The Artist

Kurt Vonnegut's Fantastic Faces

By Peter Reed

(reprinted from Volume 10, Issue No. 1 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, copyright 1999
Florida Altantic University, Boca Raton, Florida)

Most readers interested in the fantastic in

literature are familiar with Kurt Vonnegut,
particularly for his uses of science fiction.
Many of his early short stories were wholly in
the science fiction mode, and while its degree
has varied, science fiction has never lost its
place in his novels.

Vonnegut has typically used science fiction to

characterize the world and the nature of
existence as he experiences them. His chaotic
fictional universe abounds in wonder,
coincidence, randomness and irrationality.
Science fiction helps lend form to the
presentation of this world view without imposing
a falsifying causality upon it. In his vision,
the fantastic offers perception into the quotidian, rather than escape
from it. Science fiction is also technically useful, he has said, in
providing a distance perspective, "moving the camera out into space, "
as it were. I And unusually for this form, Vonnegut's science fiction
is frequently comic, not just in the "black humor" mode with which he
has been tagged so often, but in being simply funny.

Less generally familiar than the fiction, however, are Vonnegut's

creations in the graphic arts. These reveal the same postmodern
heterogeneity of mode and subject found in the fiction-realism and
abstraction, the fantastic and the mundane, sentiment and irony, humor
and melancholy.

Vonnegut's vision of the fantastic in daily life surely must have been
influenced by some of the extraordinary events that occurred while he
was still a young man, such as the suicide of his mother on Mother's
Day 1944 while he was home on leave; his surviving as a prisoner of war
the Allied firebombing that destroyed Dresden; the death of his sister
Alice from cancer within hours of her husband's death in a train crash.
His fiction struggles to cope with a world of tragi-comic disparities,
a universe that defies causality, whose absurdity lends the fantastic
equal plausibility with the mundane. Much the same outlook pervades the
graphic artworks that have increasingly occupied Vonnegut in recent
years.

The drawing of the locket bearing the "Serenity Prayer" slung between
Montana Wildhack's breasts in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is the first
appearance of artwork in one of Vonnegut's novels.' The simple felt-tip
pen drawings in Breakfast of Champions (1973), however, were what first
called general attention to Vonnegut as a graphic artist. They came as
a surprise at the time, first as being an unusual addition to a novel,
but also for their frank, often naive and simply funny qualities. Most
startling-and to some at the time, offensive-were the depictions of an
asshole and "a wide-open beaver. " But the drawings earn their place in
the novel, and must be seen as integral to it. Some make graphic the
ludicrous disparities that often exist between words as signifiers and
what it is they signify. Others simply function as embellishments or
even punch lines of jokes. In their almost child-like simplicity of
line they have a certain ironic propriety in a novel where the central
event is an arts fair. Above all, they are part of-and draw attention
to-the seemingly naive, even adolescent, perspective by which Vonnegut
deconstructs and demystifies American culture and society in this
novel.

Vonnegut continued drawing, frequently making doodles with a felt-tip

pen on pages of discarded manuscript. From these he evolved "felt tip
calligraphs," abstract faces drawn with brightly colored soft felt tip
pens.' He was invited to enter a show where artwork by writers,
including Norman Mailer and Tennessee Williams (both accomplished
painters) were exhibited. He said, "I've drawn all my life, on the
edges of manuscripts and things like that. But I started thinking,
'This is the amateur approach.' ...So I decided to take myself
seriously as an artist... My father was an artist, my grandfather was
an artist, and I have three children who are accomplished artists."

More formalized drawings, similar in style but composed to a much

larger scale on parchment, followed. Some thirty of these were
exhibited in a one-man show at the Margo Fiden Gallery in Greenwich
Village, opening on October 15, 1983. Vonnegut also experimented with
smaller etchings, whose subjects were often self portraits, usually
profiles with bushy hair and drooping cigarette, roughly similar to the
one that appears at the end of Breakfast of Champions.

The medium used in more recent graphics had its origin in a request by
an old friend from Vonnegut's days as a PR writer at General Electric
to assist in the dedication in 1993 of a new college library. Ollie
Lyon, once a fellow "flack" at G.E., had gone on to reside in
Lexington, Kentucky, and become chair of the Development Council for
Midway College. He invited Vonnegut to perform one of his "How to
Succeed in a Job Like Mine" evenings as a fund-raiser for the new
library. Vonnegut additionally created one of his self-portraits for a
poster advertising the event. Another friend of Ollie Lyon, the
bookseller John Dinsmore, provided the connection with Lexington artist
Joe Petro III, who silk screened Vonnegut's graphic for the poster.
Since then, Vonnegut and Petro have continued their collaboration, with
Vonnegut producing images on large sheets of acetate, which Petro then
silk screens.'
 Copyright 2002 Jill Krementz.

