Kurt Vonnegut Day: The Book That Took Twenty Years

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis on November 11, 1922, the youngest of three children in a prosperous German American family that lost most of its money in the Depression. He went to Cornell to study biochemistry, cared far more about the student paper than his classes, and enlisted in the Army in 1943.

He died in Manhattan on April 11, 2007, at eighty-four, from brain injuries he suffered in a fall at his home several weeks earlier.

In between he wrote fourteen novels, a pile of short stories and essays, and one book that changed how Americans wrote about war. He was a science fiction writer who spent his career insisting he wasn’t one, a satirist who wrote like a kind uncle, and a man whose birthday fell on a holiday he cared about more than most people who still observe it. That combination explains most of what makes him worth reading, and a good deal of what makes him hard to imitate.

Why did Kurt Vonnegut care so much about Armistice Day?

Because it was his birthday, and because of what it originally marked.

In the preface to Breakfast of Champions, published in 1973, he calls November 11 “accidentally my birthday” in passing. He remembers it as a sacred day, when people in the nations that had fought the First World War went silent at the eleventh hour to mark the moment the killing stopped in 1918. Then he delivers the verdict in two short sentences: “Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.”

That’s Vonnegut in miniature. A flat statement, no adjectives, a joke shape with no joke in it, and a moral position you can’t miss. The United States renamed the holiday in 1954, and I’ve written about what that renaming did in Armistice Day: What a Renaming Costs. Vonnegut’s two sentences make the argument better than most essays on the subject.

What happened to Kurt Vonnegut in Dresden?

The Germans captured him on December 22, 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge. He was twenty-two. As a prisoner he was sent to Dresden and put to work, and the Germans housed the prisoners in an underground meat locker at a slaughterhouse.

On February 13, 1945, Allied bombers began the raids that burned the city. They went on until the fifteenth and killed around 25,000 people. Vonnegut and the other prisoners survived because they were three stories underground in the meat locker. When they came up, the guards put them to work pulling bodies out of the ruins.

Months earlier, home on leave, he’d found his mother dead by suicide on the night before Mother’s Day 1944. He carried both of those things for the rest of his life.

My grandfather was a prisoner of war too. I interviewed him about the war when I was seventeen, and I didn’t write the final version of that book, Behind the Wire, until 2025. I know something about how long a war story can sit before the writer finds the way in.

Why did Slaughterhouse-Five take more than twenty years to write?

Because the straight version didn’t work.

Vonnegut came home in 1945 meaning to write a war novel about Dresden, and for two decades he couldn’t. The first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five is about that failure. It opens with the line “All this happened, more or less,” and then the author talks directly to the reader about his visits to old war buddies, his attempts to outline the book, and the promise he made to the wife of one of those buddies.

Her name was Mary O’Hare, and she was angry. She told him the men in the war had been babies. Books and films, she said, would turn them into glamorous heroes played by movie stars. He promised her the book would have no parts for John Wayne, and he gave it a second title, The Children’s Crusade.

The solution he found was to break time. Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist from the fictional town of Ilium, New York, becomes unstuck in time and lives his life out of order. He’s in Dresden, then at his wedding, then on an alien planet, then back in the war. The structure lets the book circle the bombing without ever describing it head-on, the way a person circles a memory they can’t look at directly.

The aliens, the Tralfamadorians, see all of time at once. To them a dead person is still alive in every other moment, so they answer every death with “So it goes.” The phrase appears 106 times in the book.

What can memoir writers learn from Slaughterhouse-Five?

The frame around a story will get a writer in when the front door won’t.

Most people who try to write about the worst thing that happened to them go at it chronologically and directly. They describe the event in full, and the result reads like a report, because the reader has no reason to trust the narrator yet and no way to bear what’s coming. Vonnegut put himself in the first chapter, admitted he’d failed for years, and let the reader watch him find a structure. By the time Billy reaches Dresden, the reader trusts the man telling the story.

Structure carries grief better than adjectives do.

Almost all my novels open with action and then drop into a flashback. That’s a much milder version of the same move. A book that starts somewhere other than the beginning tells the reader the past matters and makes them want to go get it. Vonnegut pushed that idea as far as it could go, and it held.

There’s a second lesson in the repetition. “So it goes” turns every death in the book, from a bottle of champagne going flat to the destruction of a city, into the same three words. Read once, it sounds callous. Read 106 times, it becomes unbearable, because the flatness keeps refusing to give you the emotion the event deserves. The reader ends up supplying it. That’s compassion delivered through consequence, and it’s harder to write than any amount of grief stated outright.

What are Kurt Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing fiction?

