Welcome To The Monkey House Analysis

Welcome to the Monkey House

In a world where overpopulation, mass birth control, and suicide parlors are the new normal, one man stands against all to bring back the sexuality that the government has systematically depleted. “Welcome to the Monkey House” is a story by Kurt Vonnegut Jr taking place in the not so distant future.

Kurt Vonnegut is a man that was born in the 20’s and it shows in his stories with the crazy ideas of what the future holds. He was a soldier that say some horrible things. One can only wonder if the twisted mind of Kurt was what helped him through his times as a POW or if it is a product of being captive. In this story the theme is overpopulation, ethics, and morality. It seems that Kurt thinks as we progress as humans,

we will be looking for ways to defeat the aging process and in some ways we are but not to the extent he writes about. He assumes overpopulation will happen because people will find a medicine to stop the aging process. I don’t buy into it because it just seems so absurd from the picture he paints in the story. Throughout the story he makes many appeals to the reader that get the gears turning. He pulls at your emotions by telling you that these people have no feeling in their genitalia which makes you wonder how would a life like that be. Also when he rapes Nancy you might use logos to weigh the morality and ethics of Billy’s grotesque actions versus the enlightenment and good he is trying to bring back to a quite literally numbed society.
From the very first page of this story the oddities are apparent. Federal Ethical Suicide Parlors, Nothingheads, Birth control three times a day, seventeen billion people on earth, and a world government are the new norm. Things must have gone completely south for the world to need suicide parlors run by six-foot-tall virgins wearing body stockings and boots with big eyes and white lips and law requiring birth control that numbs the person from the waist down. The law breakers not taking the birth control are called nothingheads, risking ten thousand dollars in fines and ten years in prison just to be able to feel their downstairs. Kurt describes these people as “bombed out of their skulls with the sex madness that came from taking nothing” whereas the others who take the required birth control are seen as ethical, moral, good people. What is most worrisome to me is that things have gotten so bad that somehow there has become a World Government. With all the wars, famine, natural disasters, mass murders, and terrorism that have happened in human history nothing has been so bad or good that the world has decided that one governing power should oversee the entire globe. What brought that along is not clear in the story but one has to wonder what Kurt thought could bring that to be.
Throughout the story descriptions of what life is like in an overpopulated world pulls the reader in and keeps them thinking what absurdity is to come next. Kurt tells us that in this reality the people who were lucky enough to be born at the right time will always look like they are twenty-two thanks to the new anti-aging medication. He talks of the government running practically everything and practically everything being automated. In fact, things were so automated that the majority of people didn’t have jobs because even the lowly kitchen jobs were automated and “a tape recording of clashing silverware and the laughter of Negroes and Puerto Ricans” replaced the sounds of actual people working. This would hit hard now-a-days to a person from Tokyo where there are vending machines that can dispense actual meals one would sit down to eat at dinner time with the family.
Billy the poet is a mysterious character that is very intelligent and very devious.

He seems like a crazy rapist trying to deflower the hostesses of the ethical suicide parlors without any obvious reason at first. Billy the poet is a nothinghead but he doesn’t seem to fit the bill of a person bombed out of his skull with sex madness. In fact, he comes across as a person who is trying to help the populous rediscover the joy, passion, and enjoyment sex can bring to a world that seems to have lost it. What he is doing sounds like he is doing a service to society but come to find out he is raping these women. Although to us it may seem immoral and wrong, the story tells us that the women he rapes stay with him in a cult like fashion and help him to rape his next victim. This brings along a moral argument that we may see or may not, is it ok to rape a woman to bring her to realize she likes sex? Most would say no but when the victim stays with the rapist on her own free will, does that make the whole situation any better? Billy the poet seems to think he is doing a great service to these women and to the world but he seems to not take any joy in his actions as a rapist in our times usually does. During the time from abducting Nancy to the time he gets her locked away to let the pills wear off he doesn’t seem to treat her as a woman, or even a person. He explains that he is not the reason she feels like she is an object but it’s the birth control. After the pills wear off he deflowered her in the Kennedy Complex and this was all because of a pill J. Edgar Nation made when he tried to bring morality to the monkey house of the Grand Rapids

Zoo.