On Vonnegut and Funny Loneliness.

I love Kurt Vonnegut. I love everything I've read which he has penned, no exceptions.

I picked up his novel Slapstick to read for an independent study of a book, with a pretty open ended direction - identify a concrete motif and theme, and explain it's significance to the work as a whole.

So, I picked the very prevalent theme of loneliness, and the main character's gag reflex to laugh at his misfortunes. Looking back, the novel fits my blog well. Really well. In fact, the entire piece is essentially a falling apart story. The US is now a series of nation states, and the last president has issued an initiative to make a dwindling population more unified. The solution? Assign a middle name and number to every citizen. This way, he reasons, people will help each other on the basis of family. It works fantastically, so much that people risk their lives for the wellbeing of others. Nonetheless, it turns out, the continent is in decline. Humans begin clinging to what they know. They know a leader is imperative. And, that's about it. President Swain becomes the King of Manhattan, who begins negotiations with Dukes of Michigan and the like. He lives with his closest kin, who happen to be his granddaughter, an aspiring slave, and her lover. They are 19 years old each.

In this, Vonnegut paints a dreary picture. At the same time, however, he writes his characters into hilarious situations. What else can one do, he asks, but laugh at the ultimate absurdities in life and death?

His grasp of this concept is what made Slapstick so enjoyable and interesting. Structure may coax us in a direction that allows us to progress, he indicates. But the crumbling of such is what makes a life worth examining.