From that beginning, the number of graphics in the Vonnegut catalogue

has grown steadily. Over the years Vonnegut had come to speak of
finding writing more onerous. Galapagos (1985) presented scientific as
well as literary challenges, and his labors with his most recent-and he
says, final novel Timequake (1997), extended for several years.
Painting, on the other hand, he found fun. As Vonnegut describes it,
writing is labor, and the writer's reward arrives when he or she hands
the manuscript to the editor and says, "It's yours. " The painter, he
says, "gets his rocks off while actually doing the painting. The act
itself is agreeable."' After a career as a writer extending very nearly
half a century, such a release is surely deserved.

Among the earlier products of the alliance with Petro were those with a
clear ancestry in the Breakfast of Champions illustrations. There was
the self portrait, reproduced with minor variations and several color
combinations. The notorious signature rectum from the novel reappears
as "Sphincter," also in a range of colors. "One Eyed Jack" is a
derivation of the profile, evidently evolved from the self portrait.
One of several similar graphics, it dates back to the time of the Margo
Fiden Gallery exhibition.

With its elaborately overlapping curlicues around the eyes, it precedes

a series of increasingly fantastic faces. Vonnegut's interest in making
abstractions of faces is long-standing: "The human face is the most
interesting of all forms. So I've just made abstracts, of all these
faces. Because that's how we go through life, reading faces very
quickly" (Horizon 5). "One-Eyed Jack" has been expressed in varying
color combinations. An early version was in orange and green, a
combination that Vonnegut seems to like but which Petro rejects because
"the colors don't play off each other well. 117 There were three
editions, known by their dominant background color as the Red, Cerulean
Blue and Dark Gray Editions. They were screened on 30 x 22 inches
paper, roughly the size of most of the graphics, all signed in pencil
by Vonnegut.

More fantastic is "Egyptian Architect" of 1993. The interest in coils

at eyes and nostrils, seen in various self portraits and in "One-Eyed
Jack, " continues. Not evident in earlier work are the interest in
background and depth and the play with triangles, pyramids and things
Egyptian, which are to reoccur elsewhere. The minimal use of color
emphasizes whiteness and negative space, pushing the two faces right up
into the framing of the border and elongating the distance to the
pyramid in the background. The pyramid is black and pale gold, the
background sky is aqua, and the seven colored panels in the eye of the
left-hand figure are alternating pale gold and aqua. Other triangles
are formed between the two heads and between the right-hand head and
the border. As in some of Vonnegut's earlier drawings, what appear to
be two faces may be one plus its reflection. (The singular noun of the
title adds credence to this reading.) The vertical line dissecting the
right-hand face intersects the flat line of the horizon, a line that
continues in the straight mouth of that face. There is consequently a
counter-pointing of the curling and the straight, another recurrent
characteristic in Vonnegut's graphics. The expressions on the faces are
at once arresting and amusing. The left-hand profile wears a look
perhaps suggestive of intellectual self-satisfaction, while the full
face looks questioning and startled.

"Cheops" (1994) continues the Egyptian motif, though Vonnegut insists

that he does not work with a theme in mind and that titles are assigned
later. Both paintings actually have a science fiction feel to them as
well, of alien beings and vast spaces. "Cheops" would appear to be one
of those paintings that Vonnegut says he begins simply with
intersecting lines (Vonnegut 10/18/95). This time there are two lines
dissecting the image vertically and two running horizontally. The
horizontal lines produce startling affects, among them the impression
of two horizons. Above the upper horizontal a dramatic face looms
against the sky like a huge supernatural presence, its eyes fiercely
commanding. The abstraction of the face seems to stand in contrast to
the solidity of the pyramids while repeating their triangles. The
downward pointing pyramid, hovering over two pyramids standing on the
second, lower horizon, adds to the affect of some vast desert mirage.
The two solid blocks of color at the bottom, yellow and red, lend a
solidity that invites the eye into the deep blank spaces above. But
"Cheops" should not be viewed too literally, combining as it does
aspects of the representational and the abstract in one compelling
postmodern image. "Cheops" rewards "count the triangles" even more than
does "Egyptian Architect." The geometric qualities of both paintings
might remind the viewer of Vonnegut's heritage as the son and grandson
of architects.

