Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84

Kurt Vonnegut, the American novelist best known for his science fiction classic, Slaughterhouse-Five, which begins with the bombing of Dresden during the second world war and goes on to offer a blackly witty investigation of fate and free will, died yesterday. According to his wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, Vonnegut had sustained brain injuries from a fall at his home in Manhattan some weeks earlier.

Vonnegut's writing career spanned more than half a century and saw him produce 14 novels (many of which were bestsellers) as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays. He ranged from the conventional science fiction of his 1963 novel, Cat's Cradle (which hangs around the discovery of "ice-nine", a substance with the properties of water but which is solid at room temperature) to the satirical Breakfast of Champions (1973) and the semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five, the catalyst for which was his own experience as a soldier with the US 106th Infantry Division and as a prisoner of war during world war two.

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We Join Kilgore Trout in Mourning
God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

By RON JACOBS

It was 1972. I was a junior in high school. A number of my friends and I were sitting in the audience at the Amerika Haus in Frankfurt am Main, Germany waiting for the speaker to appear. A few minutes after 8:00 PM a gray-haired man who looked a little like Mark Twain in the shadowy light of the stage sauntered out. "Good evening," he began. He arranged his drink on the podium. Then he leaned the top half of his lanky frame on the podium's wooden top. Kurt Vonnegut's court was in session for the night.

I don't recall everything he talked about that evening, but do recall that he spoke rather critically about the nature of young people. It was his belief at the time that they were too interested in the short term solution. Hence their fascination with mood modifiers like LSD and other psychedelics. Unknown to us in the audience at the time, Kurt Vonnegut's son Mark was being institutionalized for a bout of some kind of mental illness. Mark wrote in his book about the experience that it was probably brought on because of a bout with psilocybin mushrooms. Like good kids, we sat there taking the scolding from this man who was as old as our fathers, only a lot hipper.

Two of the essential books on every literate, at least somewhat countercultural young person in the US's list at the time were Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle:. The former is an antiwar novel that needs to be dusted off and read anew by every US resident who gives a shit about the direction our country has been going since it was written. We are all Billy Pilgrim--the novel's protagonist--and we can all decide to either make a difference or not. The second novel is an allegory about a lot of things. There's a substance called Ice-Nine that cannot touch water without instantly freezing it. Not only does this substance freeze the water it first touches; it continues to freeze all the water that that water touched and so on, potentially freezing all the water in the world. In fact, that's how the book ends. The rock band The Grateful Dead named their publishing company Ice Nine. Interestingly enough, the Grateful Dead also represented another concept presented by Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle: the karass. Simply put, a karass is a group of people who, unbeknownst to them, are collectively doing God's will in carrying out a specific, common, task. The idea became the model for more than one group of young folks trying to put together a collective living situation.

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