Kurt vonnegut :: essays research papers

Kurt Vonnegut Served as a sensitive cell in the organism of American Society during the 1960s. His work alerted the public about the silliness of modern warfare and an increasingly mechanized and impersonal society in which humans were essenti wholey worthless and degenerated. The satirical tone and sardonic supposition allowed people to read his works and laugh at their own misfortune.      Vonnegut was natural on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, where he was reared. His father was an architect, as his grandfather had been. though the familys fortune was eroded during the Depression-his father went without an architectural commission from 1929 to 1940-they were well-to-do. Kurt attended Shortridge postgraduate School, where he was the editor of the nations oldest daily high school paper, the Echo. (((high school quote)))     Vonnegut was expect to become a scientist, and when he went to Cornell in 1940, he chose, at the importunity of his father, to major in chemistry. (((college quote))) "Chemistry was everything then," he said. "It was a magic news program in the thirties. The Germans, of course, had chemistry, and they were going to take apart the universe and put it in concert again. At Cornell, he was the managing editor and columnist for its daily paper, the Sun. Among interned as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. It was here that he experienced what would ulterior become the basis for one of his best-selling novels, Slaughterhouse-Five. "(Dresden) was the first fancy metropolis Id ever seen. Then a siren went off-it was February 13, 1945-and we went down two stories beneath the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with (animal) cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone." This experience, or rather, disaster, was the Allied firebombing of Dresden in which over 130,000 people, in the main citizens, died for no apparent reason. Despite the horr or of the incident, he maintains that the experience did non change his way of thinking, but rather gave him another viewpoint from which to adopt the absurdity and cruelty of the human race. "The importance of Dresden in my life has been easily exaggerated because my book about it became a best seller." (p. 94 CWV)      Vonnegut returned to the get together States determined tp be a writer, and to deal with the experience of Dresden, though it was almost 25 years before he was able to do so.