"Astronomy" (1996) seems both whimsical and compelling. The bold blue
eye, heavily underlined with dark red eye bags, and the fixated
expression created by the set of jaw and mouth, command attention. The
astronomer's unblinking gaze, riveted on the star, is emphasized by the
connecting line. The inner square around the face-suggesting a window,
perhaps creates a sense of enclosure, like a double frame. Also
remarkable is the appearance that the whole inner drawing is one
continuous line. The simple device of a double line at the bottom of
the frame (filled-in in red) can appear to move the subject back and
leads to the impression of the star's being not just in front of the
face, but distant at an angle, seen through the window behind. Thus
"Astronomy" is all flat surface, or a perspective piece with depth, as
you wish. Something in that expression, above all, remains to arrest
our attention.

Only in Vonnegut's more recent graphics do allusions to his own fiction

occur. The first to do so was "Absolut Vonnegut", created in 1995 as
one of a series of Absolut Vodka advertisements by renowned American
artists. It features the familiar self-portrait profile, an open window
in the background, and a vodka bottle on a table in the foreground. The
wooden table is heavily grained, an exercise Vonnegut enjoys and which
he has employed in several pieces. The hands playing with a loop of
string and the cat's head stopper to the bottle make obvious allusion
to his novel Cat's Cradle (1962). In the novel the cat's cradle becomes
the symbol for traditional explanations that really do not explain-the
child looks at the string configuration that is supposed to represent a
cat's cradle and sees "No damn cat. No damn cradle. " The novel mocks
religions, political doctrines and various national and societal
affiliations whose claims to explain and give meaning to existence are
as illusory as the string figure.

In "Absolut Vonnegut" the reference to his fiction is allusive. Earlier

he had said, "I don't want to draw on my reputation as a writer by
putting a lot of quotes from my works into my drawings or by
illustrating my books. They have absolutely nothing to do with my
books, and I'm proud that they don't" (Horizon 5). One graphic that
overtly refers to his fiction is "Trout in Cohoes". This depicts the
science fiction story teller who is such a favorite character to
Vonnegut aficionados. Kilgore Trout has been seen as Vonnegut's alter
ego, the embodiment perhaps of his worst fears of what he might have
become in those early years when he was dismissed as a science fiction
writer and not re-viewed. Trout is a parody of the science fiction
writer who spins out stories at an astonishing rate with dazzling
imagination, while fame and fortune continue to elude him. He figures
most prominently in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Breakfast of
Champions, and Timequake. The latter, Vonnegut's most recent and
apparently his last novel, gives Trout the central role, and features
this illustration as its frontispiece. "Trout" has been screened by
Petro in an edition of 77 on 22',x3O,' White Rives BFK paper, signed
and numbered "by Kurt Vonnegut and Kilgore Trout." There is also an
edition of 18 in which the cage appears in gold.

Trout appears as unkempt and unshaven as one would expect from his
portrayals in the novels. The surprise is his eleven eyes. Looked at
they tend to give the impression of a vibrating head, which would
certainly reflect Trout's constantly agitated state of mind. Perhaps
they express Trout's fractured vision, his way of seeing beyond the
surface of things, his way of looking at the world-or worlds-with a
kind of multiple vision. "Cohoes" refers to the fact that in Breakfast
of Champions, and again in Galapagos, Trout is said to live in a
basement apartment there. The birdcage in the background is the home of
Trout's parakeet, Bill. In Breakfast Trout offers Bill three wishes and
the chance for freedom. The wise bird returns to his cage, which Trout
calls the smartest choice of all because then Bill will always have
something left to wish for. As in several other graphics, Vonnegut lets
the image spill over the heavily drawn frame. The affect is to call
attention to the non-representational nature of the art, or to
emphasize its artifice, much like the self-reflexivity in Vonnegut's
fiction. The subject's protruding over the frame enhances the sense of
depth, also felt in the way the left hand wall angles behind the
border, as if Trout were looking out of a framing window. The mouse
hole in the skirting seems a characteristically whimsical touch. When
"Trout in Cohoes" was exhibited as a new acquisition at the University
of Kentucky, David Minton, reviewer for the Lexington Sunday Herald
Leader wrote, "The portrait of Kilgore Trout possesses all ' the clear
and open wit and humor (black humor admittedly) one finds in his
novels...

