Peter Stothard: the bad about Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, has died. He was 84.

Vonnegut, who often marvelled that he had lived so long despite his life-long smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, the photographer Jill Krementz. He died yesterday.

The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic.

He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.

“I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,” Vonnegut once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot.

Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

His mother had succeeded in killing herself just before he left for Germany during the Second World War, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge.

He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed tens of thousands of people in the city.

He spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW’s inside an underground meat locker labeled "slaughterhouse five".

The novel of the same name, in which Private Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.

Times Recommends

• Tehran cannot live up to its rhetoric
• The new unicycle that will ‘change the world’
• We cannot wish away Iran’s bomb