...life's work. Throughout many of Vonnegut's works, we are shown his ability to turn major events in his life into satirical dark humor. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis Indiana. He spent most of his life and adolesnce in Indianapolis and is very thankfull."What people like about me is Indianoplis" (The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial). Kurt graduated Shortridge High, where he was a writer and editor of his school newspaper. Later he attended Cornwell University. Kurt hoped to follow in his father and grandfather's footsteps in becoming an architect. Due to the economic crisis that fell in 1929 that lasted through the 1960s known as the Great Depression, Kurt was urged by his father to major in something else. He decided to study Biology and Chemistry. Later he attended Carnegie Institute of Techology and the University of Tennesse. At 20 years of age when World War II broke Vonnegut enlisted into the army. In 1944 in the Battle of the Bulge in Dreseden Germany,Vonnegut was captured and became a prisoner of war. Vonnegut and fellow POWs where kept to work in a factory that produced vitamins, and were sent to dorm in an under ground slaughterhouse. Later Soviet troops took over and Vonnegut was freed. Much of what he experienced during the war can be found in his books. (Shields 28) Vonnegut was able to transform the horrid events he experinced into his most acclaimed novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-Five takes in accounts of what Kurt...
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...characters threaten to wreck themselves and their surroundings with their own stupidity. There is a refreshing and beautiful innocence in Bob’s and Ray’s humor. Man is not evil, they seem to say. He is simply too hilariously stupid to survive. And this I believe. Jerome Klinkowitz, in the introduction to his essay collection entitled Vonnegut in America, has used this quote—as he certainly should—to support his claim that Vonnegut’s humor has its roots in the comedic response to the Great Depression. But of course there is much more to it than that. The reader is left with a nagging question: Were humanity’s case really as Vonnegut describes it, and were this truly his belief, wouldn’t it seem that the only appropriate response would be for Vonnegut to sit and laugh quietly at the antics of the doomed race? But of course Vonnegut has done anything but sit and laugh quietly. His dozen novels fairly shout his anger at the “hilarious stupidity” which unfits our species for survival. In the first chapter of what is certainly his greatest novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut tells us a secret...
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...Many readers of literature are very familiar with Kurt Vonnegut and his abilities, as an author, to portray fantastic literature. He is particularly known for his uses of science fiction. Even his shorter stories and different books, that are not supposed to be science fiction genre, have sort of a sense of his wacky science fiction style. Kurt Vonnegut very often makes a connection to nature or the real world style with science fiction, mostly by the use of humor and irony. Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He passed away at the age of 85, on April 11, 2007. Kurt's parents worked hard, and both his grandfather and father were architects. His grandfather was the founder of Vonnegut Hardware Company in Indianapolis and was all about hard work and labor. Kurt Vonnegut majored in chemistry and was very interested in writing and graphic arts, which made it hard for him to connect with his father. Kurt decided to attend the University of Cornell after graduating from Shortridge High School in May of 1940. Vonnegut developed an early understanding for his writing ability, when he became the editor for The Cornell Daily Sun. Instead of following his passion for writing, he fell into his father's ways and enlisted in the U.S. Army to study vastly about mechanical engineering. To make matters worse, a couple of years after being enlisted, his mother committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills on Mother's Day of 1944. This was the...
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