Kurt Vonnegut: A Complete Rundown on Style

By Trevor Durham on March 18, 2016

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is a staple when discussing American literature in the previous century. His subversive humor redefined the field of literature in immutable ways. His two greatest works (based on readership, not merit) Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, speak volumes on some common themes, but use interesting stylistic differences to tell what seem like opposing stories. His lesser known works, such as the riotous Breakfast of Champions, the controversial Mother Night, and one his final novels Hocus Pocus help show some of his more subversive and distant stylistic qualities. Using these novels as a lens, we can see that, while Vonnegut’s oeuvre is vast and varied, he stays true to some syntax snips and an overall tone of indifference, while all relying on a structured canon of his own doing that build into a strongly unreliable narrator that skews his entire collection.

From the overview of all of his novels, it seems as though they are from different authors. Mother Night handles the trial of a supposed Nazi propaganda writer as he reflects on his crimes. Cat’s Cradle is a story about the son of a doomsday scientist hunting down his father’s research, running into a nihilistic religion, an island of apathetic natives, and the apocalypse itself. Only six years later, Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel about the Dresden fire-bombing, aliens, and theories about time. Only a year after, he released Breakfast of Champions, which deals with the intersection of failed science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout and insane Dwayne Hoover. Almost two decades later, Vonnegut released Hocus Pocus, discussing the prison break near a university and the sexual debaucheries of a professor.

Most people would only risk to venture that Vonnegut keeps his tone consistent throughout his bibliography: all of the above novel implement a detached, snappy comedic tone that leaves audiences rolling; “I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone” (Slaughterhouse-Five 5). Matching this with his subversive and irresponsible humor, as seen in Mother Night, “The New York Daily News suggested that my biggest war crime was not killing myself like a gentleman. Presumably Hitler was a gentleman,” (121), Vonnegut’s clearly off-brand distinction seeks to set his works apart from his contemporaries in sheer absurdistic bluntness. Joseph Heller drones on, Bradbury is too realistic, but Vonnegut is just right.

On a much closer level, we can see that they’re structurally very similar. While Cat’s Cradle boasts an impressive 127 chapters, Slaughterhouse-Five has a mere ten, Mother Night has forty-five, Breakfast of Champions has twenty four and an epilogue, and Hocus Pocus has an even forty- all of his novels hinge around short, brief sequences and scenes, each with a punch-line or motif that rings loudly. Slaughterhouse-Five’s chapters all unify in a chain of narrative with a singular idea at stake, while Cat’s Cradle moves haphazardly through time as it tells the progressing story (the irony, of course, being that Slaughterhouse-Five is the novel about being “unstuck in time”). Hocus Pocus dissolves the illusion of time and has the chapters focus around ideals or characters in his life, and Mother Night is the written confession of Howard Campbell Jr. So while Cat’s Cradle may have three chapters on two pages, Slaughterhouse-Five will have three scenes on the same space. The syntax is the same, but different. While presentation is different, the editors haven’t concealed Vonnegut’s choppy scenes that point out his novels so firmly. So it goes.

When we see that the narratives are told not only in different syntactical structures, but also in narrative voice, comparisons become even more difficult. Hocus Pocus and Mother Night are told as prison confessionals (Hocus Pocus tells us this on pages 18-19, “Now I myself am a prisoner here, but with pretty much the run of the place. I haven’t been convicted of anything yet. I am awaiting trial,” and Mother Night’s Howard Campbell tells us that the book is “…written by a man suspected of being a war criminal” (1)). Cat’s Cradle is told as a memoir (it begins with Jonah claiming Bokononism [2], a religion he does not discover in himself until near the end of the tale), indulging continual, but brief, sequences that provide exposition on a vast number of topics. Slaughterhouse-Five is frustrating to explain. A narrator introduces the outline (by page 26 the entire book is foreshadowed) of the tale before switching to describing Billy Pilgrim as protagonist (29), from whose eyes we see his life. Billy takes us non-linearly through his disjointed life, ending somewhere in the middle, in Dresden. Billy introduces us to the narrator, who gives one of Vonnegut’s most memorable lines: “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” (189) Most despairing of all is the ambiguous narrator of Breakfast of Champions, who retakes the reins of the story on page 197 so fiercely as he refers to himself as ‘Creator of the Universe’, giving frustrating confusion to the entire Vonnegut canon of characters and throwing the reliability of every narrator into question.

