"What in hell are people for?"
Kurt Vonnegut's legacy is being questioned, if not yet recast, due to Charles Shields' new, entirely unauthorised, biography of the man whose reputation is seen by many as unassailable. It is not an overstatement to say that I see in him, through his work, a kindred spirit. I count myself as one of the many who have found profundity in lines such as the above, this one quoted from Rosewater by way of his short story 2BR02B and a despairing indictment of the endemic and needless cruelty of human society.
It is this despair that drives Eliot Rosewater and, more importantly, his wife Sylvia, to and over the brink of destruction. They try to effect a sea-change in social interaction but prove to be as ineffective as Canute against the remorseless, infinite tide of human pettiness and selfishness. Sylvia's eventual fate is narrated tenderly: it is clear that Vonnegut has invested in her something of himself. It is also clear that he does not claim that he has the answer to the sorry state of the human condition, nor would he want to be the person who has. After all, sings the wordless chorus behind every page, who would listen to him?
When Vonnegut describes himself, by way of his nom de plume Kilgore Trout as "society's greatest prophet" the inference is that Trout is the author's rhetorical ego unleashed, loosed from the smothering effect of compassion, even conscience. He can offer half-truths, solutions that lack complexity and subtlety and above all fail to grasp the tired, trapped bird of doomed hope that Eliot cannot release from within his cage of psychosis. Imperfect, irritable Vonnegut may have made a better attempt: Trout's is feeble and platitudinous and singularly useless.
There is more, far more, to be said about Rosewater, but it is in his depiction of Sylvia and Trout that Vonnegut reveals himself. This is not, and nor are any of his other works, the writings and emotions of a misanthrope. He may not have ever mellowed, but if not it was for the same reason as Noam Chomsky: he looked at the world.
"If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable."
