So it Goes pt. 2

Listen: Vonnegut placed the utmost value on the power of an idea. In his novel Breakfast of Champions, the main character, Kilgore Trout leaves the world with the epitaph “We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”Kilgore Trout, who appears in nearly all of Vonnegut's books, is essentially a surrogate character for Vonnegut to inject his own views. And this does not make itself anymore apparent than it does in that quote. Vonnegut trail-blazed the literary world at his time, he blew up the distinction between “science fiction” and “real literature” and showed how interesting, radical and bizarre ideas could be written skillfully and create an engrossing tale. And yet, they took these creative ideas and intertwined them with realities of humanity, creating perplexing tales that spoke not only of unknown worlds but combined them with human emotions that were real, human problems that were all too common, managing to surmise the issues of our society more accurately in these made-up worlds than anyone could ever dare to do in a book bound to the confines of possibility.

Vonnegut had a grasp of human neurosis that was impossibly spot-on. In each his characters, be it Eliot Rosewater from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse 5, or the aforementioned Kilgore Trout, who appeared in countless novels, Kurt brings to the table a new slice of humanity. The caricatures he drew in his protagonists, upon closer inspection, were all people we knew. And perhaps beyond that, they were all parts of our own being, flaws and insecurities we found in the world, and further, somewhere in ourselves. Because of this, Vonnegut knew how to make us feel more than any author could, relying not on melodramatic deaths and romantic relationships, but instead evoking a much less feigned, much more human kind of emotion. We could relate to and recognize the things in Vonnegut's writing.

Eventually, Vonnegut began a gradual retirement from fiction writing, publishing his last novel in 2001. However, his interest in humanity never ceased to grow. He was named the honorary president of the AHA (American Humanist Association), where he served until his death in 2007. He spoke of this prestigious role with the sentiment “I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead”. He passed away in 2007 after suffering severe head trauma, and left the world different than he found it. So it goes.