Kurt Vonnegut was a writer who employed a simple, straightforward style to complex issues of existence, technology, and morality. Like Ernest Hemingway, this approach was shaped by his experience as a journalist. But where Hemingway delved inward, struggling with his mortality and failures on the pages of his fiction, Vonnegut looked outward. He examined the world around him, offered critique, and wasn’t shy about highlighting the absurdities of the modern world. His work defied categorization, dabbling in satire, science fiction, and postmodernism.
Vonnegut played with time and point of view, carving out a unique literary identity for himself. Reading his work often feels like engaging in a lengthy conversation with the man, especially when he inserts himself as a character or breaks the fourth wall by directly addressing the reader. The 10 books listed here are some of his most successful.
1. Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five was Vonnegut’s breakthrough book in terms of commercial and critical success. Based on his own horrifying experience as a prisoner of war and survivor of the bombing of Dresden, it’s the story of Billy Pilgrim. Billy becomes “unstuck” from time, moving uncontrollably back and forth through his life. We see him as a young man, in World War II, and in the far future as part of a human “exhibit” on the planet Tralfamadore. The sliding, non-linear narrative is executed brilliantly, and Vonnegut’s framing of the story as a self-conscious work of personal scholarship blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction, questioning the value of the distinction. A scathing anti-war narrative, it remains the most interesting, fun, and accessible of Vonnegut’s novels.
2. Breakfast of Champions
Vonnegut’s most complex novel is amazingly dark. An obscure sci-fi writer named Kilgore Trout travels to Midland City for an arts festival. A local businessman on the brink of insanity named Dwayne Hoover meets Trout and receives one of his novels. The book tells him he is the only person with free will—everyone else is essentially a machine. This sends him over the edge and he starts attacking people around him who he now believes to be robots. Then Kurt Vonnegut shows up as the author of the story and sets Trout free before disappearing into the void. This is a violent story, but its themes of free will and the nature of existence remain powerful—as does the question of whether we are all biological machines just waiting for bad programming (such as Trout’s book) to send us on a rampage. If Slaughterhouse-Five was a scream of terror and frustration in the face of existence, Breakfast of Champions is an effort to make sense of it. It’s also surprisingly hilarious.
3. Player Piano
Vonnegut’s first published novel Player Piano is his most traditional, and yet it’s still unlike almost anything else you’ll read. Set in a post-World War Three America where all factory and other laboring jobs have been replaced by machines, it explores a society where the vast majority of people have no purpose or meaning. While Vonnegut plays this sci-fi concept straight, there’s a hint of his future disdain for traditional narratives in the way he tells two parallel stories—one about a member of the managerial class who loses faith in the world he’s helped create and one about a visiting dignitary who finds this future America puzzling and terrifying—that don’t intersect in any meaningful way. It’s a prescient story about a pressing concern today—the negative effect of technology on our lives—that Vonnegut explores with surprising, thriller-like tension.
4. The Sirens of Titan
Vonnegut’s second novel is in some ways a transitional work. On the surface, it has a classic structure—a plot, characters, and no one named Kurt Vonnegut running around hijacking the story for pages and pages. But it’s also a novel where none of the characters have any agency—there are no heroes or villains because no one is truly able to choose anything that happens. A man and his dog travel the stars and are transformed into waves that can only take solid form when they intersect with a planet. An elaborate plot to cause a Martian invasion of Earth is set in motion—and doomed to fail. A robot helps an old man die peacefully while waiting for a bus. It’s a funny, beautiful story—but also a bit of a litmus test. If you love The Sirens of Titan, chances are you’ll love all of Vonnegut’s work.
5. Welcome to the Monkey House
Vonnegut’s second collection of short stories shows off his versatility and his incredible gift for creativity. In the short story medium, Vonnegut hones in more on single ideas, and the result is a series of tightly focused narratives that exhibit all of the humor and brains that typify Vonnegut without a lot of the (often brilliant) rambling he indulges. In one story, the government handicaps all citizens in an insane quest for equality. In another, a man discovers the secret to manipulating objects with his mind and uses it to destroy all weapons of war. It’s a stunning collection, but it’s marred by the awful depiction of sexual assault in the titular story. Many people who become fans of Vonnegut’s novels and essays are shocked and disappointed when they read Welcome to the Monkey House, which even in 1968 exhibited some pretty terrible attitudes towards rape and women, but it’s essential reading if you seek to understand Vonnegut as a writer.