Vonnegut’s themes seem just as far apart: The post-war dealings of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction in Cat’s Cradle juxtapose with Slaughterhouse-Five’s grueling war camps and alien zoos as well as Indian food and gasoline.

The thing is, Vonnegut doesn’t wish for his audiences to focus on his overlaying ideas. Each of his novels skew pre-and-post-war conceptions of humanity and society. Cat’s Cradle may have science, Hocus Pocus may have sex, and Slaughterhouse may have foreign life, but they all seem to seek to discuss free will, death, and religion- the topics most harrowing after the most violent, morally degrading years in international history. It’s how he handles the juxtaposition of drawings of assholes in Breakfast of Champions and the internal debate of godliness verseus the power of literature that allows his supplementary themes their proximity- satirical stylings make for wonderful fictional controversy.

Cat’s Cradle is seemingly all about religion when looked over a second time. The fictional Bokononism, a religion written in musical nihilism, begins and ends with the phrase “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies” (Cat’s Cradle 5). The religion doesn’t take itself seriously in the slightest- Bokonon himself decrees, “Of course it’s trash!” when discussing his own form of faith (Cat’s Cradle 265).

Most works seem to disprove of any form of God. Even Bokononism finds “not even God” (211) sacred to themselves. In this way, the reactionary effect is to flip to God’s opposition of free will, as one would assume what is not good is evil. Vonnegut seems to argue against this just as forcefully as he writes against a logical God. Breakfast of Champions first mentions deity on page 31, citing “…the same legs the Creator of the Universe gave to my father,” yet later revealing to the audience (in cruel irony of a character reading the truth in a novel) that Vonnegut is aligning himself as the internal God, “’You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe.’” (259). Billy Pilgrim, upon learning of times’ immutable control of events, realizes an incredible frustration against the notion of free will, that “he cannot change… the past, the present, and the future.” (Slaughterhouse-Five 77). In fact, Slaughterhouse-Five’s repetition of ‘so it goes’ (Vonnegut’s most iconic phrase due to this novel) one hundred and six times is so remarkable that it seems to be the first/last time you’ll read it in each instance, remarking on the immutable force of the phrase itself- it seems to be a choice in recognizing it while, at the same time, being there regardless of your will. Conflicting, but very Vonnegut.

Slaughterhouse-Five’s religion is a lot harder to understand. Billy calls attention to a curtain denoting ‘Please Leave This Latrine As Tidy As You Found It!’ when urinating and thinks to himself “the magic curtain and the theatrical grief were part of some religious ceremony he knew nothing about” (Slaughterhouse-Five 159). Billy certainly doesn’t think highly of the one-true-American-religion at Vonnegut’s time of writing, denying Catholicism despite his upbringing (Slaughterhouse-Five 48). Billy and Eliot Rosewater sit in an asylum and compare the New Testament to a science fiction book by Kilgore Trout (the protagonist of future novel, Breakfast of Champions), involving an alien formally explaining that God’s implications were just that they crucified the wrong person at the wrong time (Slaughterhouse-Five 139).

Every Vonnegut publication (Kilgore Trout galore!)

