Life is crazy, do nothing about it: Finding sanity in Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdity
Bailee Isackson is a content writer and disc jockey for KCPR. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
“Life is crazy” is a sentence I’ve muttered to myself countless times, listening to the news or the things people and my friends do just to get by nowadays (entirely justified most of the time, too).
The mechanisms controlling the universe seem as wild as ever nowadays, and as easy as it is to give in to desperation entirely, there is always a shared meal with my friends or a stray cat (in this case Romeo, the stray who frequently visits my job) to bring me back to the present.
There is also the comfort in knowing that other people think this life is just as crazy as you do, and I find that comfort most often in Kurt Vonnegut’s books; blends of science fiction and absurdist philosophies wrapped in humorous bows that make it easy to find their takeaway and don’t require a huge commitment of time to finish.
If anyone’s life was crazy, it was almost definitely Vonnegut’s, the height of the trauma being that Vonnegut was a WW2 veteran who survived the bombing of Dresden as a POW, then being tasked with clearing bodies from the rubble of the bombing.
In living through these moments, the basis for common themes in his books is found. Skepticism about those in power, meaningless and absurd existences and hope in living life according to how you can.
“Nothing in this book is true.”
These are the first words you read when opening Cat’s Cradle by Vonnegut. Right under those words is a quote from The Books of Bokonon 1: 5 – “Live by the foma* that makes you brave and kind and healthy and happy,” with foma being defined by harmless truths.
Cat’s Cradle follows an author writing a book about the atomic bomb and is about how little we understand about the world, science and religion. Vonnegut emphasizes that our key mistake when navigating life is to look for meaning in what we do rather than assigning it.
Sirens of Titan depicts a rich mogul whose life trajectory is told to him (involving an incredibly convoluted interplanetary journey), and he does all that he can to avoid it, only to fall right into that destiny. It seems as if a predestined life relegates you to nothing but a cog in a machine, but choosing to navigate life as if you do have free will suddenly makes that notion easier to bear.
Slaughterhouse-Five comments on the atrocities of war and its aftereffects on those involved (through the Billy Pilgrim being “unstuck in time”) while taking a strong anti-war stance and discussing free will through life that has already happened.
All of these stories wrap themselves up in humor that seems so far-stretched from the normal that you begin to believe that it isn’t real, when it’s real enough for you to have these takeaways that are resonant with current events.
Disenchantment with life seems bountiful nowadays — a government that is stripping away the rights of its constituents, a climate crisis and ongoing human rights violations all across the globe, a volatile economy that feels cruel and inhumane to live in.
It is as if the voice of the younger generation is incessantly stifled, and the people in power benefit at our expense. The world is inherently absurd to live in, but you were also never meant to focus on the world’s problems and try to shoulder a burden akin to holding up the sky.
Connection to those around you and trudging through the absurdity while doing what you can and what is within your capacity are the key tenets to author Kurt Vonnegut’s outlook on life — finding meaning in the things you choose to do. Picking up one of his books always gives me a good laugh and helps me straighten the frame with which I view life, and I’m sure you’ll find something similar in them, too.
