Paul Bowers
In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1982 novel Deadeye Dick, narrator Rudy Waltz describes life as the interstice between the opening and closing of one’s “peephole.” On Wednesday, April 11, at the age of 84, American literary maestro Vonnegut had his peephole permanently closed due to brain injuries sustained during a fall in his Manhattan home.
Upon
hearing this piece of disheartening news, I, like so many other avid Vonnegut
fans, couldn’t hold back a quiet chuckle—the kind elicited by a counterculture
author who made light of death so frequently.
Some of my first thoughts were of what would appear on his
tombstone. Among the famous epitaphs he
devised: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt,” “He tried,” and, as a
suggestion for his own funereal etching, “The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”
This would be an ironic tribute to
Vonnegut, a devout atheist and honorary president of the American Humanist
Association, but irony was his strong suit.
He has been called a social commentator and a black humorist, but to me
he was always a satirist of life, a seemingly misanthropic great-uncle with a
secret compassion hiding in his breast pocket like candy for his great-nieces
and -nephews. I felt like I should have
been invited to his funeral, and I wanted to hug his wife and children.
In this respect, he was a modern
Twain, a spiteful yet loveable curmudgeon.
He was also a Midwestern Faulkner, mythologizing humble towns like
Midland City, Ohio, in the same manner that his Southern predecessor dealt with
Yoknapatawpha County. He created so many characters that will forever be embedded in my
mind and in the American literary consciousness: the failed sci-fi writer
Kilgore Trout, the time-traveling soldier Billy Pilgrim, the beautifully doomed
Celia Hildreth.
Absurd and lonely as the majority of
his characters are, we feel as though we’ve known them since they were
young—and that’s because we have. They
are the lost and wandering souls who never asked to be born in the first place,
searching aimlessly for meaning in a postmodern Waste Land.
Five days after Vonnegut died, we
saw this sort of hopelessness on the campus of Virginia Tech, where a crazed
gunman opened fire on students for no apparent reason. Vonnegut witnessed such depravity firsthand
as an American soldier cooped up in a slaughterhouse during the firebombing of
Dresden, and he continued to see it in the way everyone around him treated each
other. As he wrote at the end of Deadeye
Dick, “The Dark Ages—they haven’t ended yet.”
As a follower of Christ, this is
where my beliefs diverge from Vonnegut’s.
Where he saw existence as an infectious disease and the human spirit as
a balm against suffering, I see humanity as the cause of suffering and God as
our only hope and salvation.
His writing challenged me, though. I can remember reading Slaughterhouse-Five in the tenth grade and growing agitated as the narrator repeated, “So it goes,” following every mention of human death. I read Cat’s Cradle and cringed while I snickered as he belittled organized religion with the fabrication of “Bokononism.”
He made me think. But he did not dismantle my faith. To the contrary, his acerbic criticism has made it stronger, and my words and actions are largely in response to the questions of human worth and spirituality that he so skillfully brought to the table.
Kurt Vonnegut has made me laugh at things that most authors wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot comedic pole. He has inspired me as a writer. And he has expanded my mind as a person.
His final contribution to the art community was a doodle of an empty birdcage with its door flung open. Goodbye, Uncle Kurt.