The idea of Kilgore Trout raises a connection, literally, between his novels. Vonnegut’s characteristic characters all tie his novels into a shared universe, most notably Kilgore Trout, his most mentioned character. Shortly after his death, Peter Freese theorized in his paper The Critical Reception of Kurt Vonnegut that he’d “been afraid of becoming a neglected science-fiction writer like his fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout” (Freese 1). This theory throws a lot of problems into how Vonnegut wrote, especially concerning the strength of his narrators: Breakfast of Champions states that “I am a novelist, and I created you for use in my books.” (299) This has us question how strong any of Trout’s earlier thoughts are, how much of Vonnegut’s other narrators are pushed by his own fictional narrative, and the reality of his entire oeuvre begins to crumble. We are Kilgore Trout’s audience because we are Kurt Vonnegut’s audience. When Dwayne Hoover reads the novels of Kilgore Trout, he goes mad. What’s to say a Vonnegut reader isn’t in the same process?

Another theory that builds off of Freese’s (especially the notion that he “didn’t exist for academic critics until the mid-1960s” (2)) is a 2009 journal written by Susan Farrell to speak specifically on the falsification of Howard Campbell’s memory, yet serves to discredit almost all narration in Vonnegut’s writings. The common theme between writers is that Vonnegut’s works have been read without scholarly eye, giving credit to narrators whom no credit is due. “Although previous analyses of the book recognize Howard W. Campbell’s complicity in the Nazi regime, pointing out that his hate-filled, anti-Semetic propaganda does at least as much good for the Nazis as his secret messages do for the Allies, I suggest that these earlier readings do not go far enough in exploring the web of lies and pretensions that ensnare Campbell,” (228) lays down Farrell’s theory that what Vonnegut’s characters tell us are, in effect, fictions. Build this into Breakfast of Champions telling us that Vonnegut created Trout to create further fiction embeds the Vonnegut canon is a web of confusion, misinformation, and intentional falsification.

Another key aspect of Vonnegut’s trademark narrative structure is to announce immediately what is to happen without regard to the event. Billy Pilgrim’s death is predicted on page  of Slaughterhouse-Five, the apocalyptic meeting of Bokonon and Jonah is referenced on page 2 of Cat’s Cradle, Mother Night tells us the entire summed up life by chapter six, Breakfast of Champions’s first sentence (“This is the tale of two lonesome, skinny, fairly white men on a planet which was dying fast” (7)), and you could have assumed that the above mentioned Hocus Pocus from page 18-19 immediately fill us in to his crimes. Vonnegut wishes to displace any importance on narrative plot, instead placing focus on the inane circumstance they occur in, the way he presents them, and any sudden event occurs as a surprise. Sudden occurrences (such as the attack, yet not, of a dog on the narrator of Breakfast of Champions, page 293) fit in only as laughs, doing nothing to affect anything occurring around them. They are merely, as Vonnegut would put it, granfalloons.

Vonnegut’s granfalloons are defined as “a team that was meaningless” (Cat’s Cradle 91). His scenes that jump out of the pre-defined narrative seem to have a point, but are meaningless. Perhaps Kilgore Trout and Eliot Rosewater, his constant character, are granfalloons. The most prevalent example of Vonnegut’s granfalloon-istic style is how he comedically juxtaposes almost any bit of information with a tangential item: “He slept like a lamb. A lamb was a young animal which was legendary for sleeping well on the planet Earth. It looked like this:” (Breakfast of Champions 82-83).  These ideas have nothing to do with each the topic of his slumber, yet they create a laughable response from the reader- the light-hearted nature of his style allows him to discuss slavery on the very next page. The granfalloons often lead to the incidental and tragic meetings of characters, such as Trout and Hoover in Breakfast of Champions that leads to the former losing his finger, and the latter’s sanity.

The accidental irony of situations (such as Trout’s theory that Jesus was just in the wrong place at the wrong time in Slaughterhouse-Five) seems to be yet another plot device signature of Vonnegut. In Slaughterhouse, the scouts who ditch Billy and Weary die because they had left and were hiding (68). An adorable high school teacher who is found with a teapot is shot on the spot (274). In Cat’s Cradle, the world ends due to the misplacement of a corpse (258). The one survivor of the prison break in Hocus Pocus is blamed for its occurrence (19). These staples of absurdism all factor into Vonnegut’s syntactical stylings as so strange they’re real.

