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SYMBOLIC CHARACTERS IN KURT VONNEGUT’S FICTION Sidita Hoxhiq Dano
(Tirana, Albania)
Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most well known and prolific writers of the 21st century American literature. He has been labeled as a science-fiction writer, as a black humorist, as a satirist and as a postmodernist. His most well-known novels are “Player Piano”, “Sirens of Titan”, “Cat’s Cradle”. But the novel that put him on the pedestal ofpostmodern American writers was “Slaughterhouse-Five”, considered an anti-war novel.
His characters are human beings, being stuck in a time, in a moment, or being stuck in an “unstuck” situation, moving from one planet to another. They live the end of the world. But the most important is that Vonnegut’s characters are symbolic. That is the aim of this paper: to present some of the most symbolic characters of Vonnegut’s fiction, that serve the idea of the novel, more than the structure. For this reason, I have divided the characters into those who try to find solution to their problems in a universal pilgrimage - represented by Billi Pilgrim and Malachi Constant- and those who wait for the end to come in their own apathy -represented by Jonah and Paul Proteus.
Keywords: fiction, characters, dehumanization, quest, idea
On April 11th, 2007 dies one of the most well-known writers of the 21st century American literature. During his life he wrote essays, plays and short-stories, but the reader knows him best as a novelist. His novels turned into symbols to students of the ’60 and ’70, who strongly opposed the Vietnam war.
Like Mark Twain, he used his humor and satire to respond some questions that troubled him as a writer, but also the American society in general. At the center of his fiction was the old question of free will and the meaning of life, death and love. The usage of figures like Jonah and Christ, made the connection of the common man’s fate to the divine will.
However, using techniques of the science-fiction, satire, humor and postmodernism, Vonnegut did not write only about metaphysical issues, but also about everyday themes of American urban culture.
His novels are built as complex compositions, allowing the narrator to enter every angle of the story, by maximizing and minimizing the elements of sci-fi and grotesque. He creates new realities, by creating new planets, like Tralfamador, or Titan; he creates new religions, like that of Bokonon; not as a mere means of science-fiction, but as a way to criticize and oppose the present reality.
He is of German origin, but his family moved to Illinois many years before. His father was an architect and his mother came from a very rich family. He went to Cornell to study chemistry, but he was always fond of writing, starting with the school newspaper. However, the most significant moment in the life of Kurt Vonnegut is Dresden. During the Battle of the Bulge, the largest American defeat of the Second World War, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans. As a prisoner of war, Vonnegut was shipped to Dresden, and along with other prisoners, he was kept in a slaughterhouse, which had the number 5. When they emerged a few hours later, he found out that the allied forces had destroyed the beautiful city of Dresden, with its unique architecture, and more than 130.000 people died. This wartime experience served him as basis for his most famous and important novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five”. However, Vonnegut’s art is influenced by other important events and literary figures.
Vonnegut frequently mentions Robert Louis Stevenson as an important influence in his writing. He says that he kept his example in mind while he was writing about popular magazines in the ‘50s. But, when he is asked to name his favorite writer, he says George Orwell, the author of “Animal Farm” and “1984”. There are also other critics who say that the way that Vonnegut uses science-fiction into his novels is too much owed to Aldous Huxley, with “Brave New World”, or that he has uses the humor of Mark Twain to satirize the problems of American society.
Vonnegut has caused debates among scholars, not only about his ideas, but also about his art. There were those who did not really appreciate his science-fiction literature, by considering it as a very low kind of art. But there were those who valued his art, saying that science-fiction was not a technique, but it was a means of Vonnegut’s writing to create his novels. There those who liked to characterize him, like calling him a satirist, a black humorist and a postmodernist. He has always rejected labeling. On the other hand, some critics accused him of repeating themes,
repeating characters, repeating ideas and repeating structures. Seeing that a character like Kilgour Trout are found in more than two novels, is to be considered. Even though, in Vonnegut’s novels, we lack well-rounded characters, they do have strong symbolic function to the novel and to the message of the novel.
