Laying Bare The Dehumanizing Forces In Human"Progress"

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is one of the most important American writers in the twentieth century. Altogether, he wrote fourteen novels, two collections of short stories and three non-fictions. Most of his works show concerns about humanity and its deterioration in the modern world. The three dystopian science fictions explored in the thesis, Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat’s Cradle (1963) are no exception. Published in the1950s and1960s, when America and the world at large were undergoing dramatic social and political changes, these fictions reflect such changes and the writer’s worries about the negative effects of technological advancement and the political, religious constraint over human beings.With these three dystopian science fictions as the object of scrutiny, this thesis aims to probe into Vonnegut’s revelation of the dehumanizing forces hidden in the ostensible progress of human world. As a humanist, Vonnegut took a writer’s responsibility to present a dark vision of imaginary advanced societies, in which people suffer technological constraint, political domination and religious control. In connection with the historical background, these fictions revealed the obvious or underlying diseases in American society and government in the1950s and1960s. To be more specific, in these fictions, he painted technology-controlled worlds, in which people are enslaved or even killed by machines or other scientific inventions. Also, he depicted totalitarian societies, in which people are divided into the ordinary and the elite. Furthermore, he invented in these fictions several religious groups like Bokononism, The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and the Ghost Shirt Society to satirize the indifference and hypocrisy of religion. By describing catastrophes in these imagined worlds, Vonnegut’s fictions allude to the social and political issues of American in the1950s and1960s, and raise people’s awareness of human free will, human dignity and heartfelt moral codes.