With Vonnegut displaying such an affinity for death’s meaningless qualities, he seems to give life a similar tone. Right after the world ends in Cat’s Cradle, Jonah begins to have sex with Mona. The scene unfolds:

Returning to my own bed, gnashing my teeth, I supposed that she honestly had no idea what love-making was all about. But then she said to me, gently, “It would be very sad to have a little baby now. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” I agreed murkily.

“Well, that’s the way little babies are made, in case you didn’t know.” (266)

The absurd inversion of audience expectations in the face of extinction causes immediate humor (especially in the final quip), but further, Vonnegut lets audiences think on about the implications of ever having a child (when is it not very sad to have a child?), whether the human race is worth continuing, and why he was gnashing his teeth. In Mother Night, one of Campbell’s most ardent followers attempts to help him out:

Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, on his own initiative, went down all those stairs to get my Helga’s luggage from Jones’ limousine. The reunion of Helga and me had made him feel young and courtly again.

Nobody knew what he was up to until he reappeared in my doorway with a suitcase in either hand. Jones and Keeley were filled with consternation, because of Krapptauer’s syncopated heart.

“You fool,” said Jones.

“No, no- I’m perfectly fine,” said Krapptauer, smiling.

“Why didn’t you let Robert do it?” said Jones. Robert was his chauffeur, sitting in the limousine below. Robert was a colored man, seventy-three years old. Robert was Robert Sterling Wilson, erstwhile jailbird, Japanese agent, and “Black Fuehrer of Harlem.”

“You should have let Robert bring those things up,” said Jones. “My gosh- you mustn’t risk your life like that.”

“It is an honor to risk my life,” said Krapptauer, “for the wife of a man who served Adolf Hitler as well as Howard Campbell did.”

And he dropped dead. (85)

In these absurd, inverted lines, Vonnegut disguises truth in dialogue while simultaneously finding way to deprive a man’s life of independent meaning from outside influence. The novel quickly moves on from his death, as if it never happened, or perhaps nobody noticed. He is given a single sentence where any character attempts to save or rescue him. They immediately move on to the anti-Semitism. Death comes cheap.

The subversions of typically serious situations are also the root of his humor. He uses long, drawn out scenes followed by shocking and hilarious clauses that destroy what the scene built. A personal favorite sequence involves a homeless man whom the Germans inadvertently stick in the military train-car where Billy is situated. “’This ain’t bad’, the hobo told Billy on the second day. ‘This ain’t nothing at all.’” (Slaughterhouse-Five 89). Soon after it is followed with:

On the eighth day, the forty-year old hobo said to Billy, “This ain’t bad. I can be comfortable anywhere.”

“You can?” said Billy.

On the ninth day, the hobo died. So it goes. His last words were, “You think this is bad? This ain’t bad.” (100)

The dark repetition brings with it enough focus and expectation to make the ironic, dark death of the mysterious man the more shocking.

The shortness of the aforementioned humor is what makes it so funny, so quick to wit. Brevity is the soul of it all, and while it may be hard to analyze and dissect wit, we can see why it works in Vonnegut. Should he have chosen to explain the harsh, terrible terms the homeless man was enduring, the crushing death may have been sad, or even boring. But by laying out an event so contrary to what has been dictated, without warning or cause, the suddenness of it all forces a smile onto the darkest of faces.

And so it goes, in Vonnegut’s trademark style. We can identify unifying themes, subversive humor, and trademark brevity. His ‘voice’ is not found in the way he styles his descriptions, but in the way he removes them to leave a bluntness. The philosophy of unimportance Vonnegut shows his audience is ruthless, honest, and hilarious. Billy and Jonah may be unstuck in time, but thanks to a memorable authorial voice, they’ll always be stuck in our literary canon.

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