Galapagos Kurt Vonnegut Analysis

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

Sabah Mazhar

Galapagos is a novel by Kurt Vonnegut published in 1985. Although not one of his most well-known novels, it features some excellent themes along with an intriguing plot line.

Set a million years in the future, the ghost of Leon Trotsky Trout, the deceased son of Vonnegut’s popular character Kilgore Trout, narrates the story of how the world changed and where everything began in 1986 on a cruise ship named the Bahia de Darwin. The main characters include a con artist named James Wait, a high school teacher named Mary Hepburn, a computer software whiz Zenji Hiroguchi and his wife Hisako Hirogushi, the captain of the ship Captain Adolf von Kleist. The world at this stage is in the midst of a financial crisis

All throughout the novel, Vonnegut states how our human nature to use our “big brains” to constantly develop new concepts and new technologies can lead us to our own ultimate demise. He even states at one point that “we are too smart for our good”. To illustrate the fact that survival does not hinge on how big your brain is, a wealthy businessman and a computer software genius are among the first to perish. This picture here showcases another, I’d say more accurate, depiction of the Evolution of Man. The man in the middle is the type of big-brained man that Vonnegut has portrayed in the novel. Through the history of time and our existence, in a short amount of years, we have created any weapons of destruction and

In a way, one could see it as the author trying to show us in which way the human race should be evolving. Humans being should be adapting to the world around them and follow the laws of nature rather than trying to develop our own laws that include various pieces of technologies that we are not naturally prepared for. Actually, there is no living organism on Earth that is prepared for the man-made guns, nuclear weapons and other technological advancements. Our big brains have advanced too quickly for our bodies, let alone any other animals’ body, to physically adapt to and protect ourselves from. Our own pieces of tech, that our own brains have developed, are against