If I were to draw my aspirational literary family tree, I'd claim Kurt Vonnegut for my grandfather. A lot of this has to do with Slaughterhouse-Five , Vonnegut's masterpiece about the firebombing of Dresden.
Vonnegut witnessed the atrocity firsthand: During WWII, Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners of war were holed up in a bunker while every living being in Dresden was ruined by fire. As Vonnegut writes in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five , "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.
The finished product features space aliens who refute the concept of free will and a protagonist who comes unstuck in time. In his essay, "Mr. Vonnegut in Sumantra," George Saunders recounts reading Slaughterhouse-Five while working as an engineer on an oil rig.
Before Vonnegut, Saunders thought good writing had to be dense and inscrutable. Vonnegut's use of humor and vernacular was a shock β a sign. Saunders writes, "This guy who had been in the belly of the beast wrote as if he were still, like me, a regular person from the Midwest. What Vonnegut did for Saunders, Saunders did for me. I made up for my mundane milieu by having an existential crisis every 15 minutes. My collapsing inner life was not buoyed by the short fiction I read, which universally depicted numb, passive, characters making ugly moral choices.
While the story was dark β the obese protagonist ends up the prison wife of an abusive thug who forces him to wear a lady's fruit brimmed hat β it was suffused with longing: longing to be a good person. Longing for a more compassionate world. For those of you who wonder if George Saunders in person lives up to the kindness, humanity, and humor in his writing: Yes. George Saunders, the person, is equivalent in awesomeness to George Saunders, the writer. When he won the MacArthur Genius grant, Saunders responded by making fun of himself for dropping his toothbrush in the toilet.
