Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84

Irreverent novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died tonight. So it goes. He was 84.

I read about a dozen Vonnegut novels during the 1999–2000 academic year, the year between my college graduation and my first year of divinity school—a year I spent doing a host of part-time jobs and trying to figure out what I'd do with my life. That year, I checked out just about every Vonnegut book that I could find in the Evansville, Indiana Public Library system. Vonnegut's prose made me want to be a writer (and, as an editor-by-profession who gets the occasional freelance writing gig, I suppose I haven't entirely missed out on that dream), and I still break out a battered Vonnegut paperback now and then.

I maintain that Kurt Vonnegut didn't write a good novel after 1973's Breakfast of Champions, but his earlier work was outstanding. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater completely changed how I looked at the haves and have-nots in the United States; Slaughterhouse-Five shaped my views on war; and Cat's Cradle challenged how I thought about God. All three of these novels rank among my all-time favorites. (And Kilgore Trout may be the best fictional character in all of American literature.)

For what it's worth, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a high school classmate of my grandmother, making the two of them part of a granfalloon. Vonnegut said of the former Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, "It's my dream of America with great public schools. I thought we should be the envy of the world with our public schools. And I went to such a public school."

I'll wrap up this post with one of my favorite passages from Slaughterhouse-Five:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.