The Functions Of Art In Kurt Vonnegut's Novels

Kurt Vonnegut is an influential novelist, satirist, and dramatist, and black humorist in American literary field and has been lauded as one of American most respected novelists due to his active artistic interaction with American life. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 11, 1922 and was the son of a successful architect. After attending Cornell University where he majored in chemistry and biology, he was enlisted in the United States Army, serving in the Second World War and eventually being taken prisoner by the German Army. Held as part of a captive labor force in Dresden, he experienced the Allied firebombing of the city on February 13, 1945. Like the protagonist in Slaughterhouse-Five, he survived the bombing in an underground meat locker, only to be put to work by the Germans extracting corpses from the city's ruins. Upon his return home in 1945, he studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and subsequently moved to Schenectady, New York, to work as a publicist for the General Electric Corporation. During that period, he also began submitting short stories to various journals, and in 1951 he resigned his position at the General Electric to devote his time solely to writing. In 1997, with the publication of Timequake, he professed his fatigue with the novel form and declared it to be his farewell novel. Therefore, during the creating career lasting about half a century, he has created fourteen novels, two collections of short stories and three volumes of non-fictional writings. Among them his most known works are The Sirens of Titan (1959), Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).Until now, much scholarly work abroad has been done on Vonnegut's black humor, apocalyptic satire and his severely challenged but never comprising humanism, labeling him as a black humorist and science fiction writer. Lately, new insights have been obtained such as Broer's psychological reading and Kevin Boon's application of chaos theory. Broer has pursued the process of Vonnegut regaining his sanity from the severe psychological struggle to finding out its resolution in his fifty-year creatingcareer. And in light of chaos theory Boon explains how both free will and determinism can exist without the apparent contradiction. While at home, there is indeed some meaningful research work. The Chinese scholars have not only studied Vonnegut's postmodernist outlooks and New Historical tendency through the combination of historical analysis and text analysis as well as the interaction between the fictional and real worlds in his novels from the angle of literary self-consciousness, but also inquired the postmodernist features of his works in structure, narration and ideas and his humanism through his deep thinking about man's survival. So their combined efforts have made a lot of contribution to bettering Chinese readers' understanding about Vonnegut's works. Nevertheless, on the whole, the Vonnegut studies at home still need to get both increased in quantity and improved in depth and breadth. Moreover, the studies, at home and abroad, have almost concentrated on Vonnegut's humanism and his artistic features while with little attention on his artistic views. Few seem to have realized his affinity with art. As a matter of fact, art has always constituted the center of Vonnegut's novels because due to the influence of his family tradition the functions of art are a constant concern in his exploration of the absurd and futile world. Moreover, Vonnegut himself also frequently comments on art in his own voice or through his characters. For instance, art might be "lies", "harmless truth"; artists may be called "drugs salesman". Therefore, this thesis wants to approach Vonnegut from the viewpoint of his affinity with art to explore the functions of art in his novels through analyzing his three novels at different creating stages in which art appears as a thematic concern and by putting him against the background of postindustrial society in the hope of introducing a fresh perspective for the better understanding of his novels and adding a little to a more comprehensive assessment of Vonnegut in the future, although it is rather hard to evaluate a living writer.This thesis consists of four parts.In the introduction the thesis first briefly introduces how Vonnegut's significant position in literary field is gradually established, and then reviews in detail thescholarly work about Kurt Vonnegut which has been done abroad and at home, and finds out that much ink has been spent on Vonnegut's fatalism, satire, black humor and humanism while with little on his affinity with art. Next the thesis goes over the influence given by the Vonnegut family tradition on him to point out that actually art and artistic imagination have always constituted the center of Vonnegut's novels. And finally, the thesis brings out its points of view.Chapter I discusses the first function of art in Kurt Vonnegut's novels through focusing on Cat's Cradle that with the help of art man can transcend the void and create his own meaning and bring chaos to order in a world without God. This chapter begins with the importance of meaning to man and the necessity of create meaning under the postmodern cultural condition to find out Vonnegut's understanding about what art is. And then it, under the guide of such understanding, concentrates on analyzing the cat's cradle, the central symbol in Cat's Cradle, to illustrate how art can bring meaning to man in a world bereft of God.Chapter II talks about the therapeutic function of art. Since Vonnegut himself was subject to long periods of depression and psychological trauma, he was very interested in the comforting power of art. Vonnegut sensitively perceives that fiction, one form of art, may function as a life-sustaining force for the psychologically wounded, stimulating courage to survive the brutal reality. Therefore this chapter on one hand discloses how Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five survives his brutal reality with the help of Tralfamadorianism, his self-made fiction, and on the other hand talks about how Vonnegut relieves himself from the shadow of the Dresden bombing through the creation of Billy Pilgrim, his character, thus gaining his own rebirth.Chapter III deals with the function of art as the alarming system which is fulfilled by the artists. Vonnegut puts out his canary-in-coal-mine theory of the arts which argues that the artists are useful to society because they are supersensitive, and they can keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there. So this chapter studies Timequake, Vonnegut's farewellnovel, from the respects of menaces to art brought by science and technology and the awkward situation of artists and American Academy of Arts and Letters to see how Vonnegut warns the people against the art crisis and predicates that the decline of art will definitely lead to the corruption of human civilization.Conclusion analyzes why the Vonnegut criticism reveals the diminishing interest in the 70s and 80s. In the decades of the 70s and 80s which is known as the second phase of postmodern experimentation, novelists almost concentrated on linguistic gamesomeness, and therefore works produced are intensely language-oriented and text-conscious. Under such a background Vonnegut's such artistic vision makes him be outside of the literary mainstream in his later career. On the contrary, the thesis believes that Vonnegut is a great postmodernist writer who is not only seeking innovations in forms but also remaining true to his own artist visions despite the frequent frustrations and occasional despair in his long writing career; his greatness lies not only in his contribution of elevating science fiction, the so-called pulp genre, into the level of critical recognition by ingeniously merging his artistic views and deep humanistic concerns into it and blurring the line between high and low culture, but also in his unremitting efforts of trying to promote the social progress with his artistic works; in his works, he often alludes to many significant social events not only merely in order to describe the social and political life of his age, but more importantly, to caution the people and make them rethink the past to avoid repeating those horrible disasters. Therefore, all the care and hard work Vonnegut has paid for it will contribute to the progress of the civilization of all human beings.