposing moral views held in equipoise, humanity's lack of a sense of purpose in the unpredictable nuclear age, the realization of the complexity of moral and aesthetic experience which affects the individual's ability to choose a course of action5; and a playing with the reader's ideas of reality6.
Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 1989. Klinkowitz, Jerome, and John Somer. The Vonnegut Statement. New York, New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1973. Lundquist, James.
Kurt Vonnegut has built a universe for Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five where Billy’s cruel, unforgiving reality is contrasted by a philosophical utopia where he has learned to operate without the pains of being human. Within this self-described ‘telegraphic’ and ‘schizophrenic’ novel, Vonnegut manages to swing the reader halfway across the galaxy to a planet inhabited by a plunger-like race called the Tralfamadorians, take them into the harrowing depths of a POW camp, and show you a man who is increasingly coming undone at the seams after having lived with the psychological terrors of the Dresden bombing. He accomplishes all of this while only leaving the reader with a slight case of jet lag and hopefully a new perspective on the American
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, uses the biblical allusion of Lot’s wife looking back on the destroyed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to parallel the story of Billy Pilgrim during the war and his experience after, when he returns to the United States. Although the reference is brief, it has profound implications to the portrayal of America during World War II, especially the bombing of Dresden. Although Lot’s wife’s action dooms her to turn into a pillar of salt, the narrator emphasizes her choice to indicate the importance of being compassionate and having hindsight. Ultimately, Slaughterhouse-Five critiques the American social attitude to disregard the unjust nature of its actions in World War II. Furthermore, Vonnegut’s novel explicates this by elucidating the horrors of war—especially in regard to the massacre of innocence, how it leaves the soldiers stagnant when they return home, and leaves them empty with an American Dream that cannot be fulfilled. In order to combat violence, the novel stresses that one must hold human life to a higher value and be compassionate towards others; America must acknowledge its mistakes so that the soldiers who fought and died for her so that the soldiers may move on.