When an author or visual artist can create such an impression in his

work he is doing something right.(8)

A slightly different version of Trout's portrait was commissioned by

the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997. It shows him wearing
a purple heart and, with its more luxuriant hair, bears a passing
resemblance to a self-portrait.

Also in 1997, Bill's cage itself became the subject in four editions of
"Gilded Cage." The four have different size cages in gold against gray
and black backgrounds, all of these signed and with a hand-drawn
profile in the bottom right corner. (Fig. 7) Apart from the story of
Bill's three wishes, the birdcage has other significance in Vonnegut's
writing. His early (1961) collection of short stories was called Canary
in a Cathouse. He also writes (notably in Wampeters, Foma and
Granfalloons, 1965) of the artist's being the equivalent in society of
the canary carried into the coal mine, whose death is the warning of
lethal gases. "Nov. 11, 1918" obviously alludes to the day the First
World War ended. November 11 is also the date of Vonnegut's birthday,
although his year was 1922. He quite often makes reference in his
writing and speeches to this date, and to the fact that for many years
it was commemorated as Armistice Day, with a minute's silence at the
eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the very time
that the armistice was signed. The painting depicts a giant hand on a
pedestal, holding a globe. Since the hand is obviously a sculpture or
monument, this makes another instance of art representing art, a
similar case of self-reflexivity to that often found in the fiction.
With its red nails and its red palm, the hand might be seen to imply a
world about to be consumed by some dreadful maw. But the soft plumpness
of the hand seems comforting, suggesting the healing embrace of peace.
Significantly, Vonnegut originally titled this composition "Peace
Monument. " The darkened segment of the globe presumably represents the
war-ravaged Europe. This would appear to be one graphic where theme was
important to Vonnegut, and of course pacifism has been a cause
consistently advocated in his writing. The fictional planet
Tralfamadore features prominently in the novels The Sirens of Titan
(1959) and Slaughterhouse-Five. Its inhabitants are rendered
differently, in the earlier novel being robots resembling big
tangerines with spindly legs and suction-cup feet, and in the latter
little green folks who look like plumbers friends topped by a small
hand with an eye in the palm. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the
Tralfamadorians take Billy Pilgrim to live in a zoo-like geodesic dome
on their planet. They kidnap the B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack to be
his mate. Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, so that they see past
and future as well as the now. Perhaps that explains the facial
expressions in Vonnegut's two graphics, "Tralfamadore #1" and
"Tralfamadore #2!"

The two "Tralfamadores" are similar, the pairs of figures in each much
alike and in the same stances relative to each other. The two figures
could be of different species or genders. The one on the left has a
cleanly geometric head, and appears to have a small round body and
tripod legs, like Salo, the Tralfamadorian robot in The Sirens of
Titan. The figure on the right has the appearance of a nose and hair,
and the comically terrified eyes that suggest a human abductee. In each
the scrutinizing stare of the left-hand figure is answered by the "What
next?" expression of the figure on the right. Another reading might be
that the two figures represent an admiring Billy Pilgrim and a
startled, newly arrived Montana Wildhack. In both versions there are
geometric designs in the lower right corner. In #2 these could
represent the geodesic dome where Billy and Montana are held on
Tralfamadore. Regardless of how these two graphics are interpreted,
they are quite compelling, with their startling juxtapositions of
expression, their humor, and their attractive line and balance.

"Prozac" features five three-armed objects, seemingly floating one

ahead of the other. The perspective created by their receding into the
distance is emphasized by the floor or ground below, and by the two
tiny birds in the upper right corner. The rectangles or cubes at the
end of each arm of these geometric figures have one half colored
yellow, the other left white. Alternate panels of the surface below are
blue. Perhaps the impression of floating in space is a humorous
allusion to the lifted spirits Prozac induces. Or perhaps the figures
suggest a model of the molecular structure of the drug. More certainly,
the picture seems to imply Vonnegut's poking fun at a society on
Prozac. Like Nov. 11, 1918, the two "Tralfamadores," and "Astronomy,"
"Prozac" was silk screened in 1996.