Vonnegut’s world is gone chaotic. He is always in this search for the meaning of life. In “Cat’s Cradle” he tells us that all the answers to that question are lies and the best we can do is to live by those lies that make us “brave and kind and happy and healthy”. In “Breakfast of Champions” Kilgore Trout finds the question “What is the purpose of life?” written on a bathroom wall. Moreover, Trout’s answer is ‘to be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool” [Vonnegut, BCh., pg. 67-68]. In “The Sirens of Titan”, he mocks with the question and those who search for the answer in the outer space when he starts the novel by saying that “Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within him.”
As I said, his characters are not well rounded. All they do is serve the structure of the novel and the ultimate message that the author wants to convey. They are people stuck in one place and are unable to change the situation. External forces, like nature, sophisticated scientific means or aliens, direct them. They are characterized by a lack of control of their life and consequently we do not expect a change of the situation. They are lonely people. Even though, they might be married, like Paul Proteus, or they may have children like Bill Pilgrim, they still feel the need to be loved and to be in the presence of other people. While reading Vonnegut’s novels, we can see that these characters are somehow desperate. While some of them, like Paul Proteus and Jonah, who wait in apathy for the end of the world, there are others, like Bill Pilgrim and Malachi Constant, who want to find a way out, into the universe, travelling in other planets. However, these four “Vonnegutian” characters bear a very strong symbolism. I have chosen to pair them, not only based on the actions they take, but on the symbols they bear. Paul Proteus and Jonah bear a mythical symbolism, while Malachi Constant and Bill Pilgrim, a semantic one.
Vonnegut’s first novel was “Player Piano” published in 1952. It is set in the future after a fictional third world war. During the war, while most Americans were fighting overseas, the nation’s managers and engineers developed ingenious automated systems that allowed the factories to op-
erate with only a few workers. It is the story of Paul Proteus, the young manager of the Ilium Works and the son of the late George Proteus who had served as Director of National Industrial, Commercial, Communications, Foodstuff and Resources. As a brilliant administrator who is only 35 years old, Paul has a major opportunity to assume a major position in America’s technocracy. But he becomes more and more disillusioned with the system. At the same time, Vonnegut gives another parallel plot, that of the Shah of Bratpur, who comes to visit America. He sees immediately the emptiness of American life, which is all focused on the mechanization of the society. Paul wants to escape this reality and he rebels by trying to join the “Ghost shirts”, which is a rebellious group rebelling against the technocracy of the society. Very quickly, Paul is kept by the police and realizes that it is very difficult, almost impossible to change.
So, the main character in this novel is Paul Proteus. It is not a coincidence for Kurt Vonnegut. In fact, Vonnegut wrote this novel, based on the experience he had in Cornell, but also when working at General Electrics. However, Paul, bears a mythical symbolism, which serves the author to convey the idea of the destruction of the society by technology in modern America. His name is related to the Greek myth of Homer’s Odyssey. He is a sea monster that can change his shape at will. The relation of Vonnegutian Paul to the myth is that he lacks a shape. In fact, the American society is so planned, that is run by corporations for profit. In the novel, the narrator gives us an example where a machine chooses people randomly to employ, without taking into consideration the human part. “Player Piano” gives the image of a society with no real place or need for humans any more. Paul, like the myth, tries to be “a free man”. But he is controlled by a society dominated by such machines. The critic Thomas Marvin calls him “an ultimate insider”. He goes further by saying that “...Paul becomes a representative man of the machine age. His lack of a stable identity, his inability to understand himself or others, and his desire for a powerful organization that can answer his nagging questions are revealed to be symptomatic of the times, and not just personal failings” [Marvin, T. pg. 30-31]. With the passing of the time, and with the parallel plot of the Shah of Bratpur opposing him, Paul feels the need to change. Not the change of the myth, anytime he wants and in any shape he wants, but he must have the strength, will and possibility of the myth to change. That is why Paul tries to enter a group, which rebels the technocracy of the American society. Because, Paul is “the one most out of touch, having had little time for reflection, having been so eager tojoin a large confident
organization with seeming answers to the problems that had made him sorry to be alive” [Vonnegut, PP, pg. 334]. In this way he realizes that he does not want to bejust a lone human manager overseeing machines. On the other hand, this change for him is not easy. He finds that he has made a bad decision going to the “Ghost Shirt Society” and tries to change it. But that change is not done so easily. For the critic Stanley Schatt “he is not ready”. According to him “Paul feels a moral responsibility to search for a solution to the problems poses by an unjust society, but he chooses unwisely because ofhis own insecurity” [Schatt, pg. 23].