They appear in the introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box, his 1999 collection of uncollected short fiction, and they’re short enough to remember.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she won’t feel the time was wasted. Give the reader at least one character to root for. Every character should want something, even if it’s only a glass of water. Every sentence must either reveal character or advance the action. Start as close to the end as possible. Be a sadist, and make awful things happen to your characters so the reader can see what they’re made of. Write to please just one person.

And the last one says to give readers as much information as possible as soon as possible.

The first seven hold up. The glass of water rule fixes more stalled scenes than anything else on the list, because a character who wants nothing can’t move a scene anywhere. A story that opens close to its end has no room for throat-clearing. A writer aiming at one reader keeps the voice from turning into a speech.

The eighth rule I can’t follow. Vonnegut said to heck with suspense. In his view readers should understand the situation so completely they could finish the story themselves if cockroaches ate the last few pages. I love twisty plots set up with small hints, and a twist needs the reader to be missing something.

For Vonnegut’s kind of book, where the ending is announced in the first chapter, the rule is right. For mine it isn’t. I think all writing rules are a bit much when people treat them as law, and Vonnegut’s own career is the proof, because he broke several of his rules whenever a book needed it.

Was Kurt Vonnegut a science fiction writer?

He wrote science fiction and hated the label.

His first novel, Player Piano, came out in 1952 and imagined a factory town run by machines, drawn from his years as a publicist at General Electric in Schenectady. The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five all use science fiction machinery: aliens, time travel, a substance called ice-nine that freezes the world’s water. Kilgore Trout, a hack science fiction writer whose stories are brilliant and whose career is a disaster, turns up in several of the novels.

Vonnegut fought the label because in the 1950s and 1960s it meant cheap paperbacks and no reviews. He wanted to be read as a novelist.

The irony is that the genre machinery is what let him write about Dresden, technology and the end of the world without preaching. An alien species with a strange view of time can say things about death that a sermon can’t. Science fiction writers have been teaching that lesson since Swift.

It puts Vonnegut alongside Orwell, whose Animal Farm and 1984 were two of the few books I loved when school forced them on me. Satire works when it’s wrapped in a story. My list of the greatest satires covers the films that learned the same trick.

How did Kurt Vonnegut earn a master’s degree for Cat’s Cradle?

Slowly, and twenty-five years late.

After the war he enrolled at the University of Chicago to study anthropology. His thesis, titled “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tasks,” was rejected. A later proposal, about the shapes stories take, was turned down too. He left without the degree and took the public relations job at General Electric, and through the 1950s he supported a family on short stories sold to magazines. In 1957 he opened a Saab dealership on Cape Cod. It went bankrupt before the year was out.

Cat’s Cradle came out in 1963. In 1971 the University of Chicago accepted it in place of a thesis and awarded him his master’s.

The rejected idea never went away, either. He kept lecturing on the shapes of stories for the rest of his life, drawing the rise and fall of a plot on a blackboard, and the talk outlived most of his late novels. A rejection is a verdict on one draft at one moment. It isn’t a verdict on the idea.

How did Kurt Vonnegut write his sentences?

One at a time, and slowly.

In Timequake he split writers into two kinds. Swoopers, he said, write a story quickly, any which way, and fix it afterward. Bashers go one sentence at a time and get each one exactly right before they move on to the next. His own prose reads like a basher’s. Short sentences, short paragraphs, plain words, and a rhythm that lands every joke on the last beat.

The plainness was deliberate and hard won. He’d trained as a chemist and a newspaperman, and he wrote as if every reader was smart and in a hurry. A sentence that needs rereading has failed.

His first rule, about the stranger’s time, sums up the whole style. Nothing gets on the page that the reader didn’t need.

What does not hold up in Kurt Vonnegut?

The late novels. After Breakfast of Champions the books get thinner and more self-referential, with the author appearing in his own fiction more and more, and the jokes start repeating. Timequake, published in 1997, is openly a salvage job built from a novel he couldn’t finish, and it reads that way.

The women are underwritten. The wives in his novels stay in the background, and the pattern gets harder to ignore the more of him you read in one stretch.

And the trademark tics wear thin in bulk. One “So it goes” chapter is devastating. Ten books of drawings, catchphrases and asides addressed to the reader start to feel like a man doing his act. Read Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, Mother Night and The Sirens of Titan, then the best of the stories, and let the rest wait.

How should you mark Kurt Vonnegut Day?

Observe a minute of silence at eleven in the morning, the way people did on Armistice Day before it became something else. Then read Slaughterhouse-Five, all the way through, and count the times “So it goes” stops you.

If you’re writing about a war, a death or any event too large to look at straight, try his method. Write the first chapter about why you can’t write the book. You’ll probably cut it later. It’ll still show you the frame. Veterans’ stories deserve that kind of patience, and I’ve written more about preserving them for Veterans Day. The rest of the calendar is on the literary holidays page. If you’ve got a story like that and can’t find the way in, my professional writing services exist for exactly that job.

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