Kurt Vonnegut

I got to see Kurt Vonnegut , one of my favorite authors, speak on Wednesday at Severance Hall. In high school I read Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five, and both of them made a big impact on me. I even read the fan fiction novel Venus on the Half-Shell by "Kilgore Trout". Vonnegut is a master at showing the absurdity of life.

Vonnegut's talk was really funny, both in the sense of traditional humor and black humor. One of the best parts of the talk was his illustration of typical plot lines on a graph with two axes: "Beginning and Entropy" and "Fortune and Illness". He showed the progression of typical categories of stories (e.g. Cinderella and "Boy Meets Girl"). Then he showed the progression of Hamlet, which was completely different from the typical stories and defied conventional wisdom about what makes a "good" story. Vonnegut's point was that we all pretend to know more about life than we actually know. We think we know what the good and bad events are, when we really don't know.

I want to read some more of Vonnegut's work now, particularly Cat's Cradle.