Article 6: The Dark Ages Haven’t Ended Yet: Kurt Vonnegut and the Cold War

The eighty-four-year-old American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died in April 2007. “So it goes” (Vonnegut 1969/1991, 22). This chain-smoking, “glib Philosopher of the Prairies,” (Vonnegut 1974/2006, xiii), “was and is subversive,” as one of his sons stated just after his death (Vonnegut 2008, 6). He was (and is) so subversive because he held up a mirror to American society, and the reflection was not what many wanted to see. Vonnegut wrote “cosmically,” as scholar Jerome Klinkowitz (2004) has noted (128). That is, Vonnegut (e.g., 1959/1998) observed Earth from a celestial perspective and, from that distant view, demonstrated the absurdity of many of its social problems. He noted that “a visitor from another planet, who might have a larger view of our day-today enterprises, … might be able to give us some clue as to what is really going on” (Vonnegut 1974/2006, 207). This intergalactic perspective and his technological discussions promoted critics to put him in a “file drawer labeled ’science fiction,’” from which he “would like out” (1). Nevertheless, Vonnegut (1974/2006) continued his cosmic ethnography because he believed his purpose was to “make mankind aware of itself, in all its complexity” (229; Ramsey 2009).