6. Cat’s Cradle
Vonnegut’s fourth novel Cat’s Cradle was written during a time of high tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the uneasy sense that the world could end more or less by accident imbues the story. A writer working on a book about what famous and powerful people were doing when the first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan discovers the existence of ice-9, a form of water that freezes solid at much higher temperatures than normal ice. It’s also a “seed crystal” that instantly transforms regular water into ice-9 on contact. The story explores the way religion is used to give people hope and purpose, but the inevitable moment when ice-9’s presence in the world turns tragic underscores Vonnegut’s doubt that any of us have true agency in our lives. In a lot of ways, this is Vonnegut’s most straightforward sci-fi novel, and the apocalypse he describes seems horrifyingly plausible.
7. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Published in 1965, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is Vonnegut’s examination of capitalism in the modern world. Eliot Rosewater is in charge of the Rosewater Foundation and is extremely wealthy, but never sober. As he slowly develops a conscience, he decides to move to Rosewater, Indiana, offering his time and money to anyone he might be able to help. A nefarious lawyer seeks to prove he’s gone insane in order to pry his inheritance away, but Eliot ultimately finds a way to make his money unexpectedly meaningful. Once again, Vonnegut is prescient; thinking about the story in an age when universal basic incomes are being explored gives it a surprising timeliness. Notable as the first appearance of obscure sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout (a frequent stand-in for Vonnegut even in stories where Vonnegut himself literally appears) and as one of the few Vonnegut stories that contains no speculative elements, it’s a book that will make you think about society and our duty to each other within it.
8. Mother Night
Published in 1962, Mother Night takes the concept of the unreliable narrator to a glorious extreme. Storyteller W. Campbell Jr. narrates his story from an Israeli prison where he awaits trial for his crimes as a Nazi propagandist. But as he tells his tale, it’s quickly clear that you can’t be entirely certain that any of it is strictly true. Vonnegut was a German-American whose parents omitted much of his German culture in the aftermath of World War II, and this book is usually seen as his exploration of the shame and rootlessness he experienced as a result. He makes that disorientation literal on the page, but he also inspires the story with his trademark dark humor—and his rage at a world where war can do so much damage.
9. Bagombo Snuff Box
Vonnegut’s third short story collection (and last one published in his lifetime) collects the stories that didn’t appear in the previous two. In other words, these are minor works. So why include it? One, because these stories—written by a young Vonnegut making a living—show his early development as a writer, and present his voice and style without the later freedom to be as weird as he liked. Two, some of these stories are fantastic, especially Der Arme Dolmetscher, in which an American soldier in World War II finds himself mistaken for a German translator when he recites a poem he’d learned phonetically. And finally, there’s the essay included at the end, “Coda to My Career as a Writer for Periodicals,” a revealing reverie in which Vonnegut reflects on his time selling stories to magazines that were often disinterested in pushing boundaries or artistic merit. The result is a book that offers a glimpse of the intersection of art, commerce, and a unique literary personality that’s well worth reading.
10. Timequake
Vonnegut’s last novel Timequake is in many ways a bookend to Slaughterhouse-Five. In it, he revisits the theme of time and ups the metafictional ante. Instead of an initial chapter in which Vonnegut inserts his authorial voice, he explains that the entire book is a combination of a failed novel he couldn’t complete (referred to as Timequake One) and his observations and memories, combined to form the book you’re reading.
In the story, the timequake strikes in 2001 and sends everyone back to 1991, forced to repeat history exactly, helpless to change anything. This horrifyingly deterministic universe rambles; Vonnegut shows up as a character and merrily derails the narrative to repeatedly drill into various tangents that catch his eye. It is, in other words, a glorious mess from a writer in the twilight of his life and career. The central conceit is awesome, and Vonnegut uses the literal structure of the book as part of it. The chapter breaks are inconsistent and meaningless in terms of the narrative, conveying a disorienting sense of having no control over your own experience. It’s a sneakily brilliant novel that deserves more attention.
No Comments