Another novel of Kurt Vonnegut, where he uses a symbolic character is “Cat’s Cradle” (1963). It was more successful than “Player Piano”, mingling again elements of science-fiction, satire and bitter humor. It is a story told by a first person narrator, who says “Call me Jonah”, since in the opening. He is a writer and wants to write a book about “The day the world ended”. He wants to find the scientist who invented the atomic bomb. Instead he searches his three rotten children, who have a part of ice-9, a combination of elements that when in contact to water, they turn everything into ice. In thisjourney, he ends in the island of San Lorenzo, which is governed by a dictator. The life in the island is kept by a morality play in which good and evil battle endlessly. Jonah or John gets to know a religion that is prohibited to the people in the island, called Bokononism. This religion is based on the “harmless untruths”. It has its own Books of prays and it is read much like the Bible’s New Testament.
“Call me Jonah” is an expression that many people relate to Melville’s “Mobi Dick”: “Call me Ishmael”. In both novels, the reader asks if it is the real name of the narrator. Thomas Marvin makes a parallelism with the white color of the whale to the white color of ice-9. But he and Stanley Schatt consider also the reference to the Biblical character of Jonah. God calls prophet Jonah to travel to Nineveh and warn its citizens to give up their evil ways or he will destroy the city. Jonah does not go and takes a ship to the opposite direction. A storm happens and the sailors want to understand who brought the wrath of God into them. He confesses, then is thrown into the sea and he is eaten by a big fish. After three days, Jonah comes to shore and decides to go to Nineveh and preach the word of God. The people repent and the city is saved. But Jonah is mad, because he wanted Nineveh to be destroyed. But God is more concerned for the people than for Jonah’s prophecy.
Unlike Paul Proteus, Jonah does not want to change anything, science is threatening human beings. It is not a machine, but it is ice-9. Both
of them pass through a passage of epiphany before deciding to change. While Paul Proteus understands the situation as technology is replacing people every day and he is being part of the same technocracy, Jonah on the other hand, understands the difference of American society to that of San Lorenzo, when he lives there himself. But Jonah is not related to the myth of change. He is seen by most people as a representation of bad luck. Nevertheless, the idea of Vonnegut is that someone else controls human destiny, when he says, “somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times” [Vonnegut, K. CC, pg. 1].
Like Proteus, which is stuck in Illium, Jonah is stuck in San Lorenzo. His mainjob now is the quest for truth. Todd Davis sees Jonah “as a mirror to our own stubborn refusal to admit that the only meaning in the universe is the meaning we create for ourselves” [Davis, pg. 62]. And that is what Jonah does. He starts to find information about the book called “The day the world ended”. “The book was to be factual. The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the way when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then. I am a Bokononist now.” Like Jonah in the Bible, he has to find the truth, write a book and tell the world about it. But along the way he risks being a nihilist and ends up being a Bokononist. Like in the Bible, even though he tries to avoid it, he can not gather the three parts of ice-9, which are in the hands of the scientist’s children. At the end, a part of it ends in the waters of San Lorenzo, they freeze, and so on the whole world ends up frozen.
So, while in “Cat’s Cradle”, Vonnegut brings the vision of the world locked up in ice that will not melt, in “Player Piano”, he brings us the vision of the despaired man, whosejob is “to do a goodjob of being human beings”. Like Proteus is in search of an identity, so is the modern American. Like Jonah, in search for truth, so is Vonnegut.
Illium is not a setting to Paul only, it is also a setting to Bill Pilgrim, the main character of “Slaughterhouse-Five”. As mentioned above, it is the story of Dresden, but told in another way. Like his contemporary, Joseph Heller, Vonnegut wanted to show the atrocities of the Second World War. But “there was nothing wise to be told about a massacre”, so Vonnegut chooses another kind of narration, and that included elements of science-fiction, telegraphic-schizofrenic manners, stream of consciousness, etc. What serves him best to do that is the main character, Bill Pilgrim. As his name implies, Bill is a “pilgrim”. Having suffered in the WWII, having
been a prisoner, he is wounded, like many other characters of the time. Much like Heller’s Yossarian, Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim has been disillusioned by the bombs of the war and longs to reconcile himself to the experience. It is the hard effort to explain something as absurd and cruel as war. But unlike others, Bill becomes “unstuck” in time and space. The narration isjust like messages of planet Tralfamador, which Bill visits a lot. One moment he is in Illium, then we find him in the slaughterhouse in Dresden, and suddenly he is in Tralfamadore. It is as if he can not make a distinction between fiction and reality, because like Paul Proteus and Jonah, he feels hopeless. However, unlike them, Bill tries to find a way out and that is by a pilgrimage in the universe, trying to find a new planet.
