Kurt vonnegut :: essays research papers

Kurt Vonnegut Served as a sensitive cell in the organism of American Society during the 1960s. His work alerted the public about the absurdity of modern struggle and an increasingly mechanized and impersonal society in which humans were fundamentally worthless and degenerated. The satirical tone and sardonic humor allowed people to enjoin his works and laugh at their own misfortune.      Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, where he was reared. His father was an architect, as his grandfather had been. Though the familys fortune was scoured during the Depression-his father went without an architectural commission from 1929 to 1940-they were well-to-do. Kurt attended Shortridge High School, where he was the editor of the nations oldest daily high school paper, the Echo. (((high school quote)))     Vonnegut was expected to become a scientist, and when he went to Cornell in 1940, he chose, at the urging of his father, to m ajor in chemistry. (((college quote))) "Chemistry was everything then," he said. "It was a magic word in the thirties. The Germans, of course, had chemistry, and they were deprivation to take apart the universe and put it together again. At Cornell, he was the managing editor and columnist for its daily paper, the Sun. Among interned as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. It was here that he experienced what would later become the root word for one of his best-selling novels, Slaughterhouse-Five. "(Dresden) was the first fancy urban center Id ever seen. and then a siren went off-it was February 13, 1945-and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with (animal) cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone." This experience, or rather, disaster, was the Allied firebombing of Dresden in which over 130,000 people, mostly citizens, died for no probable reason. Despite the horror of the incident, he maintains that the experience did not change his bureau of thinking, but rather gave him another viewpoint from which to observe the absurdity and scratchiness of the human race. "The importance of Dresden in my life has been considerably exaggerated because my hold about it became a best seller." (p. 94 CWV)      Vonnegut returned to the United States determined tp be a writer, and to deal with the experience of Dresden, though it was nearly 25 old age before he was able to do so.