Armageddon In Retrospect

APRIL 22, 2008

Kurt Vonnegut makes like Tupac, releases new shit from the Great Beyond.

When Franz Kafka was near death he asked that all of his unpublished work be destroyed. The fact that this wish was not granted gave us all of Kafka's greatest work. If his wishes had been carried out he might be simply an obscure footnote in literature and the only work of his that would likely still be read is the Metamorphosis. This is why I have mixed feelings about posthumously published work. On one level I'd like to think that my dying wishes would be honored and I see most posthumous work as shallow attempts to cash in by family members and publishers but I've read a good deal of unpublished material that has left me scratching my head at why this material has not seen the light of day before and eternally grateful that it has finally been let loose on the world.

Such a work is Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect, a collection of short stories that seems as good as anything Vonnegut has ever written and the best thing published since Breakfast of Champions back in 1973. Some opinions may differ on this point but I've found most of Vonnegut's work over the last few decades of his life to be merely rehashes of earlier superior writing and as much fun as a novel like Slapstick or Timequake may have been they lacked either the depth or innovation that Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle or Slaughter House Five had. Maybe I just found Vonnegut's search for a unique style and developing of his craft more interesting then his arrival at his final destination.

Despite an introduction by his son mark Vonnegut there never is much clarity on what Vonnegut thought of the material presented or whether he thought it was good or even publishable. In the introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box, a collection of his early work, Vonnegut was very critical of the work collected and even stated that though he reworked most of the stories he still didn't think it was very good. While not as good as Welcome to the Monkey, his best short story collection, I found that book highly enjoyable. I imagine Vonnegut might have put a similar disclaimer ahead of this book and if so he would not have only been too harsh a critic of his own work but would have been dead wrong.

Toward the end Vonnegut seemed especially morose and one of the most enlightening things that his son writes in the introduction is how he believed his father to be an optimist who always wanted people to think him a pessimist. This more or less sums up most of what I have always found puzzling about Vonnegut. Though he had been fond of being cynical about everything else Kurt apparently went ballistic when his son wrote that his father "might have envied Twain and Lincoln their dead children" a black joke that was obviously not meant to be taken too seriously.

Most of the stories in Armageddon in Retrospect are among Vonnegut's saddest and most serious which may explain why they had not been previously published. While most of them contain wit and poetic irony the main goal of this collection seems to be to deal intimately with Vonnegut's most personal of themes, the dehumanization of war. Many of the stories seem to be highly autobiographical, pulling bits and pieces of his time as a prisoner of war and the book even opens with a letter he wrote to his family back home after his eventual release. One also can't help but feel the relevance that the fiction seems to have to our current war in Iraq despite the fact that these stories are plucked from decades before the war was even contemplated.

Only the final story which shares its name with the book itself shows Vonnegut's scathing and sometimes absurd humor at its full flower. Closing the collection on this note is a genius stroke and after being enraptured with stories about the uselessness of war we are given a story that perfectly illustrates man's mad desires and our inability to avoid senselessness. Vonnegut once said that other than Mother Night he did not know the morals of any of his stories but if his work as a whole had a message then Armageddon in Retrospect has perfectly captured it and stands as a cautionary tale about mankind’s desire to destroy itself. It is a pity that even with his status as a literary grandmaster that so relatively few have been listening.

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