On the other hand, the critic Thomas Marvin, sees the symbolism of Bill’s Pilgrimage as a reference to “Christ figure” [Marvin T., pg. 124]. For him, Billi is an anti-war hero. Jerome Klinkowitz, another scholar finds a relation between Vonnegut as a writer and Bill. “Above all, Von-negut and his protagonist find themselves conventionally speechless in the face of ultimate but unanswerable questions, unanswerable at least within the limits working to confine them” [Klinkowitz, J. pg. 89]. But the answers to the questions of Bill, does not come from the earthlings, but from aliens of Tralfamadore.
“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past. ... It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever [Vonnegut, K. SH5, pg. 26-27].
Besides Bill, also Malachi Constant is another character of Vonnegut’s that tries to find a way out by visiting another planet. He is the main character in “Sirens of Titan”. After loosing all his wealth, he fulfills the prophecy of Rumfoord to go into another planet, and have a son with Rumfoord’s wife. He goes to Titan. As the years go by on Titan, Malachi Constant lives the simple life of a farmer. But, eventually he comes back to Earth. Waiting to catch a bus to the city’s center, Malachi Constant freezes to death in the snow. Just like in “Cat’s Cradle”, the end comes from a “white” death. Malachi is also seen as a Jonah figure. In fact, Malachi uses the name Jonah Rowley, when he visits Rumfoord’s estate, preparing the reader for his anxious flight from Rumfoord’s prophecy. As Jonah, Malachi becomes the focal point of Vonnegut’s moral discourse. According to the narrator, Malachi’s wanderings across the universe represent “empty heroics, low comedy and pointless death” [Vonnegut, K.
ST, pg.8]. The scholar Todd Davis says that “Sirens of Titan focuses on the cosmological education of one man: Malachi Constant” [Davis, T. pg.55]. I would say that this is the real symbol of the character of Malachi, which means “constant messenger”. Malachi is a messenger, and his message is revealed immediately, in the opening of the novel that “everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself” [Vonnegut, K. ST. pg.1]. So, Bill Pilgrim and Malachi Constant do not only bear a semantic symbol to the novels, but they serve also to the symbolic idea that the author wants to reveal to the reader.
Vonnegut’s characters, bearing not only mythical, biblical and semantic symbols, they also serve to Kurt Vonnegut to build the structure and serve the main idea. He has been accused very often than he uses only elements of science-fiction, but he has always known how to master it. He is considered to be an author of ideas, rather than characters. But the latter have always helped to the idea. Vonnegutian characters have been influenced by external forces. These forces manipulate and control every human being’s actions and thoughts for their own mean purposes. They have two solutions: either to wait in apathy, or quest to discover the meaning of life in another dimension. They suffer from a lack of will or passivity. But not all of them end up in despair. “Player Piano” ends with no clear resolutions, whereas “Sirens of Titan” ends with a literal movement towards light. While “Cat’s Cradle” ends in a frozen world, Bill Pilgrim of “Slaughterhouse-Five” finds the answers of life in an alien organization. Outer forces control them, which can be nature, science and even God.
Above all, Vonnegut’s characters are human. That is why he always says that “a purpose of human life is to love whoever is around to be loved” [Vonnegut, K. ST, pg. 320].
References
1 Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Delacorte Press, 1973
2 Marvin, Thomas F. Kurt Vonnegut, A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press, 2002
3 Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980
4 Schatt, Stanley, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. G.K. Hall &Co, 1976
5 Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat’s Cradle. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1998
6 Davis, Todd F. Kurt Vonnegut’s Crusade, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2006
7 Marvin, Thomas F. Kurt Vonnegut, A Critical Companion, Greenwood Press, 2002
8 Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Vonnegut Effect, University of South Caroline Press, 2004
9 Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte Press, 1969
10 Vonnegut, Kurt. Sirens ofTitan. NewYork, Dell, 1998
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