By 1998, Vonnegut and Petro were able to offer a catalogue of some

fifty works. The selection offered here, while illustrative, cannot
capture the full range of style and subject presented by the whole
collection. Certain characteristics remain constant in the majority of
these graphics, however, regardless of subject. Largely because of how
they are composed with India ink on sheets of acetate they are
dominated by black line. Small areas are then filled in with color,
often in differing combinations at the silk screening stage. The effect
is of cleanness of line, often of geometric pattern, and of space.
Vonnegut frequently uses "negative space," heightened by small areas of
color that increase attention to the blank spaces. Sometimes the image
is silk screened onto gray stock with the white areas painted. Both
Vonnegut and Petro like to use white as a color, and this technique
also intensifies the sense of space given by the white areas (Petro
10/16/95).

Vonnegut enjoys the work of Paul Klee and Georges Braque, calling the
latter "a special hero," and is intrigued by what the cubists did in
"breaking up the chaotic into geometric forms, pleasing shapes"
(Vonnegut 10/18/95). New York artist and formerly cartoonist Saul
Steinberg is a friend. Perhaps one can find little reminders of these
men's works, and that of others, in Vonnegut's paintings: a touch of
Miro in the "Tralfamadores," for example, or of Calder in "Prozac."
Like his architect father and grandfather, these artists have been part
of the culture he has lived in, and their influence is inevitable. For
Vonnegut there is no sense in avoiding such models if he finds
something in them to try. "The notion that someone can make a big
discovery and then nobody can make use of it would be very poor
science," he says, alluding, as he often does, to his scientific
training. He can look at a feature of pictures by Paul Klee and say I
can do that sort of thing" (Vonnegut 10/18/95). But his art can hardly
be called derivative. There is a consistent individual style that
becomes as recognizable as his pros6. The sense of humor, of satiric
wit, so characteristic of his fiction, is usually evident in the
graphics, too. It is the element of enjoyment in their creation that
Vonnegut invariably emphasizes when speaking of his graphics.

Just as Vonnegut's prose style has often been characterized as honed-

down, so too there is a spareness to his graphics. That is the chief
distinction between the vigorously colored felt-tip calligraphy of the
early 1980s and the later silk screened art. And in both, the relative
simplicity of expression counterpoints the generosity of imagination
and vision, making the work more compelling. Vonnegut's concise verbal
pronouncements often deflate those myths habitually proffered as giving
meaning to daily existence. Yet at the same time his ranging
imagination captures the fantastic that permeates the mundane, the fact
stranger than fiction that makes daily life forever beyond
rationalization. That sense of the fantastic, of the chaotic that fills
life with surprises both painful and comic, finds expression in his
graphic art as it does in his fiction.

Notes

1. Mantell, Harold, producer and director. Kurt Vonnegut: A Self-Portrait Princeton,

N.J.: Films for the Humanities, 1976.
2. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1969,
199.
3. Two doodles on manuscript and one felt-tip calligraph are reproduced in Peter
Reed, "Kurt Vonnegut," Dictionary of Literary Biography: Documentary Series,
Volume 3. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark/Gale Research, 1983. 321-376.
4. Anon. art review, Horizon October 10, 1980
5. An account of Lyon's role in introducing Vonnegut and Petro, of their working
 relationship, and description of some of the earlier artwork, appear in the 1993
Vonnegut interview and "The Graphics of Kurt Vonnegut" in Peter Reed and Marc
Leeds, The Vonnegut Chronicles. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. 35-44, 205-
222. Peter Reed
6. Telephone interview of Kurt Vonnegut by Peter Reed, October 18, 1995.
7. Telephone interview with Joe Petro III by Peter Reed, October 16, 1995.

Works Cited

Anon. Art Review. Horizon. October 10, 1980, 5.

Mantell, Harold, Producer and Director Kurt Vonnegut.- A Self-Portrait.
Princeton: NJ: Films for the Humanities, 1976.
Reed, Peter. "Kurt Vonnegut." Dictionary of Literary Biography: Documentary
Series. Vol. 3. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark/Gale Research, 1983.
Reed, Peter, and Marc Leeds. "The Graphics of Kurt Vonnegut." The Vonnegut
Chronicles. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. 205-222.
Telephone Interview of Kurt Vonnegut, October 18, 1995.
Telephone Interview with Joe Petro III, October 16, 1995.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1969.

