Vonnegut's Changing Women

Vonnegut 's Changing Women What follows is an argument to the effect that, in the novels written before 1973, Vonnegut 's female characters generally are presented negatively, either as pro-authority anti-individualists or as helpless or male-manipulated victims who never "grow" in either a personal or literary sense. In addition I maintain that, in at least two of Vonnegut 's later novels, certain female characters exercise individuality in their own existences and effect positively the awareness and attitudes of male characters. From the beginning of Player Piano (1952) through Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut describes the characters of his various worlds in terms of their victimization at the hands of a dehumanizing, or perhaps a better term might be "deindividualizing," technologically fixated, industrial/militaristic society. Time and time again in these novels the role of the individual is subsumed in the miasma that passes for "social responsibility." Like the real world in which every human being exists, Vonnegut 's literary worlds feature nameless and faceless authorities (when such authorities are offered at all) who seem to be the masters in local, regional, global, and sometimes interstellar chess games. Often, as is the case in Vonnegut 's 1951 "All the King 's Men," these "manipulators" move their all-too-sentient pieces in what at times, for the victims, must seem to be diabolical--and what certainly are tragic--maneuvers. In The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Slaughterhouse Five the "accidental" nature or intergalactic point of view of the authority that seems to be "in charge of things" serves to distance humans from personal responsibility for the results of such maneuvering--as such results are described in the novels. In Sirens, for example, the inappropriate and often asinine behaviors of Malachi Constant are shown to be products of the direct influence of the Tralfamadorians who for millennia have manipulated human

Cited: Vonnegut, Kurt. Bluebeard. New York: Dell, 1987 ______________. Cat 's Cradle. New York: Dell, 1963. ______________. Jailbird. New York: Dell, 1979. ______________. Mother Night. New York: Dell, 1961. ______________. Player Piano. New York: Dell, 1952. ______________. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell, 1959. ______________. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell, 1966.