Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday, prompting reporters and commentators to memorialize him as a symbol of the 1960s and ’70s counterculture and a hero of the movement to end the Vietnam War. Recalling the author’s heyday, the New York Times noted, “Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.” Without a doubt, those images from decades ago sealed Vonnegut’s standing as a master of American literature. But the paperback copies on college campuses are by no means a thing of the past.
With the Bush Administration plowing ahead in Iraq, Vonnegut’s vision of war—on display most directly in Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade—continues to spark debate and inspire activism among young people from coast to coast. “We’ve spent the last five or six years, a very formative time, in a constant state of war,” says Wes Hannah, a senior at Cornell University and a member of the school’s student antiwar group. “I feel like I’ve been influenced [by Vonnegut’s work] in the same way people were influenced when it came out.”
Kate Losey, a senior at the University of Wisconsin, remembers first experiencing Vonnegut fiction as a high school student in the small town of Warsaw, Indiana. “I was reading Slaughterhouse-Five, and I wasn’t in agreement with the Afghan war,” she says. “It must have fallen in line with my thinking.” From there, Losey went on to read several more of Vonnegut’s classics, from Cat’s Cradle to Galápagos, while emerging as a leading antiwar activist in Madison.
In today’s student realm, in which many initially encounter Vonnegut through required reading, the popularity of the author’s vision of war stems in part from its recognition of unmitigated horrors. That element contrasts sharply with Washington’s standard framing of every wartime tragedy as a necessary means to a necessary end. “War gets rationalized,” says Katrina Yeaw, a graduate student at San Francisco State University, “and I think Vonnegut, through his characters, shows how irrational war really is.” Yeaw read Slaughterhouse-Five as a college freshman and has been an active member of the national Campus Antiwar Network for the past four years.
Having written his last novel in 1997, Vonnegut never explored the age of George W. Bush in that form. Though he continued to share his thoughts through non-fiction writing and interviews—asked by In These Times in January 2003 what was not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq, he replied, “That they are nonsense”—his sharpest game was always full-length fiction. And as Yeaw says, “It’s important for people to read the books on the Iraq war, but I think fiction has the ability to reach people on a different level.”
Indeed, the unique blend of humor, sci-fi and social commentary that defines Vonnegut’s novels has fueled both hope and action among students in the Bush years, as it did with their forebears in the ’60s and ’70s. “A lot of the articles I’ve been reading are saying his books hold a lot of cynicism,” says Losey, who traveled from Madison to Washington in March to protest the Iraq war outside the Pentagon. “But for me, it was uplifting to read his books. They gave me a lot of hope.”
That Vonnegut’s work continues to excite the nation’s students speaks volumes about the deceased author himself. “He cared about the earth, and mostly, he cared about people,” says his friend and agent, Donald Farber. “That’s why he’s one of the few current writers, I used to say living writers, who is still one hundred percent in print. [His] books are multi-generational.”
And so the Children’s Crusade continues, with Vonnegut as essential as ever.