Kilgore Trout: Kurt Vonnegut's Alter Ego

Stephanie E. Bonner

In 1922, two residents of Indianapolis, Indiana had a son

who would later become one of the premiere writers in 20th
century American literature. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born to Edith
and Kurt Sr. on November 11, 1922. He graduated from Shortridge
High School in 1940, attended Cornell University for a year, then
joined the army. He fought in World War II and was captured by
the Germans in 1944. As a Prisoner of War, he lived through the
firebombing of Dresden, an event which inspired his acclaimed
novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. After he returned from Europe in
April of 1945, he married Jane Marie Cox and spent several years
studying at the University of Chicago and working as a reporter
for the Chicago City News Bureau. In 1947, he went to work at
General Electric Corporation as a research laboratory publicist.
He worked there for 3 years until he left to become a full time
writer in 1950. In the past 47 years, he has become one of the
most acclaimed writers of our time.
Kurt Vonnegut's first novel was entitled Player Piano and
was published in 1952. Since then, he has written over a dozen
other novels, collections of short stories, a collection of
essays and interviews, and a play, Happy Birthday Wanda June. He
spent 1965 in residence at the University of Iowa Writer's
Workshop and taught writing at Harvard in 1970. He also was
awarded a M.A. degree from the University of Chicago. Vonnegut
currently appears on the Barnes and Noble Booksellers bag and is
featured on a Visa commercial in which he buys a copy of one of
his own books.
If one looks through Vonnegut's works, one will find many
occurrences of reoccurring characters, settings, and themes.
Perhaps one of the most frequently occurring characters is
Kilgore Trout, an obscure science-fiction writer with a small but
devoted following of readers. Though the details of Trout's life
change from book to book, in all of the books he has written
a huge number of short stories and novels, but has had trouble
getting reputable publisher to print them. However, there are
many similarities between Vonnegut and Trout. The reoccurring
character Kilgore Trout mirrors Vonnegut himself through the
similarities in their lives, writings, and themes.
The life of Kilgore Trout changes from book to book. In
Jailbird, he was serving a life sentence in prison (Vonnegut 21)
In Breakfast of Champions, he lives alone with a parakeet named
Bill (Vonnegut 18), while in Galapagos, he had a wife and a son
(Vonnegut 42). In some books, like Breakfast of Champions and God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, he rise into fame by the end, but in
others, he dies an unknown. However, a few factors remain the
same in all of the books. He always has written a phenomenally
large number of works, but his works aren't accepted by normal
publishers. Thus, while Trout labors as some sort of manual
worker to earn money, his stories are printed as filler in
pornographic magazines, though the stories themselves are far
from obscene. By the time of the action in Breakfast of
Champions, Trout had written 117 novels and 2000 short stories,
yet still worked as "an installer of aluminum combination storm
windows and screens" (Vonnegut 18)
Though in some ways, the life of Kurt Vonnegut is very
different from that of Kilgore Trout, there are some amazing
parallels. Though Vonnegut has not written nearly as many works
as Trout, both have written a large number of stories, and most
of them are science fiction. Near the end of his life in his
Breakfast of Champions persona, Trout had become a famous and
acclaimed person who had won a Nobel Prize and had become so
respectable that even his jokes were taken seriously and
incorporated into the language (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
25). When Vonnegut began publishing works, though respectable
publishers did accept them, they were printed as paperback
originals, "the form that pulp fiction done by hack writers often
takes" (Mustazza xxii). It wasn't until the mid '60's that he
began to take his place in the literary world (Mustazza xxii).
Though Trout started at a more extreme low and rose to a more
extreme high, Trout's rise to fame mirrored that of Vonnegut.
Similarities between Vonnegut and Trout appear in the
storyline of their writings as well. Several stories Vonnegut
attributes to Kilgore Trout appear someplace else written by
Vonnegut himself. Perhaps the best example of this is the Trout
story called "2BRO2B." In "2BRO2B," which appears in God Bless
You, Mr. Rosewater, Trout created a world where almost all the
work was done by machines, and humans could only get work if they
had several Ph.D.'s. (20) This world is remarkably similar to the
one where Vonnegut set Player Piano, his first novel. The action
in Player Piano takes place on a world where almost everything is
done by machine, and the machines themselves "are no longer
controlled by men but by other machines" (Broer 18).
The people in "2BRO2B" are so hopeless, and the world is so
overpopulated, that the government has set up a "purple-roofed
Ethical Suicide Parlor at every major intersection, right next
door to an orange-roofed Howard Johnson's" (Vonnegut, God Bless
You, Mr. Rosewater 20). The visitors to the Suicide Parlor die
painlessly and patriotically, and even get a free last meal at
the Howard Johnson's next door (21). In Vonnegut's short story
"Welcome to the Monkey House" the story opens in an Ethical
Suicide Parlor almost identical to the ones described in
"2BRO2B," right down to the purple roof and the Howard Johnson's
next door (Welcome to the Monkey House 32) By actually writing
stories that he had earlier attributed to Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut
emphasizes the similarities between the two.
In Kurt Vonnegut's works, fragments of short stories or
novels attributed to Kilgore Trout often appear. As Marek Vit
says, "the themes of these fragments are often very similar to
the themes of Kurt Vonnegut's novels." One of the main themes the
two share is dehumanization. For example, Player Piano deals with
a world where almost everything is done by machines, causing most
humans to become useless and hopeless. Several Kilgore Trout
stories related in the Kurt Vonnegut novel Breakfast of Champions
share this theme. One, appearing on page 73, is set on the
Hawaiian Islands:

"Every bit of land on the islands was owned by only

about forty people, and, in the story, Trout had those
people decide to exercise their property rights to the full.
They put no trespassing signs on everything."
"This created terrible problems fro the million other
people on the islands. The law of gravity required that they
stick somewhere on the surface. Either that, or they could
go out into the water and bob offshore."

Eventually, someone hits on the idea of giving everyone

a helium balloon so they can hover over the islands without
actually touching the ground. However, the residents of the
island are dehumanized by money and property rights to the point
where they can no longer even walk on the ground.
Individuality is another theme that both Trout and Vonnegut
use. In Breakfast of Champions, there is a character named Rabo
Karabekian. Rabo Karabekian is an abstract expressionist painter
who's paintings consist of canvases covered in one shade of paint
with stripes of colored tape on it. When defending his works, he
describes the stripes of tape thus:

"It is the immaterial core...the 'I am' to which all

messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us...
It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous
adventure may befall us... Our awareness is all that is
alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything about us is
dead machinery." (221)

In this, Vonnegut states that our awareness is what makes

us human and makes us individuals (Broer 105). In the same book,
Vonnegut relates another Kilgore Trout story, entitled "Now It
Can Be Told." The story is formatted as an open letter from the
Creator of the Universe to a Creature he had made as an
experiment in Life. In the story, this creature was the only
actual living being on earth, and everyone else were merely
robots programed so that the Creator could see how the Creature
would react to different things. The Creator was continually
being surprised by the way the Creature reacted to things.
Because the Creature had free will, the Creator couldn't predict
what it would do (173-175). The entire Trout story dealt with
what makes one a human, an individual. Thus, like the Rabo
Karabekian's speech written by Vonnegut, the Kilgore Trout story
deals with individuality.
Marek Vit calls Trout "a parody of Kurt Vonnegut himself."
James Lundquist says that he is Vonnegut's "alter ego" (41).
Lawrence Broer dubs Trout Vonnegut's "fictional counterpart"
(102). The basic life of Kilgore Trout reflects Vonnegut's, and
the two share the some of the same writings. The basic themes of
both Kurt Vonnegut's actual works and the ones he attributes to
Trout are the same. Kilgore Trout, in many ways, truly is the
parody, the alter ego, the fictional counterpart, of Kurt
Vonnegut himself.
References:

Broer, Lawrence R. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of

Kurt Vonnegut. Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama
Press, 1989.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, and John Somer. The Vonnegut Statement. New

York, New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1973.

Lundquist, James. Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Frederick Ungar

Publishing Co, 1977.

Mustazza, Leonard. The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut.

Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Vit, Marek. "Kurt Vonnegut." Online. URL:

"http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/vonn.html" (May 10, 1997.)

Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. New York, New York: Dell

Publishing, 1952.

Vonnegut, Kurt. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. New York, New York:
Dell Publishing, 1965.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Welcome to the Monkey House. New York, New York:
Dell Publishing, 1968.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York, New York: Dell

Publishing, 1969.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York, New York: Dell

Publishing, 1973.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Jailbird. New York, New York: Delacorte Press/

Seymour Lawrence, 1979.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Galapagos. New York, New York: Delacorte Press/

Seymour Lawrence, 1985.