Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922-April 11, 2007)

Today, the world lost a wonderful human being.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., author of such great postmodern works as God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions; Slaughterhouse-Five; and his most recent collection of essays, A Man Without a Country, died today of brain injuries caused by a fall he suffered a few weeks ago. He was 84 years old.

Now, some of you may have acquainted yourselves with Kurt through your high school years with Cat's Cradle. I discovered him through Breakfast of Champions, and it changed the way I looked at modern literature. It was a book that made me laugh and most importantly, made me think.

Vonnegut, arguably the 20th century's Mark Twain, was a brilliant satirist that discussed the themes of consumerism, metaphysical questions, pollution, politics, and the overall absurdity of American life and the "American Dream." His works and characters (such as Eliot Rosewater, Kilgore Trout, Dwayne Hoover and Malachi Constant) still resonate with us today. Vonnegut provided a double-edged approach to the idiosyncrasies of American culture and society: on the one hand, he presented the harsh, cynical view of society, but at the same time fostered a great sense of humanism and the belief in the strength of humans in the struggle to protect their world from destruction and dehumanization.

To me, and to many others, Vonnegut was a model, not only as a writer and a social critic, but as a human being. We may never see another author like him again, but we can only hope that his works will continue to inspire scholars and everyday people alike, and look beyond the normal conventions of everyday American life.

Thanks for everything, Kurt. We'll miss you.

An afterthought from Slaughterhouse-Five:

"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, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. 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."