Kurt Vonnegut is Dead

Sad. Kurt Vonnegut is dead. I remember how much I identified with him and with his characters, who were little more than quizzical dust particles on a cosmic breeze. In fact, their lives felt like my life – and by that I mean the life of a member of the TV audience – buffeted about through time, moods, and all manner of inanity.

I was born in 1962. The first long-running TV series I remember was the Vietnam War. It was presented as a farce, with mortal consequences. I lived in a working class neighborhood, with an assortment of immigrant and second and third generation Catholics, fighting people, among them a former Hitler Youth, many still working out pathologies from WWII. I knew I would one day have to decide whether to go to war or evade the draft. A monumental, life and death, kill-or-be-killed-or-don’t-kill-and-be-imprisoned-or-exiled-existential decision that I needed to be prepared for by the age of eighteen. I knew I would face this decision alone.

No doubt, this is what made Kurt Vonnegut’s characters and his world so attractive. And the rest of TV too, in the age before the remote. One was transported through time, the object of events, never the subject. No life and death, kill or don’t kill, live or die, right or wrong, character-defining decisions need really be made. In the end we are just the pawns of space-time anyway. We are merely the abused audience for a cosmic joke told for no particular reason by no one in particular.

I fell in love with Kurt Vonnegut in the early 70s. I wanted to be Kurt Vonnegut. My first short stories weren’t much like his, but the protagonist who is little more than a hapless witness to insanity certainly was there.

By 1984, Vonnegut had made a serious attempt at suicide, and my own crippling anxiety had sidetracked my nascent music and writing careers.

Part of the cure involved ceasing to see myself as a Vonnegutean anti-hero. Though I never was forced to make that life and death decision about going to war, due to the elimination of the draft in the early ‘70s, I still needed to face up to what I believed and what I would give my life for. And little by little, I discovered that it did matter, and that people could and did make a difference.

Vonnegut himself was no Billy Pilgrim after all. It takes fierce will and an almost insane commitment to become the kind of writer and figure that Vonnegut was. He was actively, aggressively, assertively himself despite every kind of discouragement the world has to offer and in spite of all enticements too.

C.S. Lewis said, “We read to know we are not alone.” At a time when I felt very much alone, I discovered Vonnegut. Though his world became an anchor that I ultimately cut loose, or at least learned to put in perspective, at one time it was a lifeline.
And through Vonnegut, I fell in love with writing. Short sentences. Little words. Wit in the juxtapositions. He lit a fire in me – a fire to connect. I now use it to pursue a career he would have hated, but that I absolutely love.

So it goes.