I was recently reading another novel by Vonnegut by the name of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. While reading, I came across two passages which reminded me of the first discussion we had in class when we talked about Kurt Vonnegut as a writer and his life story. It had been mentioned that his mother had committed suicide when he was young, and for some reason that stuck with me. When I read the first passages, I immediately thought of Vonnegut.
The passages are talking about a man named Fred Rosewater whose father committed suicide when Fred was just a boy, something Fred was unfortunately a witness to. It reads: "Sons of suicides seldom do well. Characteristically, they find life lacking a certain zing. They tend to feel more rootless than most, even in a notoriously rootless nation. They are squeamishly incurious about the past and numbly certain about the future to this grisly extent: they suspect that they, too, will probably kill themselves. " (144) The passage goes on to describe how Fred's father had died and all his son had witnessed. A passage from further into the book says: "Sons of suicides often think of killing themselves at the end of the day, when their blood sugar is low. And so it was with Fred Rosewater when he came home from work." (196)
This all got me wondering about Vonnegut himself, being the "son of a suicide." I found reading about this character extremely sad and I wondered whether these passages contained some bit of autobiographical truth, so I did some research. In an article published after the author's death in 2007, I found out that in 1984, Vonnegut tried to take his own life with sleeping pills and alcohol.
I thought this was so sad thinking about the underlying message of hope in Slaughterhouse Five. I think the truth in these passages also highlights the fact that there must be more truth in his other work. This truth, I think, makes some of the horrors we are reading about in Slaughterhouse Five even more real to me, and even harder to read. It also amazes me that a man with such a background could write a book like Slaughterhouse Five with such a hopeful undertone of appreciation of beauty and positivity, then go home and contemplate suicide. It makes it all so much more tragic.
Great post, Lauren. You've touched on the beauty and the tragedy of good writing here. A lot of the best writing that I've ever read has seemed like an x-ray of the writer's soul. Your insight and the connections that you made here were very, very interesting.
ReplyDeleteThank you. I'm really interested in seeing how works of literature relate to the lives of their authors. I know that when I write, my life definitely shows through whatever I write. It's interesting to see how other authors put pieces of